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How quickly you reply in conversation shows how connected you are
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According to studies published in PNAS, people feel closer to individuals who reply to them promptly in conversation. According to the results, even objective observers perceive a higher level of social closeness in talks when participants respond to one another more quickly.
Throughout the course of a normal day, most of us have many discussions with a wide range of individuals. We “click” with certain people and not with others. Emma M. Templeton and her colleagues at the University of Toronto wanted to see whether they could tell when two individuals clicked just by listening to their chats. The researchers were particularly interested in reaction times.
The key to a successful conversation is taking turns, where one person speaks while the other actively listens, and then vice versa. Although it demands some mental effort, this interaction is quite well-orchestrated. Predicting your conversation partner’s next idea, guessing when they’ll finish talking, and preparing an acceptable retort are all necessary skills for effective conversational response. One’s ability to accomplish this rapidly may be an indicator of how effectively they can read and comprehend the thoughts of their discussion partner.
“There’s nothing like the satisfaction of a deep discussion. I was curious as to the factors that contribute to the success or failure of certain dialogues. PhD candidate at Dartmouth Templeton. The complexity of discourse led us to begin by recording a large number of discussions between pairs of individuals. Then we may use those recordings to quantitatively analyse the various conversational behaviours that occurred and see how they correlate with the participants’ self-reported levels of social connection.
Templeton and her team enlisted 66 college students and made them talk to one another for 10 minutes. Most of the students did not know each other, so they were able to have 10 separate one-on-one conversations with a total of 10 different people. Participants estimated how much they enjoyed each chat thereafter. They were then asked to assess how connected they felt to their discussion partner at various points in a video clip of their talk.
The researchers tallied the lag durations in each discussion between participants’ turns talking. Confirming their hypotheses, participants reported greater positive emotions and a higher sense of social connection during talks with shorter average reaction times. When looking at evaluations given at discrete points in a discussion, quicker reaction times were associated with a more intense sense of rapport. Partners of those with quicker overall reaction times reported more enjoyment and a stronger sense of connection during conversations.
Another research using a smaller subgroup of the population found similar results when testing the hypothesis that these effects carry over to chats between friends. Again, quicker reaction times indicated better pleasure of the discussion and stronger emotions of connection when individuals were having it with three of their close friends.
The speed with which a partner responded, rather than the speed with which the participant responded, was associated with greater social connection in both experiments. Particularly, the researchers discovered that the reaction time of a participant’s partner strongly explained the diversity in the participants’ emotions of social connection, whereas the participants’ own response time did not. The researchers speculated that this was due to people misinterpreting their partners’ rapid reaction times as signs of attentiveness and interest.
When individuals reply fast to one another in discussion, it’s an indication that they’re bonding, as Templeton put it. Thirdly, research indicates that rapid reaction time is seen as an indicator of social connection even by those who are not part of the social group. Conversations from Study 1 were recorded and then listened to by independent listeners. It’s worth noting that some of these snippets have been altered to either have shorter reaction durations (about a fifth of the original) or longer response times (roughly double the original) (twice the length of the original).
After the reaction times were sped up, participants said that the discussion was more entertaining and their partners felt more connected than in the original. In contrast, when reaction times were decreased, participants viewed talks as less engaging and their partners as less engaged. Note that the observers were never explicitly instructed to monitor reaction times; this finding suggests that they picked up on the fact that faster responses indicated closer social ties on their own.
In sum, the results imply that even microsecond-level changes in reaction times might influence assumptions of social connectedness between conversation participants. The authors recommend further research into scenarios where speedy reactions may be viewed differently, such as negotiations or disputes.
We considered this from the perspective of people meeting for the first time and old friends reuniting. There are plenty alternative dialogues to be had. It will be fascinating to discover, as Templeton remarked, whether reaction time conveys different meanings in various conversational contexts. We are still digging deeper into this information to find out what additional conversational habits are strongly linked to feeling connected to the other person.
Scientists “don’t believe these reaction times are anything that can be faked” “because these response times are occurring so rapidly,” he or she said. That is, you can’t just decide to reply more quickly in an effort to forge a closer bond with someone. The only way to react fast is to read the other person’s intentions and grasp their perspective.
Emma M. Templeton, Luke J. Chang, Elizabeth A. Reynolds, Marie D. Cone LeBeaumont, and Thalia Wheatley wrote the paper “Fast response times suggest social connectedness in conversation.”
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