People spend most of their days talking to other people (at least, they did before the pandemic happened). How do people know when to stop talking? They don’t: most conversations end when neither person wants it to end. It turns out that people almost never want to talk for the same amount of time and people are really bad at guessing when their partner wants to go, which turns conversations into complicated coordination games in which both sides typically lose.
Published in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e2011809118
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