How do you end a conversation politely?
Almost nobody ends a conversation when they wanted to. Not you. Nobody. It has been counted.
What was counted
932 conversations, some between friends and family, some between strangers left to talk as long as they liked. Afterwards each person was asked in private when they had first been ready to stop.
Both people got the ending they wanted in 1.59% of conversations. Fewer than two in a hundred.
That number gets quoted as gloomy trivia. The half that gets dropped is the direction, and the direction is the whole point. In 46.83% of them, both people had wanted to stop earlier. In 9.52%, both had wanted to keep going.
Nearly half of all conversations are two people separately waiting for the other one to leave.
Why it happens
Saying "I'd like to stop now" sounds like a judgement, so people don't say it. They cannot infer it either, because the other person is hiding it just as carefully for the same reason. Both sides negotiate blind.
What leaving actually means
You may be carrying the idea that ending a conversation is something you do to someone. You can put it down. On the numbers, the person you are talking to has more likely than not been ready to go for a while.
That matters most before the conversation rather than at the end of it. A conversation you cannot get out of is expensive to start. Leaving being cheap is what makes starting cheap.
Ending one, in practice
In text, and here
All of that was measured face to face, where walking away is visible and costs something. In text it costs less. Leaving is easier, which is the good half. The other half is that silence is ambiguous, and that applies to the other person reading your silence exactly as much as it applies to you reading theirs.
Which is a reason to send the one line rather than going quiet. Not out of politeness. It is the only way either of you learns how the conversation actually went.
Where this comes from
Conversations almost never end when both people wanted them to, and the common failure is by a long way that they run too long — not that somebody left too early.
What the study actually did
932 conversations across two studies. In the first, 806 people described a recent conversation with a friend or family member and said when they had wanted it to end. In the second, 126 pairs of strangers talked in a lab for as long as they liked, then reported separately when they had each been ready to stop. Both people got the ending they wanted in 1.59% of conversations. In 46.83% both had wanted to stop earlier; in 9.52% both had wanted to keep going. On average people wished the conversation had been 56.01% different in length (study 1, intimates) and 46.03% different (study 2, strangers) from what it was.
What it doesn't show. Why any of it happens, or that a specific person wanted to leave. The first study relied on memory and on people reporting what they thought their partner wanted, which the authors flag themselves; the second fixed that but was a paid laboratory task where nobody had much reason to keep talking. Both were spoken, face to face. We have not found it measured in text, where leaving costs less and says less.
Mastroianni, A. M., Gilbert, D. T., Cooney, G., & Wilson, T. D. (2021). Do conversations end when people want them to? PNAS, 118(10), e2011809118 ·
10.1073/pnas.2011809118
