Conversation
Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus of language teaching and learning. Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational interaction.
This article is about human communication. For other uses, see Conversation (disambiguation).Aspects[edit]
Differences between men and women[edit]
A study completed in July 2007 by Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona shows that contrary to popular belief, there is little difference in the number of words used by men and women in conversation.[9] The study showed that on average each gender uses about 16,000 words per day.
Between strangers[edit]
There are certain situations, typically encountered while traveling, which result in strangers sharing what would ordinarily be an intimate social space such as sitting together on a bus or airplane. In such situations strangers are likely to share intimate personal information they would not ordinarily share with strangers. A special case emerges when one of the travelers is a mental health professional and the other party shares details of their personal life in the apparent hope of receiving help or advice.[10]
Narcissism[edit]
Conversational narcissism is a term used by sociologist Charles Derber in his book, The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life.
Derber observed that the social support system in America is relatively weak, and this leads people to compete mightily for attention. In social situations, they tend to steer the conversation away from others and toward themselves. "Conversational narcissism is the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America", he wrote. "It occurs in informal conversations among friends, family and coworkers. The profusion of popular literature about listening and the etiquette of managing those who talk constantly about themselves suggests its pervasiveness in everyday life".[11]
What Derber describes as "conversational narcissism" often occurs subtly rather than overtly because it is prudent to avoid being judged an egotist.
Derber distinguishes the "shift-response" from the "support-response". A shift response takes the focus of attention away from the last speaker and refocuses on the new speaker, as in: "John: I'm feeling really starved. Mary: Oh, I just ate." Whereas a support response maintains the focus on the last speaker, as in: "John: I'm feeling really starved. Mary: When was the last time you ate?"
Artificial intelligence[edit]
The ability to generate conversation that cannot be distinguished from a human participant has been one test of a successful artificial intelligence (the Turing test). A human judge engages in a natural-language conversation with one human and one machine, during which the machine tries to appear human (and the human does not try to appear other than human). If the judge cannot tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. One limitation of this test is that the conversation is by text as opposed to speech, not allowing tone to be shown.
One's self[edit]
Also called intrapersonal communication, the act of conversing with oneself can help solve problems or serve therapeutic purposes like avoiding silence.