14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists say that, oftentimes, members of a serious relationship, or spouses who have been married to each other for years, cannot convey their message clearly enough in an argument. As such, their partner does not really understand what they are trying to communicate.
This is the same thing as if two complete strangers were trying to talk to each other. This type of behavior appears regardless of the fact that some have been together for at least decades.
In the recent investigation, researchers also learned that the same type of communication pattern holds true for very close friends as well. It would appear that, in some cases, people simply cannot convey their intentions as clearly as they want to, or believe they had.
“People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers,” says University of Chicago professor in psychology Boaz Keysar, who is an leading international expert on communications.
“That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the ‘closeness-communication bias',” he adds, quoted by Science Blog.
A series of 24 married couples were asked to participate in a new series of parlor game-like experiments, which were designed by Williams College psychology professor Kenneth Savitsky.
“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.
“Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical,” the expert adds
“This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse,” he goes on to say, adding that only some couples were on the same wavelength at all times.
He is also the lead author of a new paper detailing the findings, which is entitled “The Closeness-Communications Bias: Increased Egocentrism among Friends versus Strangers.”
The researcher is published in the January issue of the esteemed scientific Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“Our problem in communicating with friends and spouses is that we have an illusion of insight. Getting close to someone appears to create the illusion of understanding more than actual understanding,” adds scientist Nicholas Epley.
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of behavioral science was a coauthor of the new journal entry.