Do conversations end when people want them to?

Years ago, I was getting ready for a party and I suddenly realized something: I didn’t want to go to the party. Inevitably, I knew, I was going to get stuck talking to someone, and there wouldn’t be any way to end the conversation without embarrassing both of us (“It’s been great talking to you, but not great enough that I want to continue!”). But then I thought, wait, what makes me think I’m so special? What if the other person feels exactly the same way? What if we’re all trapped in this conspiracy of politeness—we all want to go, but we’re not allowed to say it? Surprisingly, no one knows the answers to these questions. Eight billion humans spend all day yapping with each other, and we have no idea if those conversations end when people wish they would. So my PhD advisor Dan and I set out to get some answers using the most powerful methods available to us in psychology: we started bothering people. (This is the blog version of a paper I published a few years ago; you can read the whole paper and access all the materials, data, and code here.) We surveyed 806 people online about the last conversation they had: how long was it? Was there any point when you were ready for it to be over? If so, when was that?1 By and large, conversations did not end when people wanted them to. Only 17% of participants reported that their conversation ended when they first felt ready for it to end, 48% said it went on too long, and the remaining 34% said they never felt ready for it to end—to them, the conversation was too short!2 On average, people’s desired conversation time differed from their actual conversation time by seven minutes, or 56% of the conversation. That doesn’t mean they wanted to go seven minutes sooner or seven minutes later—it’s seven minutes different. If you just smush everyone’s answers together, all the people who wanted more cancel out all the people who wanted less, and it gives you the impression that everyone got what they wanted, when in fact, very few people did. Participants thought their partners fared even worse: they guessed that there was a nine-minute (or 81%) difference between when the conversation ended and when the other person wanted it to end.3 These results surprised us. It wasn’t that conversations went on too long, necessarily—they mainly went on the wrong amount of time. And that’s extra surprising when you remember that we surveyed people about their most recent conversation, so they were overwhelmingly talking to people they know well, like a lot, and talk to all the time—spouses, friends, kids. Still, this study had two big limitations. First, these conversations happened out in the wild, where they might have been ended by external circumstances. Maybe the “too long”s were, say, trapped on an airplane and unable to escape their unwanted conversation; maybe the “too short”s were having a lovely chat when their boss told them to get back to work. And second, we only get to see one half of each conversation, so we don’t know how accurate participants were when they guessed their partners’ desires, nor do we know how people were paired up. Maybe, for instance, the “too long”s and the “too short”s were all paired with each other, and that’s why no one got what they wanted—they wanted different things. To get around both of these limitations, we were going to have to bring people into the lab and—gulp—make them talk to each other. We brought 366 people into the lab and paired them up. Our participants were a mix of students and locals in Cambridge, MA, and their defining characteristic was that they were willing to participate in a study for $15. We told them to “talk about whatever you like for as little time or as much time as you like, as long as it is more than 1 minute and less than 45 minutes.” We told them we had additional tasks for them if they finished early, so they would participate for the full hour regardless of how long they chose to talk. (We did this so that people didn’t think they could just wrap up after a minute and go home.) Here’s the first crazy thing that happened: 57 of our 183 pairs talked for the entire 45 minutes. We literally had to cut them off so they could fill out our survey before we ran out of time. And that’s a problem, actually—we don’t know how long they would have kept talking if we hadn’t intervened. The whole point of this study was to watch people end their own conversations, and instead they made us do it.4 So we ultimately excluded these non-enders, but it turns out the results are the same with or without them. That itself is pretty weird, and I’ll come back to it in a minute. Looking only at people who ended their own conversations, once again, only a small minority of participants (16%) reported that their conversation ended when they wanted it to. 52% wanted it to end sooner, and 31% wanted it to keep going. On average, people’s desired conversation length was seven minutes—or 46%—different from their actual conversation length. But now we have both sides of the conversation, so we can also see how people were paired. Was every “too short” partnered with a “too long”? Nope. In fact, almost half the time, both participants said “too long” or both said “too short”. Only 30% of conversations ended when even one person wanted it to end. That means most pairs weren’t splitting the difference between their desires, nor were they waiting for one person to get tired and put an end to things. They were bumbling through their conversations, often blowing right past their preferred ending point, or never reaching it at all. We specifically told people to talk as long as they wanted to, but when they came out of the room, almost all of them said, “I didn’t talk for as long as I wanted to.” So what happened? Why didn’t these conversations end when people wanted them to? Two reasons: People wanted different things In almost all cases, it was literally impossible for the conversation to end at a mutually desired time, because people’s desires weren’t mutual. People’s desired ending points differed by 10 minutes, or 68% of the conversation, on average. So at best, people had a considerable amount of dissatisfaction, and they had to figure out how to allocate it between them. But they couldn’t do that, because: People didn’t know what their partner wanted We had people guess when their partner wanted to leave, and they were off by 9 minutes, or 64% of the conversation, on average. So people really didn’t know when the other person wanted to go. Incompatible desires create a coordination problem, and impenetrable desires prevent it from being solved. If you and I want different things, but I don’t know what you want, and you don’t know what I want, then there’s very little chance that either of us will get what we want. Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to matter whether participants ended their own conversations, or whether we had to return at 45 minutes and do it for them. You’d think that if people could pick their own stopping point, they would pick something closer to their desires. But they didn’t. Maybe that’s because a conversation is like a ride down the highway: you’re really only supposed to exit at certain times. But the exits themselves are pretty spread out, so you’re probably not going to be on top of one at the exact moment you start feeling ready to leave. Technically, you can get off the highway between exits, but you might have to drive through some bushes or crash through a wall—that’s what it feels like to, say, leave in the middle of someone’s story. So instead, you wait until the next exit comes (and you end up as a “too long”), or you get off before you really want to (and you end up as a “too short”). This strong set of conversational norms keeps things both orderly and somewhat dissatisfying. The consequences for exiting at the wrong time are, in my experience, rather great. Once, I was hanging out with some friends, and there was a moment that felt to me like a lull…