People have trouble accepting conversational bids, even ones that seem obvious. I’ve seen cases where person A asks person B the same dang question 10 times throughout a conversation and B just can’t seem to give a response that’s in any way related to the question that was asked. Often, I feel like humans just confabulate vaguely plausible looking responses in a conversation to be used as a filler until they can opine on what they want to talk about. A less cynical explanation is that people aren’t making the conversational bids they appear to be making e.g. a complaint about a problem is a bid not for solutions but for commiseration.
Still, I think there is some merit to the idea that people are actually kind of bad at parsing and/or responding to conversational bids. Which is why it’s striking when someone is laser-focused on what you say and gives cogent responses to the bids you make. Equally striking is being that someone focusing on understanding and following along with another person’s motions. It requires building up intense curiosity in what’s going on in someone else’s mind, and frankly it feels intimate. Would recommend trying it out.
People have trouble accepting conversational bids, even ones that seem obvious. I’ve seen cases where person A asks person B the same dang question 10 times throughout a conversation and B just can’t seem to give a response that’s in any way related to the question that was asked. Often, I feel like humans just confabulate vaguely plausible looking responses in a conversation to be used as a filler until they can opine on what they want to talk about. A less cynical explanation is that people aren’t making the conversational bids they appear to be making e.g. a complaint about a problem is a bid not for solutions but for commiseration.
Still, I think there is some merit to the idea that people are actually kind of bad at parsing and/or responding to conversational bids. Which is why it’s striking when someone is laser-focused on what you say and gives cogent responses to the bids you make. Equally striking is being that someone focusing on understanding and following along with another person’s motions. It requires building up intense curiosity in what’s going on in someone else’s mind, and frankly it feels intimate. Would recommend trying it out.