Random Anthropological Thoughts
Today’s post is nothing more then a slightly organized stream of thoughts that have been swirling around my head this morning. I’d like to think that they are related in a subtle and amazingly insightful way, but I haven’t quite found it yet. :-)
A lot of books talk about how many people should be in an organized group of people. In management books, they talk about how the maximum size for a project team is 150. The reasoning is that in small groups order is maintained by personal interactions and loyalties — in groups this size everyone knows everyone. Once you have a large amount of people, it’s easier to “hide and slack”. In larger companies and organizations this can be very apparent.
Related to this, though I’m not sure where I heard it (probably The Tipping Point), is the idea that in a social group or setting, people will end up in groups of 5 to 7 at most. This seems related to the ideas in The Mythical Man-Month, which basically says that the number of interconnections in a group increase exponentially compared to the number of people.
And you’ve probably seen this in action. At parties, people always break into groups of around 5 people to chat and socialize.
The thing I find most interesting is that these ideas were first proposed after observing primates in the wild. I guess we do have a lot in common with our hairy brethren. :-)
Somehow related is the Fundamental Attribution Error theory which was developed 40 years ago, and was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the Tipping Point. The basic idea is that people tend explain a person’s action by attributing it to their personality disproportionally compared to the situation.
The last thing that was swirling in my mind was how susceptible we are to what we see and hear. That’s why commercials are so effective; why wouldn’t you get hungry when watching TV, every other commericial is for some sort of food!
So there are some obvious and interesting connections between the ideas, but I’m still not seeing anything super insightful. Oh well, I tried. :-)
Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac » Banning Microwave Popcorn wrote:
[...] Social Pressure: If someone causes the building to be evacuated, have the person send an email to everyone apologizing, explaining how it happened, and stating what they will do differently next time. It sounds a little childish, but it works great in software engineering for people who break the build. You could also have some traveling “award” for the culprit to keep in their office. [...]
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 12:44 pm | Permalink