How it shows who has a good connection to each other
The pause in conversation that occurs when one person stops talking and the other starts talking lasts a quarter of a second. If it goes even faster, that's a good sign.
When we're on the same wavelength with someone, the conversation flows as if by itself. And it doesn't just seem that way, as a series of experiments at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire shows. The good connection reveals itself literally in fractions of a second - the brief pause between two conversational exchanges. "Our results show that the faster people respond to each other, the more connected they feel," psychologist Emma Templeton reported in a university news release.
First, the team invited 66 strangers to talk about a random topic: Women were asked to talk to another woman for ten minutes, men to another man. Afterwards, all participants watched their conversations alone on video and noted when they had felt how. In a second round of experiments, they talked to a close friend. Result in both cases: The shorter the pauses between talking, the more they felt they had a connection with their counterpart. Even within a conversation, there were phases where things went better or worse.
This is audible even to those on the outside. Templeton's team manipulated the audio in the conversation between strangers so that they answered each other either significantly faster or slower. All other features remained unchanged. When the pauses were shortened, the subjects inferred a good connection; when the pauses were lengthened, they inferred a less good connection between the participants.
The moment in the conversation when it clicks
The feeling of being on the same wavelength was less related to how quickly the person responded themselves, but to how quickly they got a response. The little pauses usually last about a quarter of a second, explains co-author Thalia Wheatley, who has researched the psychology of interpersonal relationships for many years. "When people feel like they can finish each other's sentences, they close that 250-millisecond gap, and that's when things click between them."
As Templeton and Wheatley write in The Washington Post, some people seemed to have a special knack for understanding their counterparts: They were generally more likely to respond more quickly. This is not consciously controllable, because in order to answer promptly and adequately, one must really understand the other person. Sometimes the flow of the conversation happens automatically, sometimes it requires active listening and getting to know the other person. Because processes can hardly be accelerated in this short period of time, it is difficult to falsify an "honest signal" - a good connection cannot be forced.
Spectrum of Science
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Originalartikel auf Spektrum.de
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