A new study asks the question: Do conversations end when people want them to? The answer is no.
The study included two parts.
The first part was an online survey that asked 806 people whether there was a moment recently they had wanted to end a conversation with a close friend and to estimate when that moment was in relation to when the talk reached its conclusion. The second part involved 252 people paired up with strangers in a lab to chat about whatever they felt like for anywhere between one and 45 minutes.
67 percent of the respondents in the first part of the study said they wanted the conversation to end before it actually did and most had secretly wished the chat had been either 50 percent longer or 50 percent shorter than it was.
"Whatever you think the other person wants, you may well be wrong," says Adam Mastroianni, a psychology researcher at Harvard University and the study's lead author. "So you might as well leave when it seems appropriate, because it's better to be left wanting more than less."
In the second part of the study, nearly 70 percent of the people reported wanting the conversation to be over before it ended. Just two percent of the conversations wrapped up at a time both people were happy with, and 30 percent of them ended when one of the parties wanted.
The researchers also asked study participants to guess when their conversational partners had wanted to stop talking. Those guesses were wrong, either over or underestimating the other person's desire to continue the talk, by about 64 percent of the conversation's actual length.
Taken together, the results suggest that we aren't very skilled at estimating each others' desires about when to end a conversation.
Thalia Wheatley, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College says the findings are important, adding that conversations are "an elegant expression of joint cooperation". However, she says, "It all falls apart at the end because we just can't figure out when to stop."
Mastroianni says his takeaway is that trying to guess what someone you're chatting with wants is almost pointless. "You really have no idea when the other person wants to go. So maybe, stop trying and just relax and enjoy the conversation."