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In 1956, Miller [1] conjectured that there is an upper limit on our capacity to process information on simultaneously interacting elements with reliable accuracy and with validity. This limit is seven plus or minus two elements. He noted that the number 7 occurs in many aspects of life, from the seven wonders of the world to the seven seas and seven deadly sins. We demonstrate in this paper that in making preference judgments on pairs of elements in a group, as we do in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the number of elements in the group should be no more than seven. The reason is founded in the consistency of information derived from relations among the elements. When the number of elements increases past seven, the resulting increase in inconsistency is too small for the mind to single out the element that causes the greatest inconsistency to scrutinize and correct its relation to the other elements, and the …