Feb 27, 2018 By: yunews
Dr. Bruno Galantucci, associate professor of psychology, and Benjamin Langstein 鈥15YC co-authored an article (along with Gareth Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania) titled 鈥淐ontent deafness: When coherent talk just doesn't matter鈥 in .
The authors begin by saying that common intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in face-to-face conversation, they diligently monitor the coherence of the messages they exchange.
However, their research shows that, contrary to this intuition, people often fail to notice cases of blatant conversational incoherence.
They had 30 participants engage in spontaneous face-to-face conversations with a confederate who, eight minutes into the conversation, uttered the nonsensical sentence 鈥渃olorless green ideas sleep furiously.鈥 They had the confederate utter the sentence with a clear voice when their c0-participants were silent. A minute later, the conversation ended, and participants were asked if they had noticed the sentence. Remarkably, only 10 participants noticed.
This newly uncovered phenomenon鈥攚hich they labeled content deafness鈥攃orroborates and extends previous findings with online instant messaging. 鈥淭hese findings,鈥 explained Galantuci, 鈥渄emonstrated that that people engaged in online instant messaging did not detect the presence of messages which were obviously incoherent. In one study, these messages were generated by . In the other, they were generated by us and inserted in the conversation through the server.鈥
