Periodic: A Monthly Blog Feature

An occasional review of items that caught our eye in BPL’s magazine subscriptions…

The impression that ours is a period of rampant rudeness is turned on its head by this letter to the “Modern Manners” advice column in Real Simple (August 2018):

The correspondent asks why her restrained phone conversation in a doctor’s office should be so annoying to others, but not a face-to-face conversation of two people in the same waiting room?

In a study published in Psychological Science*, Lauren Emberson, PhD coined the term “halfalogue”, to explain why the one-sided talking annoys so many people.  It seems that it is precisely that “one-sidedness” of the phone conversation that gets under our skin.  

Blame our innate curiosity. We can’t help being frustrated as we try to fill in the part of the conversation we can’t hear!  To compensate, we listen harder, resulting in the single voice being more intrusive.

*We don’t offer this periodical, but we do subscribe to Psychology Today.