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Do conversations end when people want them to? Surprisingly, behavioral science provides no answer to this fundamental question about the most ubiquitous of all human social activities. In two studies of 932 conversations, we asked conversants to report when they had wanted a conversation to end and to estimate when their partner (who was an intimate in Study 1 and a stranger in Study 2) had wanted it to end. Results showed that conversations almost never ended when both conversants wanted them to and rarely ended when even one conversant wanted them to and that the average discrepancy between desired and actual durations was roughly half the duration of the conversation. Conversants had little idea when their partners wanted to end and underestimated how discrepant their partners’ desires were from their own. These studies suggest that ending conversations is a classic “coordination problem” that humans are unable to solve because doing so requires information that they normally keep from each other. As a result, most conversations appear to end when no one wants them to.

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Significance People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people’s efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. For example, participants believed that Americans increasingly want to limit immigration, which they said justifies tighter borders. However, participants also said that limiting immigration would not be right if attitudes had shifted against it––which is what actually occurred. Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

Harnessing the utility of preprints may solve many of these issues in academic publishing. Preprints are defined broadly as research documents made freely available via a public server (e.g., arXiv; PsyArXiv) before publication in a journal. They accelerate dissemination of research, allow researchers to gain early feedback, and increase access. With many concerns surrounding their use unfounded (e.g., scooping 10,11 ), preprints can reduce publication bias by permitting researchers to deposit their work regardless of its publication 'success'. Through not-for-profit preprint servers, financially supported through institutions, organisations or donations, preprints fulfil the criteria of green open access detached from the typically large profit margins of gold open access publishing, which charge either a subscription fee to readers or an article processing charge to authors 12 . From this perspective, preprints can also create a more equitable and diverse research landscape, aiding better access and discoverability of research for those in developing countries (e.g., AfriArXiv; although additional support for such preprint servers is required 13 ). Ranking systems do not exist with each preprint server aligned with its discipline and quality control maintained through version tracking, moderation, and community feedback (including error detection) 14 . Services such as 'Review Commons' and 'Peer Community In' offer a platform for independent peer-review of preprints, facilitating author-directed submission of refereed preprints to affiliate journals. Such in-house oversight protects the community from predatory journals and ensures homogeneous policies and procedures. Furthermore, the offshoot of 'PCI Registered Reports' promotes rigour, reproducibility and replication by reviewing and recommending Registered Report preprints 15 .Problems associated with academic publishing signal a strong incentive for change. Preprints can mitigate many of these concerns by reimagining traditional publication and research evaluation processes and progressing a more equitable, open access future. Journals should not see preprint servers as a threat but rather an aide to an improved research landscape.