What's annoying to you? Loud music from the apartment below, people walking around as you work? What about that guy talking loudly into his earpiece in line for coffee, sharing his half of the conversation with the whole cafe?
Our mobile devices let us talk on the phone anywhere we please – at work, at the bus stop, in a restaurant – but this also means that we end up overhearing the conversations that other people are having. This is especially true if you can work remotely, bringing your computer to a coffee shop or park only to end up frustrated as you listen to other people blab. These are public spaces, but shouldn't our personal information remain somewhat private?
That guy with the earpiece is annoying for more reasons than one, and there's an interesting psychological aspect at play here as well. It turns out that listening to one side of a conversation is actually more distracting than hearing both sides of a conversation, more easily stealing our focus away from our current task.
Listening to Halfalogues
In 2010, some interesting research was published by psychologists at Cornell University, which found that listening to one person have half of a conversation – known as a “halfalogue” - is much more distracting than listening to two people having a conversation.
Why does this happen? Keeping your focus on a task requires you to tune out distractions, and this becomes more difficult when listening to a halfalogue compared to a full dialogue.
The researchers suspect that this is because when we overhear a dialogue between two people we're able to predict the flow of the conversation, and we can then more easily ignore it because it won't surprise us and grab our attention. When we hear a halfalogue, on the other hand, we only get one side of the conversation so we're unable to predict what the speakers will say next. This ambiguity in the conversation keeps attracting our attention.
"Hearing half a conversation is distracting because we are unable to predict the succession of speech. It requires more attention," said Lauren Emberson, first author of the study. "We believe this finding helps reveal how we understand language in conversation: We actively predict what the person is going to say next, and this reduces the difficulty of language comprehension."
This is why it's easier to get annoyed and distracted when you're listening to a halfalogue. Even though you're hearing fewer sounds compared to a full dialogue (because you only hear half the words), you can't control your attention as well because half of the information is missing. This makes us automatically try to fill in the gaps, which is quite distracting when you're trying to focus on your own life.
The Need for Privacy in Public
The halfalogue effect is one example of how our modern lives are creating new challenges for us to understand and deal with. We need some degree of privacy in public spaces – so we don't have to listen to other people, but also so we can have our own conversations in private, whether to keep personal information secure or just out of consideration for other people.
That's why HeroX is hosting the Silent Speaking Challenge, a contest to create a tool that will allow people to speak privately in public situations. The goal is to be able to speak at normal volume but to only be heard within 3 feet. Like your own personal sound bubble, you'd be able to speak normally without fear of being overheard or of distracting other people.
If you've got some great ideas about creating a personal speaking bubble, including information about resources or related research, head over to the Challenge Page to learn more and get updates on the latest developments.
