Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Same with what you talk about. People like to talk about themselves, but many of them are interested in hearing about you too. Just keep it under control, and lob that conversation topic ball back and forth regularly.
On the other hand, a low-effort, drive-by unsupported claim doesn't necessarily deserve great effort and eloquence in a response. Maybe we should be better than them, but we also all have limited energy.
Pretend I am dense, and give me a better idea of what I didn't explain well enough, and I'm happy to oblige. Everything I say makes sense in my head but I don't always communicate it effectively.
I think that HN has more zealots, propagandists, shills, and others arguing in bad faith than it did ten years ago. And I think that many of us have grown less patient with posts that clearly seem to be grinding axes, pushing agendas, or arguing rather than listening. (I think dang would say that we shouldn't be like that, but my patience has limits. I admit that as a weakness in myself, but there it is.)
Of course there is! For example the way you have worded your question. It makes it clear what you diagre with and stimulates a conversation.
At the moment the greyed out comment simply says “why not?”. I would love to answer their question too, but it is not even clear what exactly it is about? And then further more are they disagreeing or are they requesting clarification on the root causes of some detail? If they are disagreeing on what grounds are they disagreeing?
My prior comment doesn't seem downvoted.
I was being partially cheeky with the answer, though it was also partially genuine, i.e. why are conversations with either loud mouths or silent types unappealing?
That is a good analogy with throwing a ball in the conversation. Imagine ball sports where only one person is participating. That's what a one-sided conversation feels like.
> How was your flight?
> Oh it was great, I sat next to a man named Joe Smoe, wait no I think his name was Joe Blow... no he said his name was Jim Blow... wait no his name was Jim Smoe... he said he was bus driver.. or was it a truck driver?...
How do you politely say "I'm never going to meet this man, and you'll never meet him again, so who cares what his name was? Get on with the story!" I know some people who can waffle around like this for 10 minutes easily, trying to remember a detail that nobody else could conceivably care about. By the time they remember the detail everybody else has already forgotten the rest of the story anyway.
And my anecdotal evidence says I want the three words person if I'm going fishing. And I want the verbal diarrhea as a wing man so I have an easy out if things get creepy or dull.
Maybe it's more about context than always meeting in the middle.
In my experience, reticence to talk is mostly about fear of saying something stupid, which generally happens when you don't have anything to say but your trying to say something. Assigning people to talk for abitrary portions of the conversation might just cause you to say more stupid things. So, this is indeed a surprising result.
When people let their guard down is when you get a glimpse into them.
Which I guess is why alcohol and similar substances have been used for centuries.
Being offensive certainly gives me a glimpse into the person but not in a good way.
I sometimes think about something similar while watching sitcoms - the characters will often say/do mean things to each other for a laugh and because everyone on the show reacts as though what was said was okay/normal it seems to barely register to me how mean it actually was.
I think growing up with a critical sibling lead to me developing a self-critical voice that I carried around with me so even if externally people didn't react poorly to something "stupid" I said, internally I provided myself that negative feedback that reinforced my fears/beliefs. I think the self-critical voice was protective when it developed - it helped me avoid the more painful external feedback from my sibling, but it continued on long after that was useful.
I didn’t see the whole paper, but I wonder if the idea is really to be engaged in the conversation.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...
I agree with ajkjk, people have gotten safe and boring.
The only advice I have is to try more, and push the envelope over time. Social restrictions feel intense but yield to sustained (unintentional) effort. Most people are some combination of cowardly and egotistical as a default position. Be like flowing water. Negative consequences don't last if you don't feed them, and positive ones build and compound.
The trick is to find those social cracks where the contrarian viewpoint is interesting but does not make you a pariah. That is, even if you hate dogs, I would advise keeping that one to yourself.
Besides that, there is no "one size fits all" approach. The only approach that works for everybody is to treat everybody like an individual with a unique personality.
For example, throwing in phrases like "with your experience, you would know that..." or "that thing you said was hilarious" make people feel good, hopefully while also being true. This is a huge part of likeability.
Had no idea it had a name or “strategy” associated with it… I just like other people to know when they’re having a positive impact on me (or something else). And people always seem to like knowing that, and get into a better mood in response!
Edit: maybe I’m not understanding the concept very well, and “profuse praise” the strategy is more belligerent than I thought
That advice was actually given in the context of a supervisor or superior working to improve a report: 'Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”'
So in context, its about noticing the things you as a person like about people and vocalizing them, and separately drawing attention to when someone improves. Pretty sound advice
If you read the actual book, its as much about not being a bore, and how not to piss people off. Some people take the advice in it WAY too far, and that's when it comes across as off-putting and inauthentic.
Because you know they took the compliment sandwich advice to heart, and the other shoe is about to drop.
Also, if you are of the personality type/disposition that this doesn't work on, don't underestimate the huge percentage of people on which it does work.
Related article you might find interesting
But, it's more likely that that's not the case, and the two are in conflict. Between the sources, I tend to think Carnegie is right, both because it's a strategy that has been working for long time, and because it accords with my own experience of the world, and because ... you know... a single social psychology research paper is sort of hard to credit when it conflicts with common sense.
It is better to remain cordial as they 'banter' at you, but to never reciprocate.
Implementing the advice in this book too literally makes for very inauthentic sounding conversation.
After reading this book, I found it easy to spot other people who had read it and were trying the techniques on me. For example, when someone uses my name 10 different times in a private conversation for no obvious reason, I have a good idea that they’re trying How To Win Friends techniques on me.
It also feels awkward when someone is trying to shape the conversation to meet some arbitrary goal, rather than having a natural and engaging conversation where both parties are actually interested in the topics being discussed. When someone is just asking me questions not because they’re interested but because they think getting me to talk about it will help them achieve some personal goal, it becomes obvious quickly.
To an extent, I agree with you. That said, protocols are also not a bad thing and socializing is almost certainly a learnable skill.
Nonviolent comms is similar... techniques for lowering people's defensiveness upfront and finding connection so that you can actually move forward with discussing the meat of the issue instead of being caught up in mutual dislike based on first impressions and preexisting biases.
Nonviolent communication is more like cult/pseudoscience/horse manure mix.
But Dale's book helped me go from virtually no friends to having many treasured relationships in my life, across interests and divides that I never would've even bothered to have explore if not for that book. It made me receptive to actually getting to know people outside my interest groups, and was as illuminating as it was humbling. It was the book that helped me realize there was so much more to people than the tiny bubble I was in. What may be common advice was, to me at the time, completely unheard of to me. If your parents and social groups don't naturally teach you this stuff, and you're an introverted computer nerd, it's a whole lot better than nothing. Are there better books out there? I'd love to hear about them.
Nonviolent comms can definitely feel cult like and wishy-washy. But it's been tremendously helpful for me in engaging with people across ideological gaps (chasms these days). And it may have saved my life on occasions when conversations got especially heated and emotional and violence was a very real possibility. For all of its teletubby tendencies, in the real world, it is much more able to establish slash remind people of human connection than the bitter street protests we've seen over the past few years. Its underlying message is to simply seek common ground and work outwards from there to solve common problems, rather than digging further into ideological trenches and seeing everyone outside it as the enemy. That particular part isn't necessarily cultish. It's just really hard to practice in the heat of the moment, so the rest of the book is a bunch of deescalation techniques mixed with, yes, fluffy feel good stuff.
Shrug. Just my review as someone whose life and relationships were made much more enjoyable after those two books. Not because I can manipulate people (still can't and wouldn't even if I could), but because they opened ways of thinking and feeling about people that I didn't have before. Together they taught me way more respect and empathy for people outside of my own comfort, interest, and ideological zones.
Worse are those people with canned lines and vocal inflections... the same ones on repeat over and over again; like they've built up a toolbox of sound bites to navigate them through all of life. It's unbelievably grating to hear.
It feels vulgar... to make one's presence and desires so known and obvious... instead of having a conversation for its own sake... for the sake of amusement or personal expression...
It's as if they're treating socialization as a constant string of business deals to be navigated... gross.
The insight is rather that others could not give less fucks if they knew about you more, what they like is to talk about themselves.
This is true even if you're totally non famous and unknown to them, like a random taxi driver and you. They still like to talk about themselves over hearing about you.
Having someone they perceive to be influential, powerful etc. listen to them spill their guts about themselves means a lot more than if they explained their worldview to a homeless person on the street. They wouldn’t shut up about the former experience at a dinner party, but wouldn’t even engage with the latter!
The point is, if your reputation does not already proceed you, talking more about yourself (assuming you aren’t a dolt) increases your perceived social value with a stranger. If your reputation is good and proceeds you already, listening more matters.
Some were of the opinion that I was a good conversationalist, which I find darkly amusing.
It’s double-dark: It awakes misogyny in myself (“speaking 95% of the time shows how little importance they give others, and I want room in my relationship”), but it also shows that we have a lot of speech debt towards women (=everyone needs to speak, but not everyone gets their share”).
Your stance is refreshing. You judge everyone! I used to be timid, then went half-extrovert, so it’s encouraging to see there’s room ahead!
> High-question askers were liked more because they were perceived as more responsive to their partner, confirming Carnegie’s advice to focus on the other person in a conversation.
And so the idea that "the more you talk, the more someone will like you" should be extrapolated to e.g. an entire two-hour first date, or to existing relationships at home or at work or with friends, would obviously be nonsense.
It certainly is an interesting finding, and easy to understand in retrospect -- people can decide to like you and find you more interesting if they've heard you speak for 8.4 minutes as opposed to 3.6 minutes.
But I wouldn't take this as any kind of generalized advice about "how much to talk in conversations", as the title suggests. The title is, frankly, a horrifying example of taking a small interesting finding and falsely suggesting it's much more broadly applicable.
There's a bunch of other neat features, but monitoring talk time is what I use the most. It works in real-time as a bot on Google meet and Zoom (the two platforms I use). I believe it should work on other video platforms as well. Just sign up and it'll start joining meetings on your calendar (if you provide it access).
Instead of using the idea everyone should have equal talk time. It depends on a meeting type. For instance, in meetings with clients or during interviews, I want to let them out talk me. "Tell me about yourself", etc. Obviously during presentations I would like to talk more, etc.
Even in this study they are targeting only one particular conversation type. It seems obvious if you try to be the most relatable and interesting, people will favor you... But that's not every conversation. That wouldn't be the case if we're all engineers trying to build a bridge.
I assume you're speaking about read.ai (not the rest of my comment)? For what it's worth, the bot starts every conversation with a pop up "are you willing to record this conversation" if you or any party selects no or type "opt out" in the chat at any time it'll leave. You can also set it to only show up when invited.
Conversations are often recorded in the space I'm in (for note taking purposes). So it's fairly convenient. There's A LOT of apps that record meetings for you. Zoom even has this as an option built into their application.
I could see having the ability to search all my meetings to find a clip of a conversation / meeting notes with a client would be invaluable. Otherwise I look like an idiot and contact the client again and ask a question they've already answered.
I only tried it once, and it somehow felt like my M1 air couldn’t cope with it and Zoom. But it might have improved since.
1) there is an economic consideration. 100% of the conversation time must be used. By the pigeonhole principle, someone is going to have to speak at least proportionately, or theres going to be silence. How appreciated overtalkers are is proportional to the average utilization of the conversation time for the people being conversed with.
2) Observational research of the form, "people who do X have better lives", is immediately invalidated as soon as it becomes popular. For a similar example, impostor syndrome became a huge buzzword, and all of a sudden everyone who had any reason at all to think they were underperforming was just a victim of impostor syndrome. This happened basically overnight. People who have been advised to shut up by their parents or researchers or therapists or the media vastly outnumber those who have been encouraged to talk more. Aside from creating an influx to the quiet part of the population, this interacts with point 1, and the next point which is...
3) Whether you are a good conversationalist depends on your audience, and how interesting you are, far far more than it depends on your ratio. People who are interesting to listen to are rewarded with interest when they talk. They are much less likely to be swayed by "research" that suggests that they should do something different. They already probably have what they want.
4) conversations are not independent. Whatever your ratio of talking to listening is, it should tend towards the central value the longer you spend with the conversational group. Of course this research is explicitly limited in scope, but the "false belief" people have, may actually be a long term heuristic. "This person will like me more in the long run if we figure out something to talk about that we both essentially contribute equally to.
5) that last arrow runs in reverse as well. The rule that people like you more when you talk more is exactly reversed. You talk more when you detect that people like you. But both rules are valid, because as a human, you only care about situations in which you like each other, and in that case it is strategic to share the conversation, so you talk less in order to show them your interest in what they have to say because of the golden rule.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Quinn-Hirschi/publicati...
> seem 'interesting' without saying much is to elicit intrigue - or mystery, so you want to seem mysterious.
I'm sure there are people to whom that applies. But it doesn't seem likely to be widely applicable to me. Most people just aren't going for the "dark and mysterious" vibe.
Posting a pay-walled link is essentially click-bait advertising.
Shame on you... =P
That way you can always tall who really is interested in what you have to say.
This study does not correlate to the real word at all. A computer telling you when you should speak is so different from a natural conversation. In the real world, you’re not speaking because you’re listening, intentionally; in the study, you’re not speaking because the computer said who’s turn it was.
A lot of the time conversations are just there to have some company and socializing is for the sake of socializing.
There is truth in this. We're wired to connect with those within our proximity.
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There, I fixed it for you.
Just because you're "doing science" and getting some results back, doesn't mean you're doing something accurate or worth over not doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
An attempt by DARPA to evaluate the various fields of social science found that only about half of the papers they tried to replicate actually gave the same results when tried a second time. People in those fields could give pretty good predictions of which papers would replicate, but the publishing apparatus doesn't seem to have much in the way of quality control to filter out the papers everyone knows are junk -- nor do people cite the junk studies less often. Here's a very readable writeup with details:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
What's more, correlational studies have another problem: even a consistent-but-small correlation between two variables usually is non-causal when you're looking at sufficiently complicated webs of cause and effect, e.g. the ones found in the social sciences like psychology. The math here has some profound, dire implications, and I found this article to be a huge eye-opener:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Ex: We have decades of research on ASD and ADHD that have utterly failed to serve the very large number of people who don’t fit the profile of “young white American boy” to whom that research actually applied because the conclusions were wrongly assumed to generalize to the wider population.
It’s not a new problem, and there is no justification whatsoever for being oblivious to that problem in this field anymore.
I understand how frustrating it is when there's a point which is well-known (to you) and people ought to be more aware of it. The problem is, when you let that frustration slip into your comment, or indeed dominate it, you end up sending mixed messages to any user who doesn't know the point or why it ought to be well known by now.
It's common in HN comments for people to post something that assumes the state in their own head, and makes sense in that context, but makes little sense to the reader who doesn't have that state in their head. To such a reader, your GP comment comes across as snark and shallow dismissal. The thing to realize is that only a slight minority of the audience—basically, nobody but you—has that same state in their head. Therefore, if you want to be understood, you can't assume it—you have to assume statelessness instead, and bootstrap the context by including the relevant bits explicitly.
It's also common on HN for people to respond to a moderation scolding with a version of what they actually meant and could have posted in the first place. I call this the rebound effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Your reply here is interesting from that angle because it's a partial rebound: it tells us part of the state you have in your head (knowledge of decades of research on ASD and ADHD), but still not enough to really grok your point, and the rest of it is still venting frustration.
It's of course perfectly natural to want to vent frustration when one feels it; the trouble is that this doesn't communicate the information that other people need to understand you, and the frustration itself adds noise to the signal. It also is likely to activate adjacent frustrations that other people feel, and therefore to evoke an unhelpful argument, rather than the curious conversation we want here.