Communications Patterns the Same in Couple, Strangers

Recently, more and more studies are beginning to demonstrate that people in couples may be no more successful at getting their point across to their companion as a stranger would be in the same circumstances.

Psychologists have discovered that the same thing holds true for married couples, for friends who are very close to each other, and for family members, as they exchange opinions on a topic, or try to convince their interlocutors of something.

It would appear that the level of closeness an individual has with someone else has little or nothing to do with improving the strength and efficiency of communication skills.

At the same time, people in long-term relationships, or who are already married, tend to think that they convey their message far more efficiently to the other than they do in actuality. Even those who consider themselves close friends exhibit the same behavior.

“People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers,” says University of Chicago psychology professor Boaz Keysar, PhD.

“That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the ‘closeness-communication bias’,” he goes on to say. The expert conducted the new study with Williams College colleague and psychology professor Kenneth Savitsky, PhD.

In order to simulate such interactions, the two created an experiment set up like a parlor game. Each round of participants featured two couples sitting back to back, and listening to each other's words.

Their job was to try and discern the meaning of the ambiguous phrases their partners were saying. The researchers analyzed the behavior of 24 couples in this manner, PsychCentral reports.

“A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting hot in here,’ as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead,” Savitsky says.

He is the lead author of a paper detailing the findings, which was published in the January issue of the renowned Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical. This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse,” the expert concludes.