People constrain their semantic associations when talking to both friends and strangers

Abstract

During conversations, people face a tradeoff between establishing common ground (e.g., understanding each other) and making interesting and unique contributions. Making an unpredictable and semantically divergent topic change may be interesting but runs the risk of being incomprehensible. How do people balance this tradeoff when deciding which concepts to reference, and does it matter how well they know their conversation partner? In the present work, participants made stream-of-consciousness word associations either with a partner or alone—simplified versions of dialogue and monologue. Participants made semantically narrower and more predictable word associations with a stranger than alone (Study 1), suggesting that they constrain their associations to establish common ground. Increasing closeness (Study 2) or having a prior relationship (Study 3) did not moderate this effect. Thus, even during a task that does not depend on establishing common ground and mutual understanding, people sacrifice being interesting for the sake of being understood.