The connection we feel to others when we have a good conversation isn鈥檛 based solely on the content of the chat. Research shows that the faster people respond to one another during a conversation, the more likely they are to feel in sync.
Conversations involve turn-taking, with back-and-forth replies happening within a mere quarter of a second on average.
This response speed is key for feeling social connection, according to experiments by at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and her colleagues. The faster the response, the more people felt like they both liked and 鈥渃licked鈥� with their conversation partner, be they strangers or close friends.
Advertisement
In one experiment, Templeton鈥檚 team paired up 66 English-speaking strangers for 10 conversations, each 10 minutes long, with different people, and asked them to rate how much they enjoyed the experience. Conversations with shorter gaps and faster response times 鈥� including interruptions 鈥� were the ones that people said they enjoyed more and felt more connection in.
Faster response times corresponded with feelings of more connection even within the same conversation. When the participants were asked to watch recordings of their conversations and continuously rate how connected they felt to their partner throughout, they rated moments with faster responses as ones that felt more connected. In a separate experiment, the team found this also applied to conversations held between close friends.
The team also asked people to listen in on conversations they didn鈥檛 participate in. They perceived conversations with shorter response times as being more connected. When Templeton鈥檚 team played audio clips of conversation but artificially manipulated the response times, people listening in on these conversations reported that the participants seemed more connected in conditions where the response times had been shortened to one-fifth of their original length rather than untouched or doubled.
Because turn-taking in conversation takes fractions of a second, fast responses are probably not under our conscious control and require us to predict and anticipate where our partner and the conversation are going, says Templeton.
鈥淭he only way that you can respond really quickly is by really paying attention to what your partner is saying and listening to them and caring about them,鈥� she says.
How quickly we respond in conversation can thus act as a signal of how connected we are to the other person, she says.
The findings underline the idea that much of our behavior can carry social meaning, says Templeton. 鈥淭here are things that we鈥檙e doing with each other that we don鈥檛 even notice and maybe don鈥檛 even think matter [that] play this role in signalling when we鈥檙e connecting to each other.鈥�
PNAS
