Do conversations end when people want them to?

Mastroianni, Adam; Gilbert, Daniel T.; Cooney, Gus; Wilson, Timothy D.

doi:10.1073/pnas.2011809118

Cited by 30 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Carl Rogers (1995), for example, characterized active listening as "one of the most potent forces for change that I know" (p. 116). 8 In spite of a growing body of work investigating conversations -especially around misperceptions in conversations (e.g., Boothby et al, 2018;Cooney et al, 2017;Kumar & Epley, 2020;Mastroianni et al, 2021;Zhao & Epley, 2021) and ideological disagreement (Kubin et al, 2021;Yeomans et al, 2020) -listening has been largely overlooked, and it is only recently that social psychologists have turned their attention to it (e.g., see Hart et al, 2021;Huang et al, 2017;. Listening is a channel through which people orient, relate, and connect, and is a fundamentally social psychological phenomenon.…”

Section: Theoretical Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do You Listen?: The Relationship Between How Men Listen and Women’s Power and Respect in the U.S.

Santoro¹,

Markus²

2021

Preprint

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As American culture confronts the issues raised by #MeToo, some ask, what can men do in interpersonal interactions to become allies and empower women? Building on research in linguistics, communication, sociology, as well as psychology, seven pre-registered studies investigate the relationship between how men listen during troubles talk (i.e., communication about problems) and women’s sense of power and respect. We theorize and compare two styles of effective listening: more other-focused interdependent listening (e.g., asking a question) and more self-focused independent listening (e.g., giving advice). We find that though men are less likely than women to do interdependent listening during troubles talk (Study 1), men can be encouraged to ask questions (Study 2). When investigating the effect on women of how men listen, we found that women anticipate feeling more powerful and respected when listened to by a man friend doing interdependent (vs. independent) listening (Studies 3a – 3c), particularly those women who do not endorse stereotypic gender roles (Study 3c). We partially replicated these findings in two live interaction studies involving strangers communicating over text: women felt more powerful and respected when listened to by men who asked open-ended questions compared to men who gave prescriptive, unsolicited advice (Study 5), though they did not when men simply asked more questions (Study 4). We suggest that listening can assume multiple productive forms, but that compared to independent listening, interdependent listening can serve as an everyday anti-sexist practice to attenuate rather than accentuate the gender hierarchy.

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Section: Theoretical Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do You Listen?: The Relationship Between How Men Listen and Women’s Power and Respect in the U.S.

Santoro¹,

Markus²

2021

Preprint

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“…Recent work has sought to examine when people choose to end natural conversations, both in the lab and in real life, and reported that the preferred time to end a conversation rarely aligns across interacting partners 72 . Although many features of the content of conversations will influence their value that go beyond the fairness manipulation deployed in this experiment, our results point to a potential computational explanation for a lack of alignment.…”

Section: Changing One's Principles Such As What One Considers As Fair Behaviour Based On What Is the Socialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite almost all conversations, and many relationships, necessarily ending at some point 17 , little is known about how people decide when to leave a social interaction. Existing research has focused on what content leads to people leaving a conversation, the phrases used to end them, or examined how misaligned people's preferences are for the duration of an interaction [17][18][19][20] . However, few studies have examined the computational processes underlying how we ascribe value to a social interaction, evaluate that it is declining, and make a decision to move on from it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time to leave: Computations of when to end a social interaction depend on opportunity costs, depression, and loneliness

Gabay¹,

Pisauro²,

O'Nell

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Positive social relationships are vital for mental health. There is an ever-increasing understanding of the cognitive and computational mechanisms that underlie how we process others’ behaviours during social interactions. Yet fundamentally many conversations, partnerships and relationships have to end. However, little is known about how people decide when to leave. Theories of decision-making posit that people stop a behaviour in favour of another based on evidence accumulation processes, shaped by the value of alternative behaviours (opportunity costs). Do people compute evidence to leave social interactions based on the opportunity costs of connecting to others? Here, in a novel economic game, participants made decisions of when to leave partners in social environments with different opportunity costs for moving on. Across four studies we find that people leave partners more quickly when the opportunity costs are high, both in terms of the average generosity in the environment and the effort required to connect to the next partner. People’s leaving times could be accounted for by a fairness-adapted evidence accumulation model, with a lower threshold for leaving in high opportunity cost social environments. Moreover, decisions to leave were modulated by depression and loneliness scores, which were linked to an interaction between the fairness of a partner and the opportunity cost of the social environment. These findings demonstrate the cognitive and computational processes underlying decisions to leave social interactions, and highlight that loneliness and depression may be linked to an atypical dynamic allocation of time to social interactions.

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“…Or imagine being engaged in a fascinating conversation and the other person says, much to your chagrin, 'Well, I'd better go'. If these imagined situations feel familiar to you, you are apparently not alone: recently published research from Mastroianni, Gilbert, Cooney, and Wilson [1] provides evidence that conversations almost never end when people want. Across two studies, participants reflecting on their last in-person conversation or a conversation that had just occurred in the laboratory reported that only 15.6% of the time did the conversation end when they desired it to end (n = 1173 pre-exclusions; https://osf.io/8k4aj/).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ending Conversation is a Fraught Endeavor

Schroeder

2021

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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Do conversations end when people want them to?

Cited by 30 publications

References 23 publications

How Do You Listen?: The Relationship Between How Men Listen and Women’s Power and Respect in the U.S.

How Do You Listen?: The Relationship Between How Men Listen and Women’s Power and Respect in the U.S.

Time to leave: Computations of when to end a social interaction depend on opportunity costs, depression, and loneliness

Ending Conversation is a Fraught Endeavor

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