It’s usually easy to tell when silence is companionable and when it’s just downright awkward. But can you put your finger on why the exact same state can feel totally different depending on where you are and who you’re with?

A recent study from researchers at Dartmouth University in the US, published in Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society, has delved into this particular phenomenon, and their findings shine a light on the way we interact and enjoy conversations with the people we’re close to.

Previous psychological studies have found that people tend to report greater enjoyment in conversations when there are shorter gaps between remarks; another report has shown that when people listened back to recordings in which the gaps have been shortened, they tend to believe there’s a greater connection between the two participants (and to believe the opposite if the gaps have been lengthened). 

If shorter breaks in chatter are a sign that a conversation is flourishing, do longer gaps mean that it is floundering? And if so, why are some conversational gaps seen as beneficial and contemplative, like in a therapy session or a doctor’s appointment? In order to try to answer these questions, the Dartmouth researchers set out to examine conversations between strangers and between friends.

A pair of participants would sit down at a cafe table for a “10-minute unstructured conversation”, the study’s authors wrote, with a webcam recording the experiment. Once the conversation had ended, the strangers went off to two separate rooms to rate their impression of the conversation and then to watch the video back, all the while “rating how connected they remembered feeling to their conversation partner at each moment in time”. (Yes, this does sound a little bit excruciating.) Then, in the second part of the study, the researchers asked people who weren’t aware of the relationship between those chatting to rate clips on factors including “awkwardness, connection and non-verbal communication”.

They found that although long gaps (defined as lasting more than two seconds) were a sign of disconnection between the pairs of strangers, they had the opposite effect between friends, marking “moments of increased connection”. Plus, friends tended to have more of them in their interactions. The observers from the second part of the study seemed able to spot this connection too: they tended to only rate the long gaps between strangers as awkward.

Between strangers, a long gap tended to signal a change in the subject of a conversation (who among us hasn’t desperately scrambled around to find another topic to fill a looming silence?), but between friends, they provided spaces for reacting and reflecting on what was just said, the researchers wrote. They gave participants a chance to enjoy the other person’s words and look back on the memories they might be evoking.

“For people with a shared history, such as close friends, long gaps may simply be times when communication travels ‘inside the head’, as when reflecting on what was just said or mutually savouring past experiences,” they explained. This, they added, can be triggered by “a simple word or phrase” (an in-joke, perhaps, or a shared memory). We might, however, be more likely to remember the silences that “we enter clumsily and fail to exit gracefully”, the psychologists suggested, which could give rise to the “intuitive yet mistaken assumption” that all silences are negative.

When you’re with someone you’re close to, then, a conversational lull doesn’t mean a loss of connection – quite the opposite. Between friends, at least, it seems silence really is golden. 

Images: Getty