When should conversations end?
2021-03-05 16:45:20.800017+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Scientific evidence that we should probably be talking less. Best observation, from the MeFi thread: "More evidence for my pet theory that neurotypicals systematically overestimate how good they actually are at judging social cues."
People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up—or Keep Talking—Science Confirms
When should you end a conversation? Probably sooner than you think
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Do conversations end when people want them to?
Abstract Do conversations end when people want them to? Surprisingly, behavioral science provides no answer to this fundamental question about the most ubiquitous of all human social activities. In two studies of 932 conversations, we asked conversants to report when they had wanted a conversation to end and to estimate when their partner (who was an intimate in Study 1 and a stranger in Study 2) had wanted it to end. Results showed that conversations almost never ended when both conversants wanted them to and rarely ended when even one conversant wanted them to and that the average discrepancy between desired and actual durations was roughly half the duration of the conversation. Conversants had little idea when their partners wanted to end and underestimated how discrepant their partners’ desires were from their own. These studies suggest that ending conversations is a classic “coordination problem” that humans are unable to solve because doing so requires information that they normally keep from each other. As a result, most conversations appear to end when no one wants them to.