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.

What awkward silence? Conversation lulls can be a sign of increased connection with our friends