#BookHighlights 💬 ‘Talk: The science of conversation’
Some time ago I started working as a conversational designer and in my search to find books related to designing bots, I came across with looots of readings related to human conversation and the different ways we have to interact with other people. And that’s how I made myself interested in this book that I found very intriguing and I would like to apply in this field.
So without further details, here are my highlights. Hope you enjoy it and find it as interesting as I did! 🙌🏼
☝🏼 Recommended, for ‘Friends’ fans: The script from Friends work well to help us understand the science of conversation. The scriptwriters juxtapose spoken turns in ways that throw into sharp relief the underpinning machinery of talk. Because a lot of the humor in Friends depends on clever conversational devices — not set-piece jokes or one-liners — audience laughter can be used as another useful tool for pinning down how talk works.
The conversational race track
There are different theories about when we learn to speak. Some say that we learn the language after we are born and that we are taught by our elders. Others assume that language is innate. There are different versions among this, but the strongest version is the Universal Grammar that Noam Chomsky holds. The theory of Universal Grammar does not say that all languages have a single grammar or that all speakers of any language know all grammars as adults.
No matter which theory of thought you follow, the truth is that conversation in general is a tacit knowledge that people have for interacting. We reveal it as we construct our turns, word by word, turn by turn, although we cannot articulate what we are doing.
“As talkers we know — tacitly at least — pretty much everything there is to know about talking. We know how to build a turn at talk. We know when to take a turn and when someone else is likely to finish their turn. We know how to keep the floor and what it means to interrupt. We know how to fix a misspoken turn. And we know how to use the gaze of our eyes, the position of our bodies, and the material environment to augment or replace speech. But we do not know how talk works scientifically”
Conversations recurrently open with three rapid, reciprocal, component pairs of actions:
1️⃣ The summons and answers (‘opening’)
2️⃣ The greetings and identification (depending on the relationship between the people involved, sometimes just the sound of the voice is enough for identification)
3️⃣ The initial inquiries (‘how are yous’)
☝🏼 “Harvey Sacks made a classic observation about ‘how-are-yous’ in a paper called ‘Everyone has to lie’. He was referring to the kind of social situation that requires a ‘fine, thanks, how are you’ response, not a long (happy or sad) answer to the question. Not everyone is the right person to receive the ‘true’ answer (example ‘I’m feeling lousy’ or ‘I’m so excited!’), but neither is every slot of the conversation the right place to say it.”
💬 You are the turns you take
Everybody can talk but of course not everyone has a psychology degree. It is very common to classify or stereotype other people by the way they speak and communicate. Many times all the information we have about that person are a couple of sentences. But luckily we have CAPD: Conversation Analytic Personality Diagnostic. And Elizabeth explains some of the most commons. Let’s see an example!
Friends: ‘The one with the Yeti’
In this scene, Elizabeth analyze the turns between Rachel, Monica and Danny, a new neighbor who just moved in.
After accidentally spraying him with insect repellent in the storage room, Rach & Mon go to knock on Danny’s door to apologize.
Generally, the preferred response to to an apology is an acceptance like ‘That’s alright’, often accompanied with phrases such as ‘no problem’. But Danny accepts Rachel’s apology by saying ‘okay’ (with no indexical term such as ‘that’s’). His acceptance is brief and is accompanied by closing the door abruptly, ending the conversation.
The scene concludes with Rachel & Monica concluding that ‘That guy is so rude!’. But what did Danny do to warrant being called rude?. He took one kind of turn and not another. Finally the scene ends with Rach & Mon showing the audience the correct way to responding to an apology.
CAPD#1: First movers 👉🏼 First movers say something unwanted or out of place or both. First movers are non-sequiturs and leave their interlocutor in a tricky position. So first movers can be detected across three turns at talk. in our CAPD a first mover can be diagnosed thus:
Turn 1: Unprovoked/unoccasioned/out-of-place turn
Turn 2: Calls out the problem with Turn 1
Turn 3: Treats the other as a perpetrator, not victim, of trouble.
CAPD #2: The mis-greeters 👉🏼 Mis-greeters say hello but their gaze, body position and head position, tells you that they would prefer that the speaker was another person.
CAPD #3: The non-transitioner 👉🏼 If you have ever been trapped in a conversation with the feeling that you cannot get a word in edgeways, you are probably talking to someone who does not give cues for transition between speakers.
There are a few more that you can find in the book. For ex. The passive-aggressive, The recruiter, The recruited, The ‘How-are-you’ subverter, or the non-questione, The recompleter & The recalibrator
😲 Breaking down some myths
Myth #1: Silence does not do anything. 👉🏼 The idea that taking a turn in a conversation requires processing time and producing process is the first myth the author tears down. Ex. From ‘Frozen’:
Anna: Does it look bad?
(2.0)
Kristoff: No!
Olaf: You hesitated.
In this example, Kristoff’s delay predict something about his upcoming response. pointing out the hesitation implies that Kristoff’s response, while it is the right one, is less genuine or sincere. He says ‘no’ because it’s the right or expected, not because he means it! And this suggests the genuine responses happen rapidly.
Myth #2: Do actions speak louder than words? 👉🏼 The notion that talk is secondary to something else — to action — forms the basis of many idioms, proverbs and phrases. The idea that people’s actions are a better indicator of character than what they say is perhaps surprisingly Universal. Actions do not speak louder than words. Words are actions. No talk is ‘small’, talk does big things.
Myth #3: Is communication 93% body language? 👉🏼 If actions speak louder than words, then it is what we do with our bodies — our faces, hands, gestures, eyes — that does most of the business of communicating.
“The fact that we have multimodal resources for interacting with others means that we can carry on a conversation with words over dinner while acquiring the salt with our bodies.”
There are also a few more myths that you will enjoy reading in the book. For ex. Do different cultures talk differently?, Are ‘ums’ errors? or Do women and men talk differently?
In the end…
Words matter. People care about the words they use when they communicate. evidence for the fact that words matter to speakers can be found everywhere. Indeed, people often draw attention to the selection of the words they utter, even as they utter them. Changing one word can make a difference.
👩🏽🦱 About Elizabeth Stokoe
Is professor of social interaction at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. She teaches social psychology, and also runs workshops in the UK and US with mediators, doctors, police and other professionals using her research-based communication training method called the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method.” She has spoken at the Royal Institution and at TEDxBermuda.
👀 Extra!
The science of analyzing conversations, second by second | Elizabeth Stokoe | TEDxBermuda 👉🏼 https://youtu.be/MtOG5PK8xDA
