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By Cathleen O’Grady
While studying for his master’s degree at Oxford University, Adam Mastroianni had a fear that many partygoers had: would he get stuck in a conversation without a polite way out?
Then Mastroianni thought again: perhaps his future interlocutor has the same concern. “What if we’re all caught up in conversations because we mistakenly think the other person wants to continue?” he says.
Now, five years and one scientific publication later, Mastroianni has discovered that both are grounded in fear: most conversations do not end when people want them to.
To get a clear picture of how people really felt when they were in conversation, Mastroianni – now a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard University – and his colleagues invited 252 strangers into their lab. They paired them to chat for as long as they wanted, up to 45 minutes. The volunteers were told that the time they did not spend on conversations would be spent on other experimental tasks, so there was no motivation to end the discussion early.
Most couples were engaged in idle talk: asking where someone grew up, or what they were studying. Many of the conversations were so boring, says Mastroianni, that it was “difficult to watch.”
The researchers then asked participants how they rate their own experience. Of 126 conversations, only 2% ended when both participants wanted it, they reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some extroverted souls wanted to talk longer, but 69% of participants said they wanted the conversation to end before it was over. On average, people wanted their conversations to be 50% longer or shorter.
The difference seems to be that people hide their true desires, says Mastroianni. Because people are worried that ending a conversation may be rude or offensive, they are deliberately not signaling to others when they want to. This makes it difficult to guess what a conversation partner wants, he says.
To see how well people wanted their partner’s preferences, the researchers asked participants to guess what they thought their interlocutors wanted, and found that their estimates were far from reality: some underestimated and others overestimated how long their mates wanted to talk; overall, their guesses were about 64% down (in both directions). About 60% of the time, both partners agree: both wanted the conversation to end sooner – or later. Only in a minority of cases did one partner want to scream while the other wanted to cut off.
The new study is the first to show numbers on how difficult it is for people to balance their own goals with what their interlocutors want, says psychologist Dale Barr of the University of Glasgow, who was not involved in the study. The break between what people wanted, and what their partners thought they wanted, is an important finding, he says. The work, says Barr, has been limited with other research suggesting that people are generally less skilled than we think when we think what others think.
Mastroianni and his colleagues also interviewed 806 people on the online crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk and asked them to describe a recent personal conversation – and how long they actually wanted it to last. Similar to the lab results, 67% of people reported wanting before the call was done – and most wanted their call to be 50% longer or shorter than the actual call.
This is surprising because most of these conversations were with friends and family, Mastroianni says. But, “Just as you would not cut off a stranger and walk away, neither would you have done the same to your mother.”
The research is an excellent example of how little is known about how conversations work, says Tanya Stivers, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. The fact that the two studies found similar results serves as a good confirmation of the findings, she says.
The house-to-point? The next time you talk to someone at a party, do not guess whether your partner wants to end the conversation or continue, says Mastroianni. “You really have no idea when the other person wants to go,” he says. “Maybe, stop trying and just relax and enjoy the conversation.”