What a group has that a pair does not
Three things fall out of a group that cannot exist in a pair, and all three are the reason this page exists rather than being a suggestion to run the two-person tool several times.
- An average. The same person can be the easiest angle for one member of a group and the hardest for another. Only the mean across everybody shows who the room as a whole finds straightforward — and that is a fact about geometry, not about who is nicest.
- An absence. A pair cannot be missing an element in any meaningful way; a group of five with no water in it is describing something real about how long it takes that group to notice somebody is unhappy.
- A distribution. Four people who all want to start things is a different problem from four people who all want to hold a position, and neither shows up in any individual pairing.
How it is calculated
Exactly like the two-person reading, applied to every pair. Each angle is one of the seven classical aspects, weighted by its traditional reading and adjusted by the two faces. Nothing new is invented for the group: the arithmetic was already right, it had simply never been asked a question about more than two people.
The number of pairs grows quickly — three people make three angles, five make ten, eight make twenty-eight — which is why the tool caps at eight. Past that a grid stops being readable and starts being wallpaper.
How to use it, and how not to
This is a set of conversation prompts about a group, and it works best read out loud with the group in the room. "Nobody here is holding the calendar" is a useful thing to notice about a shared house. "You two will keep having the same argument in new costumes" is a useful thing for two people to laugh about.
It is not an assessment of anybody and must not be used as one. Do not use it to decide who to hire, who to live with, or who to leave out. A birth date is not evidence about a person, and the fastest way to make an interesting tool into a nasty one is to treat its output as a verdict on somebody who is not in the room.
Names are optional and stay here
You can label each person so the grid is readable. Those labels are never transmitted, stored or logged — they live in the page's memory for as long as the tab is open, exactly like the birth dates, and closing the tab is the delete button. The privacy notice sets that out in full.