2 strangers in a room: Who sets the tone / topic of conversation?
"Imagine two people on a blind date. Who sets the tone? Who picks the topics? You might think it’s the more attractive person. The factors influencing conversational dominance are not what you might expect.
Joseph Manson, a professor of anthropology, and colleagues at UCLA, analyzed what happens when strangers are told to make conversation.
Manson recruited 105 college students, organized them into three-person, same-sex groups, and told them to talk about whatever they wanted. The topics they ended up covering were fairly predictable; most groups discussed their majors, their hometowns, their class year. Manson videotaped the conversations and used a few measures to figure out who was dominating the conversation: How many words did each person contribute? Who determined the topic? Who did more of the interrupting?
Then, they looked at how several factors affected conversational dominance. Age
had a small effect: Older students were slightly more likely to determine the topic of conversation. People from wealthier zip codes were less dominant, which Manson attributes to a kind of cool indifference. “It’s almost like they’re disdainful of new acquaintances,” he said. “They kind of disengage. They already have friends.”
Surprisingly, ... social status, and facial attractiveness had no significant effect on conversational dominance.
Similar experiments have shown that people will accommodate or even mimic a more attractive stranger’s conversational preferences and habits. If, for example, two women are paired for conversation, the less attractive woman often starts to mimic the vocal pattern of the prettier one.
Manson discovered one factor that was by far the best predictor of conversational dominance: students’ scores on a psychopathy questionnaire.
There are two facets of psychopathy, Manson explained. One, “primary psychopathy,” has to do with being callous and manipulative; the other, “secondary psychopathy,” is marked by impulsive and anti-social behavior. They’re “somewhat correlated,” he told me, but they lead to opposite effects: “People who are high on primary psychopathy dominate the conversation—they tend to be glib and charming.” People high on secondary psychopathy, meanwhile, are less likely to dominate." :eek2:
