Miller's law

Miller's Law can refer to two different principles.

In communication

Miller's law, part of his theory of communication, was formulated by George Miller, Princeton Professor and psychologist.

It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The law states: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."^{[1] [2]}

The point is not to blindly accept what people say, but to do a better job of listening for understanding. "Imagining what it could be true of" is another way of saying to consider the consequences of the truth, but to also think about what must be true for the speaker's "truth" to make sense.

In psychology

The observation, also by George Armitage Miller, that the number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven.^[3]

References

1. ^ adrr.com
2. ^ work911.com
3. ^ Miller, G. A. (1956). "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information". Psychological Review 63 (2): 81–97. doi:10.1037/h0043158. PMID 13310704. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/.