Am I the only one who really hates when someone is constantly talking on the phone at 7 am in the train? These people are not even trying to lower their voice. Not only that, it’s also too much info. They talk about stuff as they would when they are in private. I would be ashamed if I knew that someone hears me talking like that. However, interestingly, it doesn’t annoy me as much when two people are talking directly to each other in the train. But how come?
The reason for this stress we feel, when some stranger is talking on the phone in a public but temporarily closed environment, is our subconscious. I remember once reading an article about psychology which explained this phenomenon (sorry, no reference here). Our subconscious tries to guess what the other person on the other line might have said, based on the talk we hear. This process is extremely complex and thus stress for us because of two reasons. First, you have to listen and analyze at the same time, i.e. there is a time lag. Consider the following conversation:
1: “Honey, did you already buy some milk?”
2: “(this is the part you don’t hear)”
3: “Ah, okay. Fine, then I’ll get some lettuce.. btw. what did Steve say about next weekend?”
Here you have to find out by yourself, that “honey” must have bought already some milk, but forgot to buy the lettuce. So the answer to the initial question “did you buy milk?” is not answered in sentence two (which would have been in a normal conversation), but in sentence three after you did the work of analyzing that sentence. Now you have the information to fill in the empty space of sentence two. So the conversation is linear, but not to you. Your mind goes nuts hopping from one sentence to another. It goes back and forth. Additionally, sentence three already contains the question “what did Steve say?”, which must be also processed to make sense in sentence five. As you can imagine, this whole process requires a lot of energy and attention.
The second reason is: you are left in the dark. You’ll never get the confirmation whether your guess was right or not. You are simply unsure whether you interpreted the conversation correctly. We assume that the duration of silence, i.e. how long the other person talks, correlates to the complexity of the unknown answer. The longer we don’t get information, the more cognitive work our brains have to do, since we assume that the time is related to the amount of information transmitted (in reality it isn’t). Additionally, the fact that the person is a stranger makes this process even more onerous. My thoughts could have been something like this:
1: “Honey, did you already buy some milk?”
“Who is Honey? Did she buy the milk? .. no, ‘already’. He was planning to go grocery shopping but also knew that there was a chance that she did that already. Is it a problem when they have two packages of milk at home? No, it must cost him some extra effort to go buy the milk, otherwise he wouldn’t call. At least the cost of going to the grocery store must be equal or bigger than the cost of calling her.
3: “Ah, okay. Fine, then I’ll get some lettuce.. btw. what did Steve say about next weekend?”
“Ah, good. Apparently she got the milk, but must have forgotten the lettuce. Salad? btw? Who is Steve and what is the connection between lettuce and Steve? What might ‘honey’ have asked Steve and what was his response? …
… and so on. Not only do we have to process these complex strings of thought, but we must also interpret other cues that person provides us: gender, age, clothing, gesture, tone of voice etc… But, we are and never will be sure about that. This is the difference to a friend talking on the phone next to you. You know him or her, probably also who the caller is and his connection to your friend. Simply you know that person well enough to interpret the conversation correctly, while listening only half of it.
People talking in the train are annoying because a) your subconscious works hard in order to compensate the lack of information and b) you don’t know whether the outcome of that is correct. That leads to stress. Consider these ‘people talking in trains on the phone’ as broken windows… that might be another blog post. However, other people talking on the phone in the train annoys me and I see it as an anti-social behavior. I try not to do it for the sake of peaceful commuting.
In the next post, I will tell you how you can turn this into extreme fun!
[...] Last post I wrote about how much I get annoyed when other people talk on the phone in trains. But how can you turn this into fun? … Actually, I’m a bit stuck. I thought about many ways to make this fun when I wrote the post last time. But, it seems that I have forgotten them all in the last couple of days and now I don’t know what to write. So, let me shortly write down the few things that I can still remember. [...]