What to do when the conversation goes quiet
A pause is not a verdict. We found no study of what silences mean or of how best to end one, so this is the most lightly sourced page in the guide. Most of what follows is us reasoning from studies about something adjacent, and those parts are marked.
What a silence probably is
Go back one step
A silence often arrives a couple of turns after something interesting got dropped. Going back for it is cheap: "You said earlier you'd nearly not come — what was that about?" Asking for more about something the other person actually said is the move the question-asking research singles out, and people do far less of it than they could.
Or go down instead of across
Instead of finding a new shallow topic, ask something more personal about the one you have. This feels riskier. The evidence says it is not: given shallow or deep conversations, people found the deep ones less awkward than they had predicted. Given the choice, they picked shallow anyway.
There is more on why this works.
In text, quiet means something else
Typed conversation has a second kind of quiet: the other person simply stops. That one is genuinely ambiguous, and reading it will not help. They may be bored, or called away, or holding three conversations of which yours is the one they did not get back to.
An opener nobody answered at all is a different problem, and mostly settled before your message is read. A conversation that started and then stopped is the harder case.
Where this comes from
Picking up something the other person already said is the highest-return move available, and people do far less of it than they could.
What the study actually did
Studies of live conversations found that follow-up questions — those that ask for more about what a partner just said — predicted being better liked. When people were told to ask more questions than usual, the number used to represent a high rate was nine per conversation against a low rate of four.
What it doesn't show. Anything about silences specifically. We could find no research on what pauses mean or what best ends them; reading a pause as a dropped thread is our inference from the question-asking work, not a measured result.
Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., & Gino, F. (2017). It doesn't hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 430–452 ·
10.1037/pspi0000097
Going deeper on the topic you already have beats finding a new shallow one — and people consistently expect the opposite.
What the study actually did
Strangers were assigned to discuss either shallow questions or notably personal ones. The deeper conversations were less awkward than participants predicted and left them feeling more connected and happier than they had expected. Given a free choice of topics, people picked the shallower ones.
What it doesn't show. That a deeper question rescues a stalling conversation, which was never tested — the studies assigned topics up front rather than mid-lull. The finding is about mispredicting depth in general. Conversations were face to face or on video; a later study did put it in text, and it is set out on the page about getting past small talk.
Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367–398 ·
10.1037/pspa0000281
