Skip to content
27 January 2010

Tufte & Miller weigh in on “the magic number 7 +/- 2

Pardon the copying below, but I just had to include this on the blog since I discovered this stuff this morning. After my post yesterday citing Miller, I thought it my duty. Edward Tufte has a long series of post and comments on the mis-reading and mis-use of George Miller’s article. Here are some excerpts from the exchanges. (The complete series is found here.)

The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Not relevant for design

Now and then the narrow bandwidth of lists presented on computer screens and bullet points on PowerPoint slides is said to be a virtue, a claim justified by loose reference to George Miller’s classic 1956 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” That essay reviews psychological experiments that discovered people had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once. These studies on memorizing nonsense then led some interface designers to conclude that only 7 items belong on a list or a slide, a conclusion which can be sustained only by not reading the paper. In fact Miller’s paper neither states nor implies rules for the amount of information to be shown in a presentation (except possibly for slides that consist of nonsense syllables that the audience must memorize and repeat back to a psychologist). Indeed, the deep point of Miller’s paper is to suggest strategies, such as placing information within a context, that extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps of data. George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review, 63 (1956), 81-97 here.

At Williams College in September 2000, I saw George Miller give a presentation that used an optimal number of bullet points on an optimal number of slides–zero. Just a nice straightforward talk with a long narrative structure. (George and I were there to pick up honorary degrees during the dedication of a new science building at Williams College. In addition, Donald Knuth’s talk as well as my own deployed no bullet lists.)

– Edward Tufte, April 20, 2003

George Miller on the relevance of +/- seven
Here is a comment by the George Miller on the scope and relevance of his classic essay:
From: George Miller
To: Mark Halpern
Subject: Re: citation for your disclaimer

Many years ago landscape architects used my +/-7 paper as a basis to pass local laws restricting the number of items on a billboard. It was funded by the big motel chains; if you run a mom-and-pop motel you have to put a lot of information on your sign, but if you have a franchise everybody knows you have hot and cold running water, color televisions, free breakfasts, etc. The restriction on billboard content was driving the small motels out of business.

The same argument was used in the Lady Bird Johnson Act to prohibit billboards within X feet of highways, and the billboard industry (a strange group that deserves an essay of its own) was hurting. They hired a man to travel around from town to town trying to refute the claims that more than 7 items of information could cause accidents. The man’s wife did not like her husband being constantly on the road, so she asked him about it. He told her that the root of his trouble was some damn Harvard professor who wrote a paper about 7 bits of information. She, being herself a psychologist, said that she did not think that that was what Professor Miller’s paper said.

Armed with this insight, he looked me up and told me the whole story about my career, unknown to me, in the billboard industry. There was much more to it than I have outlined here, and I was shocked. So shocked that I wrote a long letter thing to set the record straight. The letter was published in the monthly journal of the billboard industry and that was the end of it. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the letter an I don’t recall the name of the journal (this was all back in the early 70s) so I cannot quote to you its contents. But the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person’s capacity to comprehend printed text.

If you want to quote the original article, it is on line and you can find a pointer to it at www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn. But if that is too time consuming - yes, you are right: nothing in my paper warrants asking Moses to discard any of the ten commandments.

Good luck, g.
(This is posted at http://members.shaw.ca/philip.sharman/myth.html )
– Edward Tufte, April 26, 2003

Halpern’s email leading to Miller’s reply
Dear Mr Tufte,
You have posted a letter from George Miller to me in which he replies to one from me. I think his letter would be better understood if you had printed mine along with it; as it is, you have an answer without the question that prompted it. His reference to Moses, for example, will probably not be understood without a prior reading of my letter to him. Yours, Mark Halpern

From: Mark Halpern Sent: Thursday, July 30, 1998 12:04 PM To: [George Miller, Princeton University] Subject: citation for your disclaimer

Dear Professor Miller,

The director of the technical writing group which I serve as editor has issued an edict that lists and procedures in our printed and screen-displayed documentation should not exceed seven, or maybe nine at the most, items. This is of course a silly rule, whatever its origin, but I think that its source in this case is a fading memory of a third-hand report of a bad reading of your classic 1956 paper.

Of course you are in no way responsible for the misreadings of your paper, and the silly things done in its name, but I hope you can help my organization, at least, climb back out of the pit it has dug for itself, using your paper as its shovel. I have seen somewhere a quotation from you, or a paraphrase of your words, in which you deplore the strange conclusions that some have drawn from your paper, and express your dismay over all the half-baked rules that people have promulgated, citing it as their authority.

In my attempt to get our director to rescind his bad rule, I would like to be able to quote your very words against him; would you tell me where I might find such words? Or, if what you’ve said in the past is not on record, could I induce you to say now that nothing in your paper should be taken as warrant for asking Moses to discard at least one, and preferably three, of the Commandments?

With my thanks, Mark Halpern

– Mark Halpern (email), November 3, 2007

I first was made aware of George Miller’s study in grad school for communications at West Virginia University in the 70s. Mike Burgoon, my professor, had us read it. He had been at Michigan where Miller was a professor.

Posted 27 January 2010 † Jack § Decision making ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,
26 January 2010

Miller’s “the magic number 7 plus or minus 2″ meets chocolate cake and fruit cups

This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition had a feature from Radiolab on decision making and the role played by the “rational” and the “intuitive” systems of the brain/mind.

Using George Miller’s seminal study on the limits of distinct things we can keep “in mind,” Baba Shiv, a professor at Stanford’s business school, had subjects individually given either a two-digit or a seven-digit number. They were asked to go to a room down the hall and repeat the number to the research assistant there. On the way down the hall, though, the subjects were stopped by another assistant and asked if they would like a snack— either a piece of chocolate cake or a cup of fruit.

The students trying to keep the two-digit number in their mind were more likely to choose the fruit. The ones trying to keep the seven-digit number in mind were twice as likely to choose the cake. Shiv reasons that trying to keep the seven-digit number fresh in the mind so preoccupied the rational, logic mental system that the more intuitive— or what what Shiv describes as the emotional— system was unencumbered and led students to choose the cake rather than the more rational and reasonable choice of the fruit— which we all know is “better for you.”

You can listen the the Radiolab story here: 20100126_me_19

Posted 26 January 2010 † Jack § Decision making ‡ Comments (0) °
25 January 2010

Attractors in community healthcare

As you know I’ve been attracted to attractors recently. I’ve found an example of attractors in patterning improvements in community settings. Russell Gonnering has a post over on the Cognitive Edge site on amplifying positive “attractors” to benefit community healthcare. He cites work by Marian Zeitlin and Jerry and Monique Sternin.

A Tufts University nutritionist, Dr. Zeitlin used the term “positive deviant” in the book, “Positive Deviance in Child Nutrition”, authored with Hossein Ghassemi and Mohamed Mansour. While studying malnutrition in Africa, the authors were struck by the fact that some children seemed to be doing quite a bit better than others. These were the “positive deviants”. The adaptive child care and feeding behaviors of these children, as well as the social networks that supported them, were studied. Life in the village was a Complex Adaptive System, and these people had adapted very well. The genius of Zeitlin and the Sternins was to realize that the key was to identify what was going right for those children and amplify it, instead of focusing on what was going wrong with the rest of the community and trying to fix it. In other words, they understood the value of amplifying a positive attractor instead of trying to impose order!!

To quote from the Fast Company article:

“The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work,” says Sternin, 62. “It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside.” Maybe the problem is with the whole model for how change can actually happen. Maybe the problem is that you can’t import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but “deviant” practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization — and change comes when you find it.

I wonder if looking for “positive deviance” to amplify would work for community anti-drug coalitions. Of course you would have to confront the federal and state insistence on “importing change for the outside.”

Posted 25 January 2010 † Jack § Complex adaptive systems § Individuals and Community ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: , ,
24 January 2010

Letter from Chris Raschka

We checked our post office box yesterday and found a letter from New York City. The return address was on Riverside Drive. It was a note from the illustrator, Chris Raschka. We had written him a letter thanking him for allowing us to use one of his illustrations as a logo.

(When we were first married we moved to New York and had a rent-controlled apartment in upper Manhattan on Riverside Drive. Our first two kids were born at Jewish Memorial at 190th Street.)

chris_raschka_note

Posted 24 January 2010 † Jack § David Olney's Oh Yeah! § The artist ‡ Comments (0) °
15 January 2010

How our thinking is “entrained”

David Snowden talks about how our thinking/doing is entrained. I wasn’t familiar with the word when I first heard it used in a podcast of one of his presentations. I think he’s getting at how we have habitual patterns of thinking, of conceiving without considering the assumptions we have taken for granted. It is like our brain is onboard a train car barreling down a track. The track is narrow. Oh, it may branch but it still stays on the “straight and narrow.” That is, we don’t or can’t cut across lanes as if we are driving a car on the interstate. David Snowden often uses as an illustration how we tend to group the words, “cow,” “chicken,” “grass.”

I found the same illustration used in an Edge Perspective post by John Hagel to which Thierry de Baillon alerted his Twitter followers. It is an interesting and enlightening post. Let me quote a little bit from its beginning.

Do we all look at the world in the same way? Hardly. We can each look at the same scene and focus our attention on something completely different. Individual idiosyncrasies definitely play a role, but broader patterns of perception are at work as well. Are certain patterns of perception more or less helpful in these rapidly changing times? Most definitely – in fact, they may determine who succeeds and who fails.

About five years ago, Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology, wrote “The Geography of Thought.” This fascinating book drew on extensive research pointing to fundamental cultural differences in how we see the world. Specifically, he contrasted an East Asian way of seeing the world with a more traditional Western way of seeing.

While it would be difficult to summarize Nisbett’s rich analysis, I want to focus on a key distinction that he develops in his analysis of two cultural ways of perceiving our world. He suggests that East Asians focus on relationships as the key dimension of the world around us while Westerners tend to focus more on isolated objects. In other words, East Asians tend to adopt more holistic views of the world while Westerners are more oriented to reductionist views. This basic difference plays out in fascinating ways, including the greater attention by East Asian children to verbs while Western children tend to learn nouns faster.

One very tangible illustration of this is a simple test reported by Nisbett. A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to children – a cow, a chicken and some grass. He asked children from America which two of the pictures belonged together. Most of them grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in the same category of animals. Chinese children on the other hand tended to group the cow and grass together because “cows eat grass” – they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the objects themselves.

I found this intriguing in the context of our continuing work at the Center for the Edge on the Big Shift. As I indicated in a previous posting, the Big Shift is a movement from a world where value creation depends on knowledge stocks to one where value resides in knowledge flows – in other words, objects versus relationships. Our Western way of perceiving has been very consistent with a world of knowledge stocks and short-term transactions. As we move into a world of knowledge flows, though, I suspect the East Asian focus on relationships may be a lot more helpful to orient us (no pun intended).

We can see such obvious one-track, narrow thinking exhibited by ideologues. For example, in politics there is Russ Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Tea Party protesters on the right and Michael Moore… . I am sure there are other liberal ideologues, but I can think of any more right off hand. I guess they don’t irritate me like the ones on the right.

Posted 15 January 2010 † Jack § Decision making § politics with low case "p" ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,
15 January 2010

Commercial use of Cognitive Edge methodology

Yesterday I got a tweet from David Snowden with two links on a new implementation of the SenseMaker software and related methodology of narrative collection. The Brook Besor Consultants have been gearing ourselves up for using both in our evaluation work on the NIH grant to Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach.

The software was designed originally for work David Snowden was conducting for certain intelligence agencies. He prefaced the tweet with “From counter terrorism to cosmetics in 4 years.”

The first link was to a cosmetic industry news site: Cosmetics Design.

Kline Group has launched KlinePulse, a new research tool aimed at gathering more targeted insights into consumer trends and patterns for personal care. …
The service is claimed to build on traditional consumer research because it goes beyond the close-ended, multiple choice approach to gathering information, which often leaves out key nuances governing consumer patterns

The second link was to the Cognitive Edge site with the initial “news release.”

Traditional consumer research often employs close-ended, multiple-choice surveys, interviews, or focus groups to solicit responses from consumers about historical behavior. The problem with these methodologies, Mills says, is that they rarely yield legitimately unbiased feedback. Survey questionnaires, by design, force respondents to choose from pre-determined selections, and focus group participants are easily influenced by the moderator and other participants in the group. In addition, the information gleaned from these methods is based on past behavior, which may have little bearing on future patterns.

KlinePulse uses open-ended, indirect questions and narrative gathering that enable respondents to deliver entirely unbiased, unprompted perspectives on their attitudes and thoughts. This raw, qualitative data is then quantified based on specific value metrics to help marketers identify the types of consumers and the contexts in which they are most highly engaged with certain brands and products.

Posted 15 January 2010 † Jack § David Olney's Oh Yeah! § Survey & Questionnaires ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:
15 January 2010

New look for Brook Besor Consultants

We are excited. We just received permission from Chris Raschka to use one of his copyrighted illustrations as a logo for our company, The Brook Besor Consultants, Inc. We asked if we could use his hands reaching toward one another from the book, Skin Again with text by bell hooks. We’re fans of Mr Raschka. We not only have Skin Again, but Be Boy Buzz also written by bell hooks and A Poke in the I. The latter was actually our first book with drawings by Mr. Raschka. It is a collection of what is termed, “concrete poems,” poems written with visual effects. These were ones selected by a Paul B. Janeczko.

Anyway. What Martha and I have in mind is a logo combined with a motto something like this:

<i>Possible logo/motto treatment</i>

Possible logo/motto treatment

The word, “reeach,” is an acronym for how we work with people: Relate, Explain/Experience, Act, in Context and History.

Note the colors of the type. Blue and Gray combined together. Got it? The Civil War united.

This is a design-in-process. Any suggestions, thoughts are welcomed.

Posted 15 January 2010 † Jack § David Olney's Oh Yeah! § Management ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:
14 January 2010

A way of thinking about values, themes & archetypes

Some of us have difficulty wrapping our minds around the values, themes and archetypes extracted from the narrative fragments collected during anecdote circles with the Cognitive Edge methodology. Why? For what reason? What purpose do they serve?

It just occurred to me that an analogy with an term from complexity science might help. It has helped me

Attractors, or, particularly in complex adaptive systems, “strange attractors.” serve as magnets, drawing actions to themselves in dynamic systems. Furthermore in dissipative systems attractors can be transformed. Themes, values, and archetypes, then, can be thought of as attractors serving to pull narrative toward certain values, certain themes, certain archetypes. Identifying the values, themes and archetypes can provide a typography of a group’s culture.

Posted 14 January 2010 † Jack § Complex adaptive systems § Discourse ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,
21 November 2009

What does training look like in complex environments?

This morning reading my emails from overnight I found a link to a post by Harold Jarche. He uses David Snowden’s Cynefin Framework as an illustration. I thought I would share it with some of my colleagues and wrote an email about it to them. After I was done, the email look like a blog post as well. So here it is:

What is training in complex systems where the future can’t be perceived until you get there? And cause-and-effect, “best practices” do not hold up?

Just came across this post by Harold Jarche on this. And he uses Snowden’s Cynefin framework to illustrate. Thought you might find it informative. On the other hand you may find it useless or frustrating if you are in an organization– or have to cope with- who believes all is in the “Simple” quadrant: and

you [can] prepare people for the future by training them in what had worked in the past. Yesterday’s best practices [are] the appropriate prescription for curing tomorrow’s ills. {This] works when the world is stable, and things remain the same over time.

The post, “the future of the training department is here

You may want to click over to the home page of the blog and see other recent posts. I thought the Toffler’s illustration of the train clever:

Speeding along at 100 mph is the enlightened business train; adapting and using new technologies (exploiting change).

Still fast at 90 mph is the civil society train; NGO’s, professional groups, activists, religious groups (demanding change).

Keeping up at 60 mph is the family train; working, shopping, trading & selling from home (adapting to change).

A distance back, at 30 mph is the union train, still focused on a mass-production mindset (denying change).

A bit further back at 25 mph is the large government bureaucracy train; slowing everybody else down (fighting change).

Limping along at 10 mph is the education train; protected by monopoly, bureaucracy & unions (blind to change).

Way back is at 5 mph is the international agency train: comprising organizations like WIPO, WTO, IMF (immune to change).

Even slower, at 3 mph is the political system train; discussing, debating but not accomplishing much (too busy to change).

Pulling up the rear at 1 mph is the legal train; so far behind that it hasn’t noticed the beginning of the financial bubble, let alone its collapse (rigor mortis).

Posted 21 November 2009 † Jack § Complex adaptive systems § Education § Management ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:
19 November 2009

Government site lists our work with CSO as part of science stimulus spending

An entry from yesterday’s Slashdot discussions- Accountability of the Scientific Stimulus Funding- tipped me off to hunt for a mention of the NIH grant to the Center for Science Outreach and, tacitly, our work with it.

Sure enough. Just a little while ago, I went the the federal government site mentioned, ScienceWorksForUs, clicked on the state of Tennessee in the map, ” Simulus Research Projects across the U.S.” and got a page for Tennessee. It reports a whopping $442,545,393 in 255 grants to four research universities (Tennessee State University, University of Memphis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Vandy) and to the Department of Energy Office of Science Lab in Tennessee: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. My, my. What circle’s we are moving in now.

To get to us, click on the headline, “Federal stimulus funds bolster Vanderbilt’s research enterprise.” You’ll reach a stub of a story from weekly Reporter, the Medical Center’s newspaper. Click on “Learn more” and read the whole story from the 11/6/09 issue. The CSO is mentioned almost at the bottom:

Virginia Shepherd, Ph.D., director of the Center for Science Outreach (CS0), will evaluate the CSO’s “Scientist-in-the-Classroom” program, operated in partnership with Metro public schools, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State University and Fisk University

Posted 19 November 2009 † Jack § Education ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,