
When we take turns speaking, we chime in after a culturally universal short gap - ehudla
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/the-incredible-thing-we-do-during-conversations/422439/?single_page=true
======
derefr
I've had it pointed out to me that there's something weird about the show
_Gilmore Girls_ in the actors' delivery of lines. The actors don't seem to be
speaking particularly _fast_ , but something about the structure of the
dialogue still seems to be perceived as very "dense" by most people. I'm
guessing the effect is from the actors shortening the conversational gaps
between their line deliveries. It seems like the each reply comes near-
instantly after the actor "heard" the previous line, which may be a super-
stimulus for making the portrayed characters seem extremely "witty."

I also have a feeling that actually increasing verbal velocity would _hinder_
this effect; you wouldn't get the impression of a witty character, but rather
a manic one.

~~~
night815
They talk about this in one of the special features on the DVDs. The average
script length for a typical "hour" show (42 minutes, running time) is one page
per minute. Gilmore Girls episodes were closer to 80 pages. They even talk
about bringing in a speak coach for the actors so they could learn to speak
faster while still being clear.

~~~
mercer
Do they explain why they did this?

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strictnein
There's some interesting things in this article, other than the "universal"
gap. Tidbits like this:

> "The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that
> it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve a single word from
> memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing
> time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning
> our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from
> grammatical cues to changes in pitch. We continuously predict what the rest
> of a sentence will contain, while similarly building our hypothetical
> rejoinder, all using largely overlapping neural circuits."

Makes sense. I (and I'm assuming everyone) will have
stories/anecdotes/arguments at the ready during a conversation, and they'll
vary and change based on what the other parties are saying. I just didn't
realize that this was a necessary thing.

~~~
developer2
I think we typically already know how we are going to respond to the earlier
section(s) of the other person's dialog, and this is why our response is ready
so quickly. If your counterpart speaks 3 sentences, I suspect that in many
cases, your response really only takes into account their first and maybe the
second sentence. Their third sentence likely often adds extraneous details
that don't require you to adjust your response. Or, in the case of debating
(ie: your response is a rebuttal in an argument), we often largely ignore what
the other person has said and ramble off a response that doesn't even address
the new information given to us by the other party. I find a lot of
conversations to be more like two separate one-sided discussions where each
person is selfishly just pushing their own talking points, rather than
wrapping the other party entirely within the discussion.

Unfortunately, something about my wiring doesn't seem to match these timing
cues up with my peers. In a group discussion involving three or more people,
I'm desynchronized from the others. Far too often when I begin to speak, I get
pre-emptively cut off by someone else who "beats me" to the cue. I think I
take a little more time to plan what to say before I open my mouth, whereas my
peers are ready to ramble unpolished responses the moment someone else stops
speaking. Too many people just like to hear themselves talk and be the centre
of attention the millisecond someone else's moment in the spotlight is
finished.

>> a sign that we’re spending most of our “listening” time actually prepping
what we are going to say (As Chuck Pahlaniuk once wrote, “The only reason why
we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own
weekend.”)

The article covers my beliefs with this quote, but then goes on to say this
study proves otherwise. I guess I'm a pessimist.

Edit: As a side anecdote, I am 30 and have a _much_ easier time hanging out
with and speaking with 45+ year olds. Conversation flows naturally and my
timing cues are much more in line, as opposed to the rush-to-be-first
situation I run into with people my own age.

~~~
gohrt
Your anecdote is inconsistent with the "universal" short gap, and I think you
are more correct. The "universality" comes from averaging that smears away
individual differences

~~~
developer2
I suppose if you're going to draw a bell curve for the gaps people exhibit,
_someone_ has to fall on the outer edges. I'm one of the outliers on the right
side of the graph in terms of milliseconds. :)

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gk1
If you intentionally prolong the gap, you can force the other side to feel
discomfort. Also known as awkward silence. Most people will instinctively fill
the gap by starting to talk again, even if they don't have anything more to
say.

You can use this in negotiations. After someone makes an offer, they'll stop
and expect you to respond. If instead you act as though you're thinking and
hold the silence, they may get the natural urge to fill the gap and start
speaking again, sometimes offering better terms.

One time I used this technique at a negotiation but the other party was an MBA
grad so they might've known about this. This resulted in _very_ long pauses,
maybe several of 20-30 seconds each, where we both waited for the other person
to fill the gap. If someone were watching us they'd think we're both crazy.

~~~
gohrt
A simple way out of that trap is to self-followup with "Take as long as you
want to think it over", or "Do you have any questions about my proposal?", or
the aggressive "Any objections, or do we have an agreement?" or of course the
21st Century [take out your phone while you wait].

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lmm
Interestingly I've read that people conversing in sign language don't leave
gaps in the same way, since "talking" doesn't get in the way of "listening",
so both participants tend to "speak" simultaneously. This dovetails with the
article: the limiting factor is not how long it takes us to think of our
replies, but how much we can convey through speech without it becoming
unintelligible.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Along similar lines, though on a longer timescale, people on IRC or similar
text-based chat mediums commonly take part in many real-time conversations
simultaneously, and don't have any trouble mixing them up.

In theory, if you didn't mind breaking cultural norms, the same thing can work
with speech.

~~~
krick
Uh, I don't know: IM chatting is anything but "instant". It's pretty slow,
actually. I don't really feel it while in conversation, but if I look at times
each message was posted afterwards — it's easy to notice that conversation of
the same volume would be done much quicker verbally. Waiting for everyone to
respond on the top of it would be so slow it would kill the conversation.

I don't speak sign language, but I observed others doing that and it seems to
be almost as fluent as talking verbally. While both parts are involved in
conversation most of the time — it's something we do as we speak verbally as
well: making facial expressions, nodding, saying "uh-huh" and inserting little
jokes.

I never actually noticed that deaf people really _tell stories_ at the same
time: one of them usually seems like listening. So, I'd actually want some
reference that would prove that deaf people really do "speak simultaneously".

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munificent
And this is one of the main reasons I hate talking on cell phones. Those have
a latency up to a quarter of a second, which totally confounds this turn
taking.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Or having cross-continental calls, which introduces similar latency.

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tetraodonpuffer
I am not so sure how universal this is if it varies between 7ms and 470ms, the
article says "there is variation but it's minuscule", to me a two-order of
magnitude variation is all but small.

And growing up in Europe and moving to North America I can definitely feel
that the "polite" amount to pause in a conversation here feels way longer, it
might be small in terms of milliseconds, but if you are used to, say, 50ms,
having to pause for 200ms is very, very noticeable

~~~
JoshTriplett
> I am not so sure how universal this is if it varies between 7ms and 470ms,
> the article says "there is variation but it's minuscule", to me a two-order
> of magnitude variation is all but small.

Agreed completely. Given the scale, and the mention that the average
conversational segment lasts 2 seconds, 7-470ms seems like a major difference.

It also doesn't seem like "the minimum human response time to anything", as
the article quotes, if it has that much variation. Humans across all cultures
can react far faster than 200ms.

> And growing up in Europe and moving to North America I can definitely feel
> that the "polite" amount to pause in a conversation here feels way longer,
> it might be small in terms of milliseconds, but if you are used to, say,
> 50ms, having to pause for 200ms is very, very noticeable

I've had the same experience in reverse: if you've come to expect longer
conversational pauses, short ones give the conversation a very different tone.

And on the flip side, the necessary pause can grow noticeably shorter between
people who know each other very well.

~~~
cosarara97
Looking at the data, it is not that people are reacting in 7ms, but that
people sometimes start talking before their partner has finished, and the mean
ends up at 7ms. It seems that the Japanese are more prone to interrupting
others:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F2.expansion.html](http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F2.expansion.html)

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mynegation
In my original family this gap is negative: we start speaking before the other
person finishes the sentence. But even as a child I understood that this is
not a norm and learned to adjust to other settings.

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derefr
The article is about culture, but I'm more interested in brain chemistry. Do
people on the autistic spectrum have the same gap? People with ADHD? People
with Alzheimer's?

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outsidetheparty
> "It’s the minimum human response time to anything...It’s the time that
> runners take to respond to a starting pistol—and that's just a simple
> signal"

i.e. the gap is typically exactly as long as it takes for us to react to the
"simple signal" that the other person has stopped speaking and now it is our
turn.

It does prove that we must be planning our response before the other person
has finished speaking, but I wonder if that's such a surprising thing to
prove: words and sentences take a lot longer to say out loud than they do to
comprehend.

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nailer
> “It’s the minimum human response time to anything,“ says Stephen Levinson
> from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It’s the time that
> runners take to respond to a starting pistol—and that's just a simple
> signal.

This seems to match the front end world where CSS and JS animations are
typically set to a number between 100-200ms.

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JoeAltmaier
I understood that some aboriginal American speakers had 'conversational
timers' that were in the minutes. That is, when somebody (an elder?) stopped
talking, you waited for 5 minutes of silence before you could be sure they
were done talking. Navaho perhaps?

~~~
logfromblammo
I like to give a little thought to the words that I speak. The conversational
gap timing may be the reason I never seem to get a turn to speak in some
conversations.

Sometimes, when speaking with the spouse, I sense a "your turn to speak" gap,
but by the time I actually start speaking, I apparently missed my turn, and I
get dinged for interrupting the continuation. Then, later, I get double-dinged
for not being communicative enough.

I never quite got the hang of "seizing the conch" (as in __Lord of the Flies__
) and holding onto it with a continuous stream of priority-holding
conversational nulls while my brain works out what I actually want to say
next. I'll sometimes pause to take a breath and before I am able to resume,
someone else jumps in.

So I'd love it if I had a cultural conversation timeout even just 15 seconds
long. I might actually get to talk _and_ finish a line of thought without
someone else trampling over me.

Edit (sibling post): So maybe I should try to get some Finnish friends, then?
But it's been a while since I've been to Minnesota or da Yoop, doncha know.

~~~
jkaunisv1
I've definitely learned how to maintain priority with conversational no-ops
when it's a situation I want/need to have my say. I dislike doing it, but it's
a necessity given the bias our culture has towards fast conversation.

Hopefully your spouse can learn that's your conversational style and adapt to
it. Once my partner was made aware of it she started waiting longer before
answering. She even apologized once for "cutting me off" during a long pause
between thoughts!

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ajeet_dhaliwal
I wish they had included India in their study - after watching a panel debate
on NDTV (a major news channel there) I'm not so sure this turn taking short
gap would be considered 'universal'. I hope no one finds this offensive but it
is perplexing how anyone can understand what is being said when everyone is
talking at the same time. I wish it was universal, and I am guessing it is
true in most places.

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alpeb
Not as a universal trait as to be present in my family. One needs to talk
louder and interrupt one another to be allowed for a turn.

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BuckRogers
I fail at this, miserably. Some of us are on the other end of the spectrum.
Tending to wait "too long" to respond thus end up talking over someone.

I think this is because some of us prefer to take time to actually think about
a response, rather than just react.

~~~
intopieces
This is why we have verbal cues for conversation that indicate that the
listener-now-speaker has understood what was said and is formulating a reply:
"hmmm, I see. But have you considered, perhaps, that..."

Conversation, as opposed to written text, has a lot of "filler" designed to
give the conversant time to formulate their words.

Your implication is that people who respond "on time" have thought less about
their response than those who do not. More likely, they have just a better
intuition for conversation that allows it appear that way.

~~~
BuckRogers
That's a fair point but it's hard to take seriously the suggestion that
someone who puts more thought into a response isn't likely to have a more
insightful answer.

I cut out most filler words out of my vocabulary years ago as I find them
annoying but occasionally do use the "mhm" hum. That said, I will fully admit
I'm a traditional nerd at heart and do lack intuition for nonsensical, "how's
the weather" conversation.

But if you want to speak about something meaningful? A conversation that would
flip the roles and leave the majority of the public at a loss for words, you
would probably prefer to speak with me.

Most of my social interaction is at places where naturally curious people
gather (like user groups / meetups).

This is why in most situations I let most people do the talking, and I focus
on questioning them. I can judge what level they're on intellectually and as a
bonus, people like to talk about themselves.

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cfontes
Well, in Brazil there is no gap :D

The conversation is just an endless stream of word from several sources.

~~~
monkmartinez
There is no discernible gap on my wife's side of the family... they are
Colombian. Further, the volume tends to increase (rapidly) as they speak over
one another. I am surprised to find they are actually communicating with
understanding.

~~~
djKianoosh
same with my puerto rican wife's family. could be a hispanic thing.

slightly tangential, but on the loudness part of it, funny theory I have is
that, and I noticed this when I've visited her family in their hometown, since
they live outside of any big city, nature itself is so loud, they have to talk
louder and louder to hear each other! ;-) especially at night, there are so
many noises coming from nature itself. here in mainland US, in so many places
I've been to, from Maine down to the south, from El Paso to San Fran, night
time is so much more quiet! anyway, that's my theory until proven otherwise
haha :)

~~~
BuckRogers
I've lived all over the world and I suspect it's a class thing. Downtown
Chicago people tend to talk over you nonstop with no regard for courtesy.
Where I've been in France and the rest of Europe, it's more what you'd expect
(a pause). In my rural midwestern working class background there tends to be a
pause, we didn't talk over one another. My wife's family is from Guadalajara,
were privately schooled and in the Mexican government's "political class",
they don't interrupt.

It's ingrained in me enough that if someone talks over me, I'll just stop
talking to them and subconsciously consider them to have a low standard of
manners.

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lcnmrn
That’s why any site should load in under 200ms.

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kuya
not so coincidentally, human conversation protocols (at a high level) look a
lot like some communication protocols:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_with_collision_detection)

