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Festive (behavioural) conversation tips
How to avoid awkward silences and uncivilized exchanges around the festive table
Chances are that you will either be hosting, or a guest at, a mega dinner party in the next few days. Yes, “It’s Christmas!”, as Noddy Holder has been yelling in his cosy West Midlands accent for 46 (!) years. Up and down the land, search parties are sent out to locate the once-a-year table extension leaves, extra tables and chairs are mobilized, spare crockery and cutlery retrieved from dark corners or borrowed from neighbours, in order to accommodate everybody.
A typical Christmas dinner will have 8–10 people round the table happily chatting amongst each other. The more the merrier? That is not so sure. A paper by experimental psychologists Jaimie Krems and Jason Wilkes (who is also a mathematician) observed that conversations rarely involve more than four individuals. The genuine difficulty of sustaining a casual conversation with five or more people even has a name: the ‘dinner party problem’. How come?
More than four is a crowd
The authors start from a biological explanation: our limited working memory. Earlier research has found that we have a hard time remembering more than about four chunks of information. Perhaps, over many generations of…
