How to End a Conversation

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Think about your last extended conversation with a stranger.

Now, of course, this might have been a while ago.

Maybe you were at a party.

Maybe you took your kids to the playground where another parent struck up a conversation.

Did that conversation feel like it went on too long?

Was it too short?

Or did it end exactly where you wanted it to?

And how do you think the other person would answer those same questions?

Well, linguists have been studying this kind of thing for a long time,

and now a Harvard psychologist has just weighed in with two new studies

that found that conversations rarely end when both parties want them to end

and were terrible judges of when the other person wants to stop.

And asked to guess when the other person wanted the conversation to end,

the participants in this study were off by about 64% of the total conversation length.

This researcher paired more than 250 strangers and asked them to converse for anywhere from

one to 45 minutes, and then he interviewed the participants afterward.

And only 2% of those conversations ended when both conversationalists thought that it should,

and 30% of those conversations ended when just one of the participants was ready to quit.

So, Grant, it sort of suggests that this conversational dance that we do sometimes winds down with a kind of awkward shuffle in the end where we can’t quite figure out how to end it.

It’s kind of hard to stick that landing.

Yeah, yeah.

And I’m sure that power dynamics must be at play, right?

I wonder about the study being between strangers, whereas in a family dynamic or in a workplace, there are factors at play which would not be there between strangers.

You talking to your boss versus you talking to a sibling or to a child, that’s different.

Yeah, I was thinking about how, you know, conversations around the house are a lot more predictable.

A lot of times they’re just formulaic.

Or a conversation with a clerk at a store, it’s not really the same thing.

But in terms of talking with strangers or people you don’t know very well, I mean, maybe that’s why we like business lunches or meeting for coffee.

Because you have that added help of the empty coffee cup or the check coming.

And that kind of ends things up.

Right.

The wait staff does the work for you.

Yeah, that’s true.

You get a little help.

They’re kind of rushing you away from the table

so they can turn it and bring somebody new in.

But if you’re waiting in line, let’s say, for a sporting event

and there’s a stranger in front of you

and they strike up a conversation

and you’re not really feeling it,

what are the signals that you give

to let them know that you don’t really want to talk?

There are different levels of on the politeness scale, right?

And some of it’s body cues and not very much of it is obvious.

Just I’m not really in the mood to talk.

You probably wouldn’t even say that because even very politely put, that still sounds rude.

Well, Grant, now I’m getting very self-conscious about how do we end this little segment of the show.

I’d love to hear from our listeners about how they end conversations with people who just don’t want to go.

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send your polite ways of just getting off the phone or ending a face-to-face conversation to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.