Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. 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 hear what each other are saying)—in conversations drawn from a real-world college campus and from Shakespearean plays. Our results provide support for the mentalizing hypothesis and also render alternative accounts less plausible.

Original publication

DOI

10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.05.005

Type

Journal article

Journal

Evolution and Human Behavior

Publication Date

01/11/2016

Volume

37

Pages

423 - 428