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Conversations are better with four people

When social groups have five or more members, the chances of them laughing together plummets.

Dunbar believes that the limits of our ability to predict the thoughts of others in this way explains why groups that work in challenging situations — such as SAS patrols and surgical teams — tend to do best when there are four members. In The Social Brain, co-authored by Dunbar, he argues that Shakespeare must have intuitively known about this phenomenon as it is rare for his plays to have more than four significant characters speaking in one scene. He was anxious to ensure his audience wasn’t cognitively overloaded by the number of minds in the action on stage.

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