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Ever feel like you are so close with someone you can finish each others' sentences? Couples who have been together a long time often feel that way, as do close friends. And it may be true, at times, that people who are close to each other can communicate easily with each other. However, Kenneth Savitsky, Ph.D., and his colleagues recently published an article this month in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology indicating that sometimes the opposite can be true.
In the article, Savitsky and his colleagues wrote about what they termed a "closeness-communication bias": people commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends or their spouse than with strangers. This can cause the speaker to take for granted that the listener knows what they are talking about and fail to give them enough information for the communication to be effective. When people meet a stranger, they would automatically provide more information because they lack that assumption.
So the next time you are too tired to go out dancing with your best friend think twice about telling him or her "I don't really feel like going out tonight." You might mean "come over and hang out and watch a movie instead" but they might end up feeling rejected and assume they are all alone on a Saturday night. "The understanding, 'What I know is different from what you know' is essential for effective communication to occur," the authors write, regardless of whether that communication is a lecture to hundreds or an ordinary conversation between two people who are close.
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