You look around the room, desperate to find an escape from this boring monologue, but you can’t come up with a polite way to leave. Sigh. Stay put, choosing to endure the conversation rather than being rude and leaving.
He may have already had more than a hidden suspicion, this was true, but it is now supported by research: conversations rarely end when people want it, a new study has found.
The researchers conducted two smaller studies to find out the differences between how long the conversations between two people are and how long each participant wanted to go.
The studies were inspired by parties attended by study author Adam Mastroianni while at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Now a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard University, he said he is afraid to go to another party because he may get stuck in a conversation with someone and not have a polite way to end it.
Then he thought, “What if we are both stuck in this conversation, because we mistakenly think the other person wants to go on?
Looks like Mastroianni was on to something.
The first study asked 806 participants to remember their most recent conversation with someone. Almost 80% of conversations took place between a romantic partner, a friend or a family member.
Over 66% of participants reported that there was a point during their conversation when they felt it should have ended.
And they enjoy their conversations less, the study found. Participants who said that there was a time when they wanted to end the conversation enjoyed the conversation less than those who said that time had passed (4.7 out of 7 on a 7-point scale compared to those who they said they did not have an average of 5.66 out of 7).
The second study brought 252 strangers to a laboratory for their conversations to be observed by researchers. The couples were asked to speak for one to 45 minutes, then brought to separate rooms for interviews.
The results were almost identical to the first study, with over 68% of participants reporting that there was a point during the conversation when they wished it had ended. That group enjoyed their conversations less.
This part of the study allowed the researchers to hear both sides of the story, so they gathered more data about what each participant assumed about the other in terms of the desired duration of the conversation.
The researchers found that participants incorrectly estimated their conversation time desired by their partner by more than 63%, which shows that they had almost no idea about their partner’s wishes, Mastroianni said.
Being socially polite can keep people from leaving conversations when they want to, Mastroianni said. Talking to someone is like driving a car on the highway, he said. People can go down to any exit, but people can’t get over when they want to, because they could hit other cars or walls.
“You have to wait for the right time to go out and it turns out that the distance between those exits can sometimes be quite long,” Mastroianni said.
How to gracefully end a conversation
The study brings important points about having conversations with others and opens the door to learning how to engage in better discussions, said Linda Sapadin, a 35-year-old psychologist who specializes in communication in Long Island, New York. She was not involved in the study.
If you want a conversation to end, Sapadin recommended that you tell the other person that you need to leave and say something positive about your joint interaction.
If someone complained about a certain area of their life, she advised them to comment that they hope things will improve for them.
While most participants in both studies felt that there was a point in the conversation when they wished it had ended, some wanted the conversation to continue longer. If you tend to fall into this category, Sapadin recommended that you pay close attention to your partner’s body language to consider indications that you are ready to end the discussion.
If they roll their eyes, don’t make too much eye contact with you, or don’t respond to what you’re saying, it might be time to end the conversation, she said.
People who wanted the conversation to continue enjoyed it as much as those who said the conversation ended exactly when they wanted to, Mastroianni said.
“In my own conversations, I try to make the mistake of leaving a little earlier, understanding that you can talk to someone again,” he said.
In the future, Mastroianni said he is interested in researching when it is socially acceptable for people to leave a conversation and how conversations in groups of more than two people work.