Humans are "designed" for conversation

Humans are "designed" for conversation

Many people find it difficult to give a speech and it is not always easy to listen to one but we are all pretty good at holding a conversation. Why is this? Surely, delivering a monologue or listening to one should be easier than dialogue?

Think about it for a moment. We face all sorts of difficulties when we have a conversation. Here are just a few:

  • We tend to talk in short, obscure, fragmentary utterances and so listeners need to fill-in the missing information and interpret what we are saying. This means a listener must often wait a while for something to become clear or must interrupt to clarify a point.
  • We cannot plan a conversation ahead of time as we never know what our conversational partners may say or ask. A conversation has a habit of going where it wants to go and not where any of the participants wish to take it.
  • When speaking we need to consider our listeners and modify our use of language on the fly so it is appropriate to the context, our listeners level of understanding or in a way that does not offend them.
  • We need to decide when it socially acceptable to interrupt the person speaking - to come in at just the right moment.
  • We need to plan how we are going to respond, if at all, while at the same time listening and in a multi-party conversation decide who to address.

It shouldn't be easy should it? But like me, until recently, I suspect you have never given it a second thought.

If you are interested in a scientific answer then take a look at the paper Why is conversation so easy? by Simon Garrod and Martin Pickering. They say it's because the interactive nature of dialogue supports the interactive alignment of linguistic representations but I will leave you to make sense of that.

But the simple answer is that evolution has "wired" our brains for dialogue rather than monologue.

If we are "designed" for conversation - not for monologue then why do we insist on inflicting monologic lectures on each other?

Lesley Crane PhD

Snr User Experience Researcher and Consultant

9y

Fortunately I think that in some quarters of Higher Education, for instance, there is a move away from the mono-conduit teaching method towards a more integrated, interactional model. On conversation, David hits the proverbial on the head as ever. Everyday conversation is guided by implicitly understood 'social norms' which help us know when, for instance, it is appropriate to 'step into a conversation' with a conversation turn. It shouldn't be easy - heavens if you had to study how to have a conversation you'd probably never pass go - but we are 'wired' to act thus. A good example is a question-answer pair: if someone asks you a question (even a veiled one) you still somehow are compelled to answer it!

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Ronald L. Frencken

Senior Consultant at Arbo Unie

9y

And feel so relieved when anyone asks me an question !

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Ronald L. Frencken

Senior Consultant at Arbo Unie

9y

How true (in my humble experience) Giving a presentation at a congres still gives me creeps

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Peter Carrillo

Doctor of Management (Organizational Leadership)

9y

Perhaps that is why I enjoy engaging my students in dialogue during my lectures, it makes us all more comfortable.

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Cicilia Haryani

Corporate Development at PT DJARUM

9y

Then the question is How to make a conversation into action, and share with others what we had in a conversation before?

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