Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

by Robin I.M. Dunbar

The pacing of conversations, the alternation of speaking turns, depends on very subtle cues, some of which are auditory (for example, the rise in pitch that occurs at the end of a contribution and signals that the speaker is about to stop and cede the floor to someone else), but others are visual (we tend to look away from someone while we are speaking to them, but flash them a glance just before we intend to stop speaking). More than this, however, it is probably the many visual cues we get while we are speaking to someone that matter: we can see the smile breaking on the face before we even finish our joke. Jokes, in particular, don’t work anything like as well in print as they do face-to-face: things we would find hilarious in a face-to-face conversation come across as stilted in the cold light of print. And our attempt at a witty reply is even less funny when our text or email is eventually read several days later (and the recipient can no longer remember what it was a reply to).