Psychology: How do you know that people have a good relationship with each other

psychology This is how you can find out which people have good communication with each other

“Yes, I thought so too!” Or “Have you watched the new season yet?” When answers like these come straight out of the box, it usually means that the conversation is taking place on its own and there is a really good connection. We feel comfortable and know: we don’t have to pretend here. It is clear how important this flow of speech is in a dialogue as an indicator of the relationship between two people A series of experiments From Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA.

Study: Quick answers = great communication

Researchers at an elite university have discovered that a particularly short pause between speeches shows how good communication is between two people. “Our results show that the faster people respond to each other, the more connected they feel,” explains psychologist Emma Templeton, one of the study’s authors.

For the study, the team invited 66 strangers to talk about any topic. Women were supposed to have ten conversations with other women, and men the same number with other men. People then watched the video conversations and indicated how close they were to the other person and at what time. They should then talk to a close friend and then also evaluate the conversation in terms of the connections they felt in each moment.

Even strangers can sense when people have a good relationship with each other

The result in both rounds of experiments was: the shorter the pauses between conversational engagements, the more connected people felt with their counterparts. Overall, they rated conversations with their close friends more positively, but it was still clear that shorter chat breaks are a sign of a stronger sense of connection.

Even outsiders look at it this way: To test their theory, the researchers manipulated audio clips of conversations so that pauses in the conversation were longer or shorter than they were in the original conversation. Here again, listeners assumed a closer relationship between people who supposedly had shorter pauses in speech.

This is how short the optimal interval between the two speeches is

Does this mean that our relationship is only good if we constantly interrupt each other? No, according to scientists, we should let each other finish. By the way, the optimal pause time between two conversational contributions is about a quarter of a second. “When people feel like they can finish each other’s sentences, they close the 250 millisecond gap,” said study co-author Thalia Wheatley. “And that’s the moment something clicks between them.”

By the way, it’s not about how quickly we answer ourselves, it’s about how quickly we get an answer from the other person. If this period of time is short, we feel a particularly strong connection to that person and have a feeling that we are really on the same wavelength.

But don’t pull out the stopwatch the next time you’re talking to your girlfriend over a glass of wine. Because in the end it’s about the conversation flowing organically and us feeling comfortable together. Trying to force something doesn’t help here, just like in other relationships.

Sources used: home.dartmouth.edu, spektrum.de

Barbara