Why the magic number seven plus or minus two

By Thomas L. Saaty, M. S. Özdemir. 2003

639 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0215397a615b3a671c29f3c73c9978c9408c8652

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Computational Theory and Mathematics

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

The Analytic Hierarchy and Analytic Network Processes for the Measurement of Intangible Criteria and for Decision-Making (2016, background): “It is known that with the reciprocal condition, the geometric mean is a necessary condition for combining individual judgments and that, contrary to the impossibility of combining individual judgments into a social welfare function when ordinals are used subject to certain conditions, with absolute ”
Principled Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback from Pairwise or K-wise Comparisons (2023, background): “…to Shah et al. (2015), we restrict our attention to K = O (1) since it is known that it is difficult for human to compare more than a small number of items due to a limited information storage and processing capacity (Miller, 1956; Kiger, 1984; Shiffrin and Nosofsky, 1994; Saaty and Ozdemir, 2003).”
An extension of TOPSIS for group decision making (2007, background): “Cardinal information, information on attribute, MADM Cardinal information, information on attribute, MADM 2 Core process Pairwise comparison (cardinal ratio measurement) The distances from PIS and NIS (cardinal absolute measurement) , Saaty [17], and Saaty and Ozdemir [18].”
Combining analytical hierarchy process and Choquet integral within non-additive robust ordinal regression ☆ (2016, background): “Some limits related to the capacity of identifying possible sources of inconsistency arise in case the number of objects to be compared is larger than seven [59].”
A Hierarchical Group Decision-Making Approach for New Product Selection in a Fuzzy Environment (2013, methodology): “Table 2 is used (1–9 ratio scale) to determine the importance degree of each super-attribute with respect to the goal and each sub-attribute with respect to its respective super-attribute [35].”
Statistical ranking and combinatorial Hodge theory (2008, background): “Hence one expects large human-generated ranking data to be at best partially ordered (with chains of lengths about 5 to 9, if [37] is accurate).”
Criteria in AHP: A Systematic Review of Literature (2015, positive): “To serve both consistency and redundancy to the AHP method, it is best to keep the number of criteria and alternatives at seven or less [42].”
CLUSTERS AND PIVOTS FOR EVALUATING A LARGE NUMBER OF ALTERNATIVES IN AHP (2012, methodology): “Psychologists have used this technique for a long time to compare affective alternatives (Yokoyama, 1921; Saaty & Ozdemir, 2003).”
Why is reflective thinking uncommon (2003, background): “…system has a short-term memory buffer that lets us keep only a few information bits in our conscious mind at any time, ‘Millers magic number 7’ (Miller, 1956), while we decide to go on to analyse other features in our environment or keep the information in our long-term memory to use in…”
Introduction to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (2014, background): “The main reason for this choice is our limited ability of processing information, also corroborated by psychological studies according to which our capacity of reckoning alternatives is limited to 7 ± 2 of them [112].”