I met them on a dating app. The online chats were nice, we seem to have a lot in common, they don’t take too long to reply. Saturday afternoon, I’m standing in front of the café waiting. They arrive, it’s the usual back and forth “sorry the U8 was a nightmare”, “let’s sit outside”, “oatmilk cappuccino, thank you”. Favorite Berlin clubs, astrology, non-monogamy, and suddenly – silence. Suddenly, I am very aware of my surroundings, suddenly, I can feel sweat building on my forehead. Suddenly, this situation is unbearable. Someone has to say something, anything. But they don’t. And neither do I. That’s it, they realized I’m a weirdo, the vibes are off, there will be no second – “date?” They smile and offer me the shriveled little dried fruit. Wait, were these few seconds of silence… not a big deal?
Although silence is an ever-present part of human communication, there is a conventionally agreed-upon adjective to describe it: awkward. Why do we experience discomfort in an interaction when arguably, there is simply nothing happening? Professor Elliott Hoey of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how people arrive at and deal with silences. Paddy Lehleiter sat down with him to ask why CA seems to be a useful tool to look at the understudied phenomenon of silence.
Conversation Analysis is a research method as well as an academic discipline that came out of the work of Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in the 1960s. CA researchers seek to uncover the workings of human interaction by looking at a multitude of phenomena, such as turn-taking (how speakers structure a conversation in regards to who gets to talk) and sequence organization (how units of talk are organized to achieve specific actions). To do so, analysts work with transcripts of naturally occurring interactions between people. CA has proven to be a useful tool to give insight not only into the structuring of conversations, but also into social categories such as class, gender, and race. Taking a constructivist approach, CA researchers describe how people themselves (re)produce social norms, rules, and values as well as how people find ways to break out of them.
FURIOS: One could assume that if there’s silence in interaction, there is nothing happening. Is that true?
Elliott Hoey: From a research perspective, it is clear that there’s always something going on. It is true, though, that for people in an interaction, it can feel like nothing. We usually delete silences from our record. Looking at silence with the tools of CA – measuring the seconds and analyzing it with regard to what is going on in the interaction – allows you to excavate and recover a lot of meaning that is transported during moments where no one is talking. At the same time, what I find cool is that the meaning of a silence, when it is felt, is obvious to the people in the conversation. In a phenomenological sense, the silence itself is awkwardness.
F: Why can silence feel so uncomfortable?
EH: I think essentially, Christian Heath got it right in his work on embarrassment in 1988: It is not just that you’re in a situation where you’re unsure what to do, or even unsure of what exactly is happening. It is that this uncertainty is happening in front of another person. So there’s this shared nakedness in the perceived absence of a particular action where you both feel like there should be one. This can implicate a lot relationally for the people in the interaction. It is easy to go from we are not talking about anything to we are not supposed to not talk about anything to we have nothing to talk about and that shows something is wrong with this relationship.
F: So you would say looking at silences can give us insights into the workings of social relationships?
EH: I do think so. Harvey Sacks illustrated how the achievement of silence is a powerful and remarkable thing: The ability to exist with someone and not have the need to talk. Obviously, this depends on the relationship. When you first meet someone, you go on a date, and the date is supposed to be made up of continuous talk. But finding yourself in a relationship with someone where you do not have this pressure for talk having to be continuous, and you don’t feel uncomfortable about silence: That is a relational achievement.
F: What are possible limitations?
EH: Whoever I talk to, people are always interested to get to the bottom of awkward silences and embarrassment. I built a collection of cases of so-called embarassables together with other CA researchers because this phenomenon hadn’t really been looked at since Heath. It is worthwhile, but it is definitely hard to get at from a CA perspective, principally because we don’t impute psychological states on people. We try to figure out how the participants themselves create a context and common ground. So we would try to find interactional indicators of embarrassment and awkwardness, such as specific gaze behaviour, actions like ›picking up a cup and drinking‹, which are often not that clear-cut.
F: I would argue that we could get much closer to answering complex questions about human sociality if the boundaries between scientific disciplines and approaches were softened. Would you agree?
EH: Yes, when I draft PhD proposals with my students, one of the things that I find helpful to think about is: What are the testable hypotheses that are generated from this? In CA, you are making real claims about how the world operates and how people do sociality. A perk of the approach is that it is so technically rigorous. By its nature, it makes you look at the smallest details in a transcript in a very precise manner. This differentiates CA from other methods of the social sciences like discourse-analytic perspectives, interactional sociolinguistics or ethnography. But to continue with these hypotheses on embarrassment that can be concluded from my research on lapses, you could turn to more psychological methods. You could hook people up to monitors to test for bodily signs of embarrassment, such as sweating and increased heart rate, which would be continuing the research with a different approach to arrive at insights about what exactly embarrassment is from different perspectives.
F: Since spending so much time studying silence, do you perceive silence differently in your own interactions?
EH: There’s one phenomenon that I recognize more now: Making the emergence of silence explicit as a resource to get out of the discomfort it can cause. It is quite common, like saying “well, this is awkward”. I do it too, in a way: When I’m in front of the classroom and none of the students say anything, I break the silence by saying: “I wrote a book about silence, so I can stay silent for a very long time”.
We sit on the balcony, eating dried fruit in silence. After a while, they look at me. “Remember our first date?”
