By: batman

batman — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:08:09 +0000

in my social psych class, we read an article that discussed a couple of relevant ideas. the first is that of transitive memory-that often humans don’t remember information so much as where information is stored, particularly stored in other humans. E.G. I don’t remember what the process for getting a purchase reimbursement is, but Mel over in accounting does. The other important point is that, on average, humans can maintain relationships with about 150 people (actually it might have been 300, but it think 150). If a group grows beyond that size, it is no longer possible for everyone to know each other. Interestingly, when Amish communities (which, to my knowledge, have little exposure to social psychology publications) grow beyond that size, they split. And some company was mentioned in the article, I think it was Columbia sportswear, operates as lots of micro-companies, in close proximity to each other, say with a parking lot between them, but each smaller than the 150 person limit. Conventional wisdom is that would make for a very ineffecient management model, but they find it increases productivity dramatically. You end up with a small-world graph. Lots of tightly interconnected cliques, with a few connections between cliques, but the graph width is still very low: probably 2, maybe 3.

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By: batman