Try to recall your last meaningful conversation. Perhaps you and a loved one were discussing how to divvy up household chores. Or maybe it was a work meeting about next year’s budget. Possibly you were debating with friends about who should be the next president, or gossiping about whether your neighbors Pablo and Zach are going to break up. As the conversation started, how did you know what everyone wanted to discuss? Did someone announce a topic (“We need to decide who’s driving Aimee to school tomorrow”) or did a focus emerge gradually? (“Hey, just wondering, did Pablo seem distracted at dinner last night?”) Once you figured out what to talk about, how did you intuit the conversation’s tone? How did you know if you should speak casually? If making jokes was appropriate? If it was okay to interrupt? You probably didn’t think about those questions, and yet they all got answered somehow. When researchers have studied conversations, they’ve found a delicate, almost subconscious dance that usually occurs at a discussion’s start.
This back-and-forth emerges via our tone of voice, how we hold our bodies, our asides and sighs and laughs. But until we arrive at a consensus on how a dialogue ought to proceed, the real conversation can’t begin. Occasionally, a conversation’s aims are stated explicitly (“We’re here to discuss this quarter’s projections”) until we realize, midway through, that people’s real preoccupations lie elsewhere (“What we’re actually worried about is whether there’re going to be layoffs”). Sometimes we cycle through various starts—someone tells a joke; someone else gets overly formal; there’s an awkward silence until a third person takes the lead—and, eventually, the conversation’s focus is tacitly agreed upon.
Some researchers call this process a quiet negotiation: A subtle give-and-take over which topics we’ll dive into and which we’ll skirt around; the rules for how we’ll speak and listen. The first goal of this negotiation is determining what everyone wants from a conversation. These desires are often revealed via a series of offers and counteroffers, invitations and refusals, that are nearly subconscious but expose if people are willing to play along. This back-and-forth can take just a few moments, or last as long as the conversation itself. And it serves a crucial purpose: To help us find a set of subjects that we are all willing to embrace.
The second goal in this negotiation is to figure out the rules for how we will speak, listen, and make decisions together. We don’t always explicitly state these rules aloud. Rather, we conduct experiments to see which norms will stick. We introduce new topics, send signals via our tone of voice and expressions, react to what people say, project various moods, and pay attention to how others respond. However, regardless of how this quiet negotiation unfolds, the goals are the same: First, to decide what we all need from this conversation. Second, to determine how we will speak and make decisions. Or, put differently, to figure out: What does everyone want? And how will we make choices together?
