Re:When we take turns speaking, we chime in after a cultural...
by cosarara97 on Monday January 25, 2016 @12:58PM
(#10968685)
Looking at the data, it is not that people are reacting in 7ms, but that people sometimes start talking before their partner has finished, and the mean ends up at 7ms. It seems that the Japanese are more prone to interrupting others:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F2.expansion.html
Agreed completely. Given the scale, and the mention that the average conversational segment lasts 2 seconds, 7-470ms seems like a major difference.
It also doesn't seem like "the minimum human response time to anything", as the article quotes, if it has that much variation. Humans across all cultures can react far faster than 200ms.
> And growing up in Europe and moving to North America I can definitely feel that the "polite" amount to pause in a conversation here feels way longer, it might be small in terms of milliseconds, but if you are used to, say, 50ms, having to pause for 200ms is very, very noticeable
I've had the same experience in reverse: if you've come to expect longer conversational pauses, short ones give the conversation a very different tone.
And on the flip side, the necessary pause can grow noticeably shorter between people who know each other very well.