One person alone with their thoughts is good.

Two people in dialogue is great, very focused.

Three can be great, but you need a good third that’s more of an active audience member than a participant.

Four is borderline. That’s really the limit, but it can work with the right set of people.

Five is no good. I’m out.

In my experience the rule is that the more people you add, the worse the conversation.

Imagine you have two people talking. They dive into a topic. They find common ground and work together to increase the shared pool of knowledge. Momentum and comfort build into something special. They connect with each other.

Then a third person joins the conversation:

  • They need context to be filled in. Time is wasted explaining background details.
  • There’s a creeping hesitancy around sharing deeply personal thoughts or secrets.
  • The third person might divert the conversation into a tangent, wrecking the previous build-up. Effectively, the attention span of the group decreases and it’s no longer able to focus.
  • The third person might be ill equipped to contribute and say irrelevant or ill-informed things that must either be ignored (socially uncomfortable) or politely rebuffed (kills conversational momentum).

The conversation is dead. You’ve reverted back to the background noise of socially approved “does pineapple belong on pizza?” conversation.

The corollary to this is that if I’m sitting at the lunch table and two people besides me are engrossed in a conversation, I will sit silently and listen. Perhaps I’ll contribute if I feel like I can, or I’ll leave quickly if it’s not interesting, but I won’t thoughtlessly barge in and make a mess of something beautiful.