Musing on group dynamics

It's still morning. I haven't had breakfast yet and I find myself contemplating a group dynamic, where in the simplest form each person in a group can communicate with every other.

2 people: 2 x 1 = 2 possible flows (2 people can each communicate with one other)

3 people: 3 x 2 = 6 flows

4 people: 4 x 3 = 12 flows

5 people: 5 x 4 = 20 flows

6 people: 6 x 5 = 30 flows

7 people: 7 x 6 = 42 flows

etc. ad infinitum

I'm tempted to describe this as exponential growth, but looking at the graph I created it clearly isn't *. What a relief!

Of course, that isn't how things work in practice. The model is wrong in that it assumes that one person communicates with just one other at one time. In reality any person may be talking to one or more people, and more than one person can speak at once, so one person allegedly may follow several conversations simultaneously (good luck with that!) I think there are groups within groups, which somehow spring up, dissolve and reconfigure. It's fluid. It's a maelstrom. It's nightmarish. I couldn't begin to try to calculate all the permutations for even a relatively small group (lie: I could, but we don't want to go there).

It's no wonder that autistic people can find this sort of situation overwhelming. You can't begin to make sense of what's going on. No thanks!

* I think this has to be quadratic growth because the formula is

x = a²-a