![]() In person, too, modern life is filled with the potential for awkwardness. Read: Are you sure you’re not guilty of the “Millennial pause”? And as video communication becomes more common in work and social life, people are likely encountering more of these awkward silences than ever. And in a recent study, she confirmed her hunch: Videochatting throws off our conversational rhythms, making it unclear whose turn it is to speak and leading to more frequent, drawn-out pauses. She’d wondered whether stilted virtual meetings were awkward in part because of the technology itself. That’s especially true on Zoom, according to Boland, the University of Michigan professor. Not every silence is a snub, though most conversations don’t flow perfectly. But by the time the response delay reached 700 milliseconds-still less than a second-subjects started perceiving the friend as agreeing begrudgingly, even if they didn’t say anything of the sort. In a 2013 study, participants listened to recordings of someone asking a friend for help with a small task if the friend replied within 500 milliseconds, researchers found, the subject viewed them as eager to help. Disjointed conversations, meanwhile, tend to make people feel rejected. Studies have found that smooth conversations-those free of pauses and filler words like uh-can boost people’s self-esteem and sense of belonging, creating a feeling of collective harmony. For most participants, that came after only one second.Ī hatred of awkward silences could also derive from overthinking them, wondering if they signal some displeasure or lack of interest from the other party. In one study, a researcher tried to measure what she called the “standard maximum silence,” the longest lull people can typically tolerate before they begin to itch to say something. But sometimes we fall out of step-and if that disjunction lasts for too long, we tend not to like it. Humans are usually pretty good at syncing their response times with those of their conversation partner some researchers believe that our brains actually fire relevant neurons at a rate synchronized to the other person’s speech. To be fair, some distaste for mid-conversation silence is cognitively natural. “After three million years,” he wrote, “mankind is at last running out of things to talk about while eating.” In 1978, a writer for Baltimore’s Evening Sun claimed that pauses in dinner talk across the United States were growing longer, a trend that might represent a permanent collapse of human discourse. The Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck complained in 1896 that “the silence of many … brings dread to the mightiest soul.” A 1947 editorial lamenting the quiet of crowded elevators even called for “good wholesome inter-elevator entertainment like movies or a speech on each ride.” For decades, people have worried that awkward silences are somehow worse than just awkward-that they’re wrong. T he fear of conversational lulls has a long history. We might even find that they give us the space to be more intentional about what to say next. Though awkward silences are an inherent part of daily life, people really wish they could escape them: Abundant books, YouTube explainers, and wikiHow tutorials advise people on how to keep conversation flowing uninterrupted at parties, in meetings, or on first dates.Īnd yet, if these pauses are unavoidable, we should probably learn to live with them. It doesn’t help that many of us exited pandemic lockdown to find that our social skills had atrophied. And now modern communication technologies such as Zoom, Boland’s research suggests, beget particularly inelegant conversations. We interact with both strangers and acquaintances-with whom we’re likely to have some clumsy back-and-forths-at a rate that would have been unheard-of before people flooded to cities and travel grew far easier. Uncomfortable silences have always existed, but in many ways, they’re harder to avoid today than ever before. We are alert to the moment rhythm ruptures, like when someone loses the beat in a karaoke performance. It helps, at least somewhat, that Boland knows the reason these breaks tend to feel cringey: They disrupt the conversational volley of call-and-response that usually comes to people naturally. When there’s a pause, no one seems to know whose turn it is to speak. She’s a psychology and linguistics professor at the University of Michigan, and like many of us, she’s been spending a lot of time on Zoom calls over the past few years-and seemingly always dealing with internet lags and people fumbling to mute and unmute their mic. A t this point, Julie Boland is resigned to awkward silences.
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