People constrain their semantic associations when talking to both friends and strangers.

Abstract

During conversations, people face a trade-off between establishing understanding and making interesting and unique contributions. How do people balance this when deciding which concepts to reference, and does it matter how well they know their conversation partner? In the present work, participants made stream-of-consciousness word associations either with a partner or alone-simplified versions of dialogue and monologue. Participants made semantically narrower and more predictable word associations with a stranger than alone (Study 1), suggesting that they constrain their associations to establish mutual understanding. Increasing closeness (Study 2) or having a prior relationship (Study 3) did not moderate this effect. Thus, even during a task that does not depend on establishing mutual understanding, people sacrifice being interesting for the sake of being understood. Public Significance StatementAcross three experiments, we find that people make narrower semantic associations with another individual, verses by themselves, suggesting that people seem to sacrifice variability in language to connect with a partner. Who the partner is, a friend or stranger, did not change the findings. People often accommodate each other in conversations, and this article suggests they do so in another way: by making smaller topic leaps.