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Today on something you should know, how to get more people to participate in important meetings. Then we think we know what other people think and what the majority consensus is and yet we're often dead wrong.

The way your brain figures out what group consensus is a pretty flimsy shortcut. Your brain assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority.

So you can kind of already see the problem with that, right?

Also, how to make sure your cover letter on your job application actually gets read. And language. It's how we communicate. It's one of our greatest inventions. And it's often inadequate.

The thing about language is that it's not really designed to be a complete picture of what somebody is thinking or what exactly they believe. We like to say about language that it's not perfect, but it's good enough.

All this today on something you should know.

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Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with my corothers.

Hi, welcome to something you should know. How do you feel about meetings? I tend to be one of those people who believes that the fewer meetings the better.

Yes, meetings are necessary sometimes, but you can waste a lot of time in meetings. I came across some interesting information by a guy named Kevin Coine who wrote a book called Brain Steering some years ago.

But the science of group dynamics in meetings turns out that the larger the meeting, the less likely people will participate. In fact, in a group of 20 people, 17 of them will not participate either because they are too shy or feel like they don't have anything important enough to contribute.

Breaking that group into smaller meetings works much better. In fact, in meetings of 3 to 5 people, you'll usually have everyone participating. Why? Well, because it would be weird for someone not to talk in a meeting of just 3 people. But it's normal not to talk in a meeting of 20 people.

Also, when you break a large group into smaller groups, the tendency is to sprinkle the domineering types throughout all the groups. But the research shows that you're better off putting the domineering types in their own group together and let them try to kind of out-domineer each other.

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