Human awareness has operating limitations built into its structure. Perhaps the most widely known was discovered by George A. Miller in 1956 concerning “working memory.” Through empirical studies, Miller found that participants could keep between five and nine elements in their working memory, with seven being the average. This leads to a simple formula, “7 ± 2,” which is featured in most Psychology textbooks, sometimes referred to as Miller’s Law.
Miller’s Law showed something else as well. To handle information sets larger than nine units, the mind can use abstraction to cut up the data into chunks it could handle. Miller defined “chunks” as the largest meaningful unit in the material that people can recognize. Once chunked, the material could be treated as a single unit and tended to follow the same “7 ± 2” pattern. Individuals each had their own strategy and criteria for chunking data sets, but that they chunked was universal.
The variation in working memory appears to be subject to stress. The more stressed a person is, physically, emotionally, or mentally, the lower their working memory capacity. The more relaxed a person is, the greater their working memory capacity. While not directly connected, this fits with personality patterns as well, with people under stress acting least developed, people having a “normal” condition of personality, and people finding their personalities displaying “higher” characteristics in conditions of intimacy and relaxation.
This limitation of working memory influences nearly all structures created by humans, especially social organization. Humans are relatively adept at consensus in small groups, with six being the easiest for group decision-making. When a group reaches nine members, it has more significant difficulties reaching a consensus, and its deliberations are more prolonged. At ten individuals or higher, consensus becomes increasingly impossible at an equal level. To cope with this breakdown of consensus, a form of “chunking” occurs where one individual begins to take on a leadership role that can correlate the lower-level members’ ideas and make the final decision for the group.
Iterating outwards from this simple form of leadership, if group sizes get larger, a set of representatives to act as leaders for a subject will emerge. These representatives act as a new five to nine-member group, making decisions by consensus. If this group gets too big, one of its members will need to take up a new leadership level.
There does not seem to be an end to this complexification process. Evidence of this pattern can be seen in the various places where complex civilizations have emerged, such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and Mesoamerica. Like individuals, societies reduce or expand their capacity for complexity based on the level of stress they are experiencing, whether internal or external. A culture’s aggregate “personality” will also display a similar shift from lower-normal-higher in situations of stress or relaxation.
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