Something to talk about: are conversation sizes constrained by mental modeling abilities?

Journal article

Conversations are ubiquitous and central elements of daily life. Yet a fundamental feature of conversation remains a mystery: It is genuinely difficult to maintain an everyday conversation with more than four speakers. Why? We introduce a “mentalizing explanation” for the conversation size constraint, which suggests that humans have a natural limit on their ability to model the minds of others, and that this limit, in turn, shapes the sizes of everyday conversations. Using established methodologies for investigating conversation size, we pit this mentalizing hypothesis against two competing explanations—that the size of a conversation is limited by a short-term memory capacity (limiting the factual information we process) or by an auditory constraint (speakers need to be able to hearwhat each other are saying)—in conversations drawn froma real-world college campus and fromShakespearean plays. Our results provide support for the mentalizing hypothesis and also render alternative accounts less plausible.

Authors: Krems, J; Dunbar, R; Neuberg, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Evolution and Human Behavior
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 423-428
• Publication date: 2016-06-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-05-30
• DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.05.005
• ISSN: 1090-5138
• Keywords: Mentalizing; Social brain; Communication; Language; Theory of mind; Group size