12 ms·

Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations

169 points by rzk 4y ago

starkd 4y ago
"Contrary to people’s forecasts, they were more likable the more they spoke, and their partners formed global rather than differentiated impressions." 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.
- whatever1 4y ago
  Which is is when you can form an opinion for someone. Will they say something stupid or offensive? 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.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    By letting your guard down I take that to mean revealing personal matters, weaknesses, fears, anything that makes you vulnerable. Being offensive certainly gives me a glimpse into the person but not in a good way.
- jrgoff 4y ago
  Your experience agrees with my experience of myself. Growing up I was the youngest child in our family friend group and particularly had an older sibling who basically bullied me - I learned to be reticent to speak and was definitely afraid of saying something stupid. When I got a little older (in high school) I eventually got curious about how so many of my peers seemed to converse easily without fear of saying anything stupid. Upon observation I realized that my peers said stupid stuff all the time and for the most part nobody cared. I think to some extent position in the social pecking order probably mattered more for how people would react to what someone said than specifically what they said. 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.
  - yamrzou 4y ago
    Did this realization eventually help you get rid of that internal self-critical voice?
    - jrgoff 4y ago
      Yes, it's not gone but it has greatly improved. One of the challenges as far as that goes is that much of the time that sort of negative self-talk/belief happens below the verbal/conscious level for me so it's easy for it to be in effect without me realizing it. I've done a number of things over the years that have been helpful but therapy work the last couple of years has led to some notable shifts for me in that area.
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  Asking questions is a form of talking. If you’re afraid of saying something stupid, why not just admit that the topic is outside your knowledge, and ask questions about what they’re telling you? I didn’t see the whole paper, but I wonder if the idea is really to be engaged in the conversation.
yamrzou 4y ago
An overview of the paper by the author: https://theconversation.com/people-think-they-should-talk-less-to-be-liked-but-new-research-suggests-you-should-speak-up-in-conversations-with-strangers-188196 https://theconversation.com/people-think-they-should-talk-le...
- 2devnull 4y ago
  Does it have the full text? It’s a good journal but there have been many methods problems in psychology research. It strikes me as a finding that would be very sensitive to sample issues and other potential confounds.
  - layer8 4y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844801.
  - Nav_Panel 4y ago
    You were right on this one. The conclusions here seem... weak, on a number of different axes (participation pool = undergraduates, topics of discussion, conversations lasting 7 minutes only, seemingly small effect sizes).
- layer8 4y ago
  This should be the title link.
cateblanchett 4y ago
i think there's an unconscious impulse to try to seem either servile or mysterious in conversations where you want to be liked or seem interesting. so it makes sense that people assume reticence to speak is a better tactic than talking a lot.
- scatterhead 4y ago
  Servile or mysterious? That doesn't resonate with me at all. Could that be a function of your personality and not a widely applicable thing?
  - cateblanchett 4y ago
    well to want to be 'liked' is to put yourself at the mercy of someone else's opinion of you. and to seem 'interesting' without saying much is to elicit intrigue - or mystery, so you want to seem mysterious.
    - scatterhead 4y ago
      I think it's more correct that people appreciate being liked. If you don't feel liked by this person, you'll gravitate to a different person. Calling it "servility" is really stretching it. > 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.
asaph 4y ago
One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...
- sdwr 4y ago
  I believe the conversational meta has shifted in the last 80 years. But more than that, people like to talk about themselves IFF they feel safe and unjudged.
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    Yeah, I think there is this unspoken assumption that the answer to this question does not depend on the specific cultural milieu, or the specifics of the context in which engagement occurs.
  - nedwin 4y ago
    any recs on resources on latest "conversational meta"?
    - sdwr 4y ago
      Most of it is garbage!! People talking about conversation, especially online, is total crap. It's all small blogs, and the ones who aren't trying to sell you something are this weird combination of unsure and self-inflated. 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.
      - fbdab103 4y ago
Nav_Panel 4y ago
Anyone know where I can find full text?
- yamrzou 4y ago
  Here it is: https://send.q1q.wtf/download/e2a1de7fbb78f9e1/#8Z_K4lRRIrI1-Ck4jHt1fA https://send.q1q.wtf/download/e2a1de7fbb78f9e1/#8Z_K4lRRIrI1... Expires after 100 downloads or 7 days.
  - gruez 4y ago
    mirror: https://files.catbox.moe/gv49eb.pdf https://files.catbox.moe/gv49eb.pdf
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - notresidenter 4y ago
    mirror: https://send.dorns.fr/download/5d3faa8570328d72/#QyHXHbuntYynOBbKu_K6yg https://send.dorns.fr/download/5d3faa8570328d72/#QyHXHbuntYy...
altdataseller 4y ago
I think a lot of this also depends on how close you already are to a partner. Ie is this a first or 2nd date? Or have you been together for awhile? Are you romantic partners, or just close friends?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ergonaught 4y ago
"Some people find some other people more likable when those people speak more in a conversation, but drawing any other conclusions than that would be fantastically stupid on its own merits, and doubly so given the recent crises in this field." There, I fixed it for you.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  For a second I thought this was the actual conclusion taken from the study and I felt respect to the authors for speaking the truth.
- europeanguy 4y ago
  Is that how you do science? I can't make my predictions 100% accurate, therefore there's nothing I can say about the subject at all.
  - User23 4y ago
    It’s more that performing this experiments with rats would only be slightly less representative of the general population than the college undergraduates they almost certainly used.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    If 80% or more of your published and "peer reviewed" predictions were non-reproducible crap (as is the case with said soft sciences), then you'd indeed better not say anything about the subject at all. Just because you're "doing science" and getting some results back, doesn't mean you're doing something accurate or worth over not doing.
  - pjscott 4y ago
    There's a huge problem in many branches of science where, using normal methodology, it's possible to come up with an endless stream of results that are unlikely to have any predictive validity outside of the extremely specific circumstances of the experiment -- and often not even there. This gives the illusion of knowledge, but everything you "know" falls apart if you actually try to apply it to the world around you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis 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-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ 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: https://www.gwern.net/Causality https://www.gwern.net/Causality
stochastimus 4y ago
Would love to see this result reproduced. Also a confounding factor might be what they talked about; would be interesting to see a follow-up that tried to break out by subject matter (someone filling time vs. conveying real knowledge vs. responding to the other person, for example).
staccatomeasure 4y ago
Introverts appreciate people that can carry a conversation and people generally like people they appreciate.
ouid 4y ago
There are so many effects here that no advice this unguarded has any chance of being correct. 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.
BlueTie 4y ago
There is an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza tries to get more time in front of a woman he's interested in by leaving his hat in her apartment thinking that even though she doesn't like him - just listening to him talk over and over will eventually win her over. There is truth in this. We're wired to connect with those within our proximity.
rootusrootus 4y ago
As with everything else, it seems, my anecdotal experience suggests a balance is usually the best overall answer. People with diarrhea of the mouth aren't much fun to talk to, but either are people who won't say more than three words at a time. 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.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Why not?
  - openfuture 4y ago
    Since you got answered in downvotes I suspect the answer is "because people will switch languages on you"
    - clnq 4y ago
      I've recently seen many good and curious comments "answered in downvotes." Maybe I can't read the room, but why does that happen? Is there a way to phrase statements that challenge others in a way that leads to conversation and not flags/greying out?
      - themitigating 4y ago
        I'm guilty of one worded replies that get downvoted. I do get annoyed since I'm basically poking the parent for an explanation.
        AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        But that's not a good way of doing it. A one-word reply rarely makes clear what needs more explanation, or even that that's what you're after. 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.
citilife 4y ago
Just a side note, something I've been using lately to monitor how much I talk in meetings is something called Read.ai - https://www.read.ai/ https://www.read.ai/ 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.
- conviencefee999 4y ago
  wow, that sounds dangerous and an active security risk to any company or individual who did not consent to it and counter intuitive to really anything meaningful at all. The organization that came up with this idea probably is raking it selling other company data to third party organizations and governments. This itself looks like an ad.
  - lukevp 4y ago
    I recall one of these transcription bots recently sending out an email summary to everyone on the invite and creeping everyone out. Don’t remember if this was the specific one or not.
    - citilife 4y ago
      I could see that, but I think it really depends on your use case. 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.
crazygringo 4y ago
To be clear... this study is ONLY about an initial TWELVE MINUTES of conversation with a STRANGER. 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.
- ccn0p 4y ago
  Right. But it would be more fun for everyone here to conclude from one headline that they should now talk 95% of the time, not to ask any questions of the other person, and even cut them off for bonus like points. +500 social XP!
graphpapa 4y ago
Conversation & social matters are so variable and vibe based that I think trying to get grip on something like 'likability' via a metric like 'contributions ratio' seems absurd.
achow 4y ago
The research paper (PDF link): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Quinn-Hirschi/publication/361936882_Speak_Up_Mistaken_Beliefs_About_How_Much_to_Talk_in_Conversations/links/62d190c5d351bd24f519c113/Speak-Up-Mistaken-Beliefs-About-How-Much-to-Talk-in-Conversations.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Quinn-Hirschi/publicati...
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
"It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." (Maurice Switzer) Posting a pay-walled link is essentially click-bait advertising. Shame on you... =P
- winternett 4y ago
  I always start out by over talking everyone and then I suddenly go 100% silent and ask everyone to pay $12 a month and give me their email to hear more myself... That way you can always tall who really is interested in what you have to say.
JadeNB 4y ago
Surely what you say is as important as how much you talk. I suppose you can assign someone literally to just fill up a certain percentage of a conversation with words (though I wouldn't trust someone accurately to gauge whether they were speaking, say, 30% of the time or 40% of the time), but you can't assign someone to have something to say a given percentage of the time.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  On a certain level what you are taking about matters. But lots of times it doesn’t. When I’m in a pub talking to someone about their weather, or what they’re drinking, or a sports game, I don’t really care about the content of the conversation. A lot of the time conversations are just there to have some company and socializing is for the sake of socializing.
award_ 4y ago
The findings of this study are fascinating and counter-intuitive. It seems that we often have mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations, and that speaking more than half the time can actually make us more likable. This goes against the common advice to "let the other person talk" and shows the importance of challenging our assumptions about social interactions. It would be interesting to see how these findings apply in different contexts, such as group conversations or online forums. Overall, this study highlights the complex dynamics of conversation and the need for further research in this area.
jtsiskin 4y ago
“In Study 3, we tested the accuracy of these forecasts by randomly assigning participants to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time in a dyadic conversation.“ 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.
nati0n 4y ago
Balance in everything.
anotheraccount9 4y ago
I can't access the research's methodolody. If the total number of interactions were too small or done in a single social group, the results don't hold. Please let me know if you find anything.

169 points by rzk 4y ago

"Contrary to people’s forecasts, they were more likable the more they spoke, and their partners formed global rather than differentiated impressions." 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.

whatever1 4y ago
Which is is when you can form an opinion for someone. Will they say something stupid or offensive? 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.
- themitigating 4y ago
  By letting your guard down I take that to mean revealing personal matters, weaknesses, fears, anything that makes you vulnerable. Being offensive certainly gives me a glimpse into the person but not in a good way.
jrgoff 4y ago
Your experience agrees with my experience of myself. Growing up I was the youngest child in our family friend group and particularly had an older sibling who basically bullied me - I learned to be reticent to speak and was definitely afraid of saying something stupid. When I got a little older (in high school) I eventually got curious about how so many of my peers seemed to converse easily without fear of saying anything stupid. Upon observation I realized that my peers said stupid stuff all the time and for the most part nobody cared. I think to some extent position in the social pecking order probably mattered more for how people would react to what someone said than specifically what they said. 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.
- yamrzou 4y ago
  Did this realization eventually help you get rid of that internal self-critical voice?
  - jrgoff 4y ago
    Yes, it's not gone but it has greatly improved. One of the challenges as far as that goes is that much of the time that sort of negative self-talk/belief happens below the verbal/conscious level for me so it's easy for it to be in effect without me realizing it. I've done a number of things over the years that have been helpful but therapy work the last couple of years has led to some notable shifts for me in that area.
j33zusjuice 4y ago
Asking questions is a form of talking. If you’re afraid of saying something stupid, why not just admit that the topic is outside your knowledge, and ask questions about what they’re telling you? I didn’t see the whole paper, but I wonder if the idea is really to be engaged in the conversation.

yamrzou 4y ago

An overview of the paper by the author: https://theconversation.com/people-think-they-should-talk-less-to-be-liked-but-new-research-suggests-you-should-speak-up-in-conversations-with-strangers-188196 https://theconversation.com/people-think-they-should-talk-le...

2devnull 4y ago
Does it have the full text? It’s a good journal but there have been many methods problems in psychology research. It strikes me as a finding that would be very sensitive to sample issues and other potential confounds.
- layer8 4y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844801.
- Nav_Panel 4y ago
  You were right on this one. The conclusions here seem... weak, on a number of different axes (participation pool = undergraduates, topics of discussion, conversations lasting 7 minutes only, seemingly small effect sizes).
layer8 4y ago
This should be the title link.

cateblanchett 4y ago

i think there's an unconscious impulse to try to seem either servile or mysterious in conversations where you want to be liked or seem interesting. so it makes sense that people assume reticence to speak is a better tactic than talking a lot.

scatterhead 4y ago
Servile or mysterious? That doesn't resonate with me at all. Could that be a function of your personality and not a widely applicable thing?
- cateblanchett 4y ago
  well to want to be 'liked' is to put yourself at the mercy of someone else's opinion of you. and to seem 'interesting' without saying much is to elicit intrigue - or mystery, so you want to seem mysterious.
  - scatterhead 4y ago
    I think it's more correct that people appreciate being liked. If you don't feel liked by this person, you'll gravitate to a different person. Calling it "servility" is really stretching it. > 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.

asaph 4y ago

One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

sdwr 4y ago
I believe the conversational meta has shifted in the last 80 years. But more than that, people like to talk about themselves IFF they feel safe and unjudged.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Yeah, I think there is this unspoken assumption that the answer to this question does not depend on the specific cultural milieu, or the specifics of the context in which engagement occurs.
- nedwin 4y ago
  any recs on resources on latest "conversational meta"?
  - sdwr 4y ago
    Most of it is garbage!! People talking about conversation, especially online, is total crap. It's all small blogs, and the ones who aren't trying to sell you something are this weird combination of unsure and self-inflated. 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.
    - fbdab103 4y ago

Nav_Panel 4y ago

Anyone know where I can find full text?

yamrzou 4y ago
Here it is: https://send.q1q.wtf/download/e2a1de7fbb78f9e1/#8Z_K4lRRIrI1-Ck4jHt1fA https://send.q1q.wtf/download/e2a1de7fbb78f9e1/#8Z_K4lRRIrI1... Expires after 100 downloads or 7 days.
- gruez 4y ago
  mirror: https://files.catbox.moe/gv49eb.pdf https://files.catbox.moe/gv49eb.pdf
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- notresidenter 4y ago
  mirror: https://send.dorns.fr/download/5d3faa8570328d72/#QyHXHbuntYynOBbKu_K6yg https://send.dorns.fr/download/5d3faa8570328d72/#QyHXHbuntYy...

altdataseller 4y ago

I think a lot of this also depends on how close you already are to a partner. Ie is this a first or 2nd date? Or have you been together for awhile? Are you romantic partners, or just close friends?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ergonaught 4y ago

"Some people find some other people more likable when those people speak more in a conversation, but drawing any other conclusions than that would be fantastically stupid on its own merits, and doubly so given the recent crises in this field." There, I fixed it for you.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
For a second I thought this was the actual conclusion taken from the study and I felt respect to the authors for speaking the truth.
europeanguy 4y ago
Is that how you do science? I can't make my predictions 100% accurate, therefore there's nothing I can say about the subject at all.
- User23 4y ago
  It’s more that performing this experiments with rats would only be slightly less representative of the general population than the college undergraduates they almost certainly used.
- coldtea 4y ago
  If 80% or more of your published and "peer reviewed" predictions were non-reproducible crap (as is the case with said soft sciences), then you'd indeed better not say anything about the subject at all. Just because you're "doing science" and getting some results back, doesn't mean you're doing something accurate or worth over not doing.
- pjscott 4y ago
  There's a huge problem in many branches of science where, using normal methodology, it's possible to come up with an endless stream of results that are unlikely to have any predictive validity outside of the extremely specific circumstances of the experiment -- and often not even there. This gives the illusion of knowledge, but everything you "know" falls apart if you actually try to apply it to the world around you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis 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-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ 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: https://www.gwern.net/Causality https://www.gwern.net/Causality

stochastimus 4y ago

Would love to see this result reproduced. Also a confounding factor might be what they talked about; would be interesting to see a follow-up that tried to break out by subject matter (someone filling time vs. conveying real knowledge vs. responding to the other person, for example).

staccatomeasure 4y ago

Introverts appreciate people that can carry a conversation and people generally like people they appreciate.

ouid 4y ago

There are so many effects here that no advice this unguarded has any chance of being correct. 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.

BlueTie 4y ago

There is an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza tries to get more time in front of a woman he's interested in by leaving his hat in her apartment thinking that even though she doesn't like him - just listening to him talk over and over will eventually win her over. There is truth in this. We're wired to connect with those within our proximity.

rootusrootus 4y ago

As with everything else, it seems, my anecdotal experience suggests a balance is usually the best overall answer. People with diarrhea of the mouth aren't much fun to talk to, but either are people who won't say more than three words at a time. 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.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Why not?
- openfuture 4y ago
  Since you got answered in downvotes I suspect the answer is "because people will switch languages on you"
  - clnq 4y ago
    I've recently seen many good and curious comments "answered in downvotes." Maybe I can't read the room, but why does that happen? Is there a way to phrase statements that challenge others in a way that leads to conversation and not flags/greying out?
    - themitigating 4y ago
      I'm guilty of one worded replies that get downvoted. I do get annoyed since I'm basically poking the parent for an explanation.
      - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        But that's not a good way of doing it. A one-word reply rarely makes clear what needs more explanation, or even that that's what you're after. 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.

citilife 4y ago

Just a side note, something I've been using lately to monitor how much I talk in meetings is something called Read.ai - https://www.read.ai/ https://www.read.ai/ 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.

conviencefee999 4y ago
wow, that sounds dangerous and an active security risk to any company or individual who did not consent to it and counter intuitive to really anything meaningful at all. The organization that came up with this idea probably is raking it selling other company data to third party organizations and governments. This itself looks like an ad.
- lukevp 4y ago
  I recall one of these transcription bots recently sending out an email summary to everyone on the invite and creeping everyone out. Don’t remember if this was the specific one or not.
  - citilife 4y ago
    I could see that, but I think it really depends on your use case. 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.

crazygringo 4y ago

To be clear... this study is ONLY about an initial TWELVE MINUTES of conversation with a STRANGER. 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.

ccn0p 4y ago
Right. But it would be more fun for everyone here to conclude from one headline that they should now talk 95% of the time, not to ask any questions of the other person, and even cut them off for bonus like points. +500 social XP!

graphpapa 4y ago

Conversation & social matters are so variable and vibe based that I think trying to get grip on something like 'likability' via a metric like 'contributions ratio' seems absurd.

achow 4y ago

The research paper (PDF link): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Quinn-Hirschi/publication/361936882_Speak_Up_Mistaken_Beliefs_About_How_Much_to_Talk_in_Conversations/links/62d190c5d351bd24f519c113/Speak-Up-Mistaken-Beliefs-About-How-Much-to-Talk-in-Conversations.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Quinn-Hirschi/publicati...

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

"It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." (Maurice Switzer) Posting a pay-walled link is essentially click-bait advertising. Shame on you... =P

winternett 4y ago
I always start out by over talking everyone and then I suddenly go 100% silent and ask everyone to pay $12 a month and give me their email to hear more myself... That way you can always tall who really is interested in what you have to say.

JadeNB 4y ago

Surely what you say is as important as how much you talk. I suppose you can assign someone literally to just fill up a certain percentage of a conversation with words (though I wouldn't trust someone accurately to gauge whether they were speaking, say, 30% of the time or 40% of the time), but you can't assign someone to have something to say a given percentage of the time.

oceanplexian 4y ago
On a certain level what you are taking about matters. But lots of times it doesn’t. When I’m in a pub talking to someone about their weather, or what they’re drinking, or a sports game, I don’t really care about the content of the conversation. A lot of the time conversations are just there to have some company and socializing is for the sake of socializing.

award_ 4y ago

The findings of this study are fascinating and counter-intuitive. It seems that we often have mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations, and that speaking more than half the time can actually make us more likable. This goes against the common advice to "let the other person talk" and shows the importance of challenging our assumptions about social interactions. It would be interesting to see how these findings apply in different contexts, such as group conversations or online forums. Overall, this study highlights the complex dynamics of conversation and the need for further research in this area.

jtsiskin 4y ago

“In Study 3, we tested the accuracy of these forecasts by randomly assigning participants to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time in a dyadic conversation.“ 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.

nati0n 4y ago

Balance in everything.

anotheraccount9 4y ago

I can't access the research's methodolody. If the total number of interactions were too small or done in a single social group, the results don't hold. Please let me know if you find anything.