Conversation Mixer
Everyone has met the person who talks forever and calls it a chat. Mostly everyone thinks they are not that person.
When I talk too long, I'm excited. When you do it, you're rude.
So I built a way to visualise it. The sliders describe how one talks: airtime, interruptions, questions back, topic hijacks, bragging, volume, energy.
Start by choosing a preset. Then nudge the sliders at the bottom, watch how the flow moves around the quadrant. The map shows how the listener, i.e. the person on the receiving end might feel
Three minutes of talk
- ■ them
- ■ me
- ? question back
- ↩ topic hijack
- ★ status claim
- ✂ me cut off
- strip: how the listener feels
How the listener feels
What this conversation is
Not active right now
How “them” behaves
Under the hood
| Idea | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Shift response vs support response (Derber) | Topic hijacks, the Invisible feeling |
| Circumplex model of affect (Russell) | The listener map |
| Talking about yourself is rewarding (Tamir & Mitchell) | A plausible reason the monologue is so easy to fall into |
| Follow-up questions increase liking (Huang et al.) | Questions back, the Heard feeling |
| Social comparison (Festinger) | Status claims, which can leave the listener feeling Small |
| Surface acting (Hochschild) | The Polite feeling: looking attentive while feeling something else |
| Turn-taking (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson) | The timeline and the cut marks |
| A double standard close to actor–observer bias (Jones & Nisbett) | The quote at the top of this page |
Disclaimer: The weights are my guesses, and not based on any model as such. Not every interruption is rude 😉
References
- Derber, C. (1979). The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Individualism in Everyday Life. G. K. Hall.
- Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. PNAS.
- Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., & Gino, F. (2017). It doesn't hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking. JPSP.
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations.
- Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.
- Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language.
- Jones, E. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (1971). The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior. General Learning Press.