News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Apr 06, 2008 - 05:40 pm
Story Found By: bwelford 1511 Days ago
Category: Social Media
13 Comments
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News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Apr 06, 2008 - 05:40 pm
Story Found By: bwelford 1511 Days ago
Category: Social Media
13 Comments
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Comments
Hmmm... my friendship circle in social networks in a little under 150 (face to face relationships only - excluding online friendships). Very interesting... this Dunbar was a smart guy.
This post follows almost to a T the section from Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covering this very topic. I think Gladwell does a fine job of offering this research/information and its utility.
This is an excellent article! My one question is before language weren’t there hieroglyphics, pictographs etc.? I felt like there was a suggestion that generations could not pass information onto the next because there was no language, however they could pass along stories and history through these mediums. I can’t wait to read part 2!
I think that the key takeaway here is that it’s not the quantity of social connections that is important (especially as you approach that 150 threshold). It’s the quality.Great read!
In the first article in this series, Human Hardware: Working Memory (http://searchengineland.com/080307-071251.php), there’s a section about the work of George A. Miller. It misrepresents the work of the author, who was discussing studies involving memory when it comes to very small changes involving a very limited range of stimuli - musical tones played and the ability of most people to remember those tones in order. (Sadly, Miller discards results in his experiment of people, trained musicians, who could easily remember 50-60 notes at a time.)The original paper from Miller describing his research is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/), and a statement from George Miller about how the Billboard industry had misapplied his research for years appears in a thread on Edward Tufte’s web site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6). A snippet:Armed with this insight, he looked me up and told me the whole story about my career, unknown to me, in the billboard industry. There was much more to it than I have outlined here, and I was shocked. So shocked that I wrote a long letter thing to set the record straight. The letter was published in the monthly journal of the billboard industry and that was the end of it. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the letter an I don’t recall the name of the journal (this was all back in the early 70s) so I cannot quote to you its contents. But the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text.Miller’s article does not say that we are limited in our ability to make choices involving around seven chunks of information at any one time. I can remember and think about thousands of words, hundreds of faces, multitudes of concepts. It says that when there are stimuli that are very limited in their differences, that most (not all) people can have difficulties in remembering them. It’s very unlikely that applies to vacation destinations or many other concepts in our working memories.It would have been a great excuse, to have told my social studies teacher in grade school that I couldn’t remember the names of all fifty states because my memory was hardwired to only contain up to seven items at a time. Or to tell my middle school teacher that I could only recall seven of the ten vocabulary words in our weekly quiz because my brain wasn’t wired that way. Or my history professors in college who wanted me to recall hundreds of dates for a single exam - what were they thinking (yet somehow people got passing grades on those tests). Our daily briefings of cases in law school involved breaking those cases down into nine different categories for analysis - we managed that, painful as it was. Before thinking too hard about the application of Dunbar’s number to social settings, I’d recommend reading the original work. I’m not so sure that it says what we are being told it says, either.Thanks.
My one question is before language weren’t there hieroglyphics, pictographs etc.? I felt like there was a suggestion that generations could not pass information onto the next because there was no language, however they could pass along stories and history through these mediums.Hieroglyphics, pictographs, etc. are all forms of language. Even cave paintings are, essentially, a form of language.
I also remember an idea from the 1971 classic, Corporation Man, by Antony Jay. He likened the modern day corporation to a primitive tribe. He felt that 300 was the natural size of a company division since that is the number of faces that a leader could remember and show recognition for. I’m not sure he had any research to back up his thesis.
@asniderHieroglyphics, pictographs, etc. are all forms of language. Even cave paintings are, essentially, a form of language.Well, if that is the case than the article’s suggestion that generations could not pass information is inaccurate. Thanks!
Ahh..Bill and his ever critical eye. Bill, I suggest you read Miller’s paper again and do a little research into how memory works before broadsiding someone else’s work. Working memory, and channel capacity, refers to distinguishing between alternatives in executive memory, not in reciting the names of states or remembering faces. The two memory tasks are completely different, one involving sequential retrieval from long term memory, one involving loading either unidimensional or multidimensional alternatives into executive memory and "working" on it to make a distinction. Two completely different concepts. I acknowledge that the magic number 7 is not an absolute, Miller makes this clear. But I never said it was. I said that Miller’s work shows that there are definite cognitive limits to working memory and we have to keep this in mind when thinking about presenting alternatives, such as on a search page. We’ve seen this pattern over and over in hundreds of user sessions.
Regarding language, you’re getting confused. Verbal language existed before pictographs or hieroglyphics or, for that matter, likely cave paintings. It’s verbal language I’m refering to, not written language. It was verbal language that enabled the passing along of accumulated wisdom. Written language helped us archive it more effectively.
Another study confirms my view of working memory, and follows up on Miller’s work. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080423171519.htmAs mentioned, the cognitive capacity of working memory is limited. Bill Slawski completely misses the point of Miller’s work, which was meant to test unidimensional vs multidimensional elements and the capacity of working memory. The fact that he used musical tones was really irrelevant. He used that as an example of a unidimensional variation. It could have been the height of pop bottles, or different shades of green. The important factor is the difference between processing in working memory (and the use of chunking) and retrieval from long term memory. Bill, in his examples, is mixing up the two very distinct and different activities.
Your link is broken, Gord. Not sure which article you meant to link to.Chunking has been considered to be related to long term memory, as least according to modern researchers in the field: The formation of chunks in immediate or primary memory often made use not only of the information present to the research participant, but also of prior knowledge that was already present in long-term or secondary memory. It is worth noting that there have been demonstrations that practically anything can be held in immediate memory, if there is enough knowledge to back it up. The Legend of the Magical Number Seven (pdf)Nelson Cowan, Candice C. Morey, and Zhijian Chen I said that Miller’s work shows that there are definite cognitive limits to working memory and we have to keep this in mind when thinking about presenting alternatives, such as on a search page.The ability to read, consider, and act upon alternatives presented in a set of search results has little to do with Miller’s research. Miller personally refuted that kind of thinking and approach when it was applied to limit the amounts of information presented on billboards - see my link to the Edward Tufte page above, and scroll down to the letter from George Miller.As Miller noted there:But the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text.
I really don’t think that George Miller would appreciate the way that his work has been presented in this article, nor perhaps would Dunbar.