Current mood:	calm
Current music:	Harvey Danger - Wine, Women, and Song
Entry tags:	culture, psychology

The science of group social activities
While interacting with people in an informal setting this weekend I made an observation that I hadn't explicitly realized until now: people + food + trivial activity = good time.

That seems to be time-tested formula for creating an enjoyable social event. While the food part is not absolutely vital, it helps a great deal. However, the key is the trivial activity. See, if you collect a bunch of people and tell them to have fun, most people will be unable to deal with the sudden lack of structure and resort either to clumping together in cliques of comfortable friends or being miserable in the company of strangers. Adding an activity to the mix gives them a fleeting sense of purpose; that's all it takes for them to begin interacting. And soon enough they will get distracted from the task at hand and begin having fun with each other, occasionally reverting to the task for a while when a conversation reaches approaches its natural conclusion.

It's important that the task be trivial though. If it seems too serious, complicated or important then people get too wrapped up in the task itself for those all-important distractions to occur with sufficiently high frequency and duration to make the event enjoyable. This little constraint is sometimes not realized by people who take the activity more seriously than its intended purpose requires. For the most part, however, the formula is reliably effective. It can be observed in party games, group retreats, frosh week, etc.

And this shouldn't come as a surprise to most people because we already knew this implicitly. But knowing something explicitly makes it easier to adapt to uncommon situations. In this case, it is now easier to understand why group work is frequently a disaster: the setting is easily unconsciously mistaken for an informal social activity and people get distracted into having a great time instead of completing the assigned task. Ergo, to increase the odds of getting work done, it is necessary to tweak the setting so it appears less like a soiree and more like a work environment.