Consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room…. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.{4}
As Twain put it, you “can’t make head or tail of the talk,” and Emberson thinks this is the root of why cell phone conversations so effectively capture our attention—and subsequently annoy us. When you hear only half of a conversation, it’s hard to predict when the person will start talking again and what that person is going to say when he does open his mouth.
Part of the recipe for what makes something annoying seems to be its level of unpredictability. Completely random stimuli, we can tune out. We also have an easier time ignoring something that is steady, stable, and routine. But things that have some pattern, like the rhythm of a conversation, but are not predictable—grab our attention, whether we want them to or not.
Speech, especially, reels us in. You might think that when you’re having a conversation with someone your brain is focused on listening, on taking in what that person is saying and processing the information he’s imparting. You probably think you’re absorbing his words like a sponge and possibly preparing your response. In fact, your brain is focused on guessing what the person is going to say next. You may be able to finish your spouse’s sentences, but your mind wants to finish everyone’s sentences.
Humans are always trying to predict speech, says Liberman. It relates to an idea called “theory of mind,” which suggests that people can’t help themselves from trying to read into what other people are thinking. “It’s also pretty much automatic,” he wrote on his blog Language Log.{5} “If you’re not autistic, you can’t stop yourself from reading your companions’ minds any more than you can stop yourself from noticing the color of their clothes.” This applies to conversations, too, he says: if you’re listening to half of a conversation, “then filling in all this theory of mind stuff does seem to be unavoidable.”
Humans are pretty good at filling in the blanks. One experimental paradigm that tests our brains’ ability to predict language has to do with verbal shadowing. “The task is to listen to someone speaking and repeat what they say as soon as possible after they say it,” says Liberman. “There used to be people who would go on variety shows because they could do it almost as fast as the person was talking. They hardly seemed to be behind them at all. But everyone can do this to some extent with a lag of a few tenths of a second.”
As the speech becomes more unpredictable—or what Liberman calls “word salad—just random words spoken in sequence—the shadowing lag is very long compared to semantically incoherent but syntactically well-formed, nonsense material.” The shadowing rate gets better and better as the structure and the content of the speech become more coherent.
Theories about how our brains prefer predictability show up in music research, too. “What we know from a biological perspective is that the best surprise is no surprise,” says musicologist David Huron. “Large parts of your brain are oriented toward predicting what’s going to happen next. There are excellent biological adaptive reasons why brains should be so oriented toward what’s going to happen. An accurate prediction is rewarded by the brain. It’s one of the reasons why in music we have very predictive rhythms. The thing to say about music is that it’s incredibly repetitive.”
Emberson tested the idea that halfalogues distract us more than dialogues or monologues do by asking people to listen to half of a cell phone conversation while performing a task that required paying attention. To make the cell phone conversations as realistic as possible, Emberson and her colleagues gathered Cornell undergrad roommates, brought them to the lab, and recorded them chatting to one another on their phones. Then the researchers asked them to sum up the conversations in monologues. This provided the researchers with halfalogues, dialogues, and monologues to play to listeners.
Listeners were asked to perform two tasks: The first was to keep a mouse cursor on a dot that was moving around a computer screen—which requires constant monitoring. The other was to hold four letters in memory and hit a button any time one of the letters popped up on the screen and refrain from hitting that button when another letter popped up. These tasks required monitoring and decision making. “Both demand a great deal of attention, but in very different ways,” says Emberson. “We wanted to know if there was an attentional effect for the different types of speech.”
The distraction of the conversations caused an effect, the researchers reported in the journal Psychological Science.{6} During the mouse tracker task, people started to make more errors in the moments after the halfalogue recommenced. “When the person starts talking, your attention is really drawn in,” says Emberson. “It’s really automatic.” The errors occurred in the 400 milliseconds after the audible speech restarted. It almost seemed reflexive.
Would any blast of random noise derail us? To make sure the effect was specifically caused by understandable speech, Emberson filtered the halfalogue so that it was garbled. She says it sounded like someone talking underwater. You could tell it was speech, but you couldn’t make out the content. In that case, the distracting effects went away. When the halfalogue speech was incomprehensible, people didn’t screw up the task.
When people performed the letter-matching task, Emberson found that people did worse when they were hearing a halfalogue compared with a dialogue or a monologue, which may suggest that we’re more distracted by halfalogues generally. Emberson interprets the findings to mean that “there’s a cost when you can’t predict the succession of speech.”
Liberman generally agrees with the theory that halfalogues are more distracting than dialogues or monologues: “It’s extremely well-established, something that Emberson and company have assumed; when you’re getting lower-quality information coming in, you’re having to work harder to understand and reconstruct it.” Liberman is more cautious about whether the increased cognitive load from unpredictable content is solely responsible for the decrease in performance on the attention tasks.
That brings us to our second ingredient in the recipe for what’s annoying. Whatever it is—a buzzing mosquito, a pestering child, a dripping faucet, or half of a cell phone conversation—it has to be unpleasant. Not horrible, not deadly, just mildly discomfiting. Whether halfalogues are distracting because they’re rude or rude because they’re distracting, it’s rare to listen to someone else’s cell phone conversation and enjoy it. Some things are inherently unpleasant—the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard probably falls in this category—and others are more unique to the individual. Some people find being stuck in traffic unpleasant; others don’t seem to mind a bit.
Overheard cell phone conversations point to a third and final ingredient in the perfect recipe for annoyance: the certainty that it will end, but the uncertainty of when. To be annoyed requires some impatience on your part. The conversation could be finished in a few more seconds, or maybe it will stretch on for another hour—it’s the knowledge that the unpleasantness will come to an end soon that gives a particular situation an edge, a sense of urgency. That is, your annoyance is related to your sense of optimism. Your hope that it will be over amplifies every additional second that you have to put up with it.