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The secret to having a good conversation lies in a mathematical pattern called “pink noise”, according to a new study that may help inform what makes a good first date.
While conversation topics, ideas, and words do matter when it comes to building closeness, research shows the way chats flow and shift from one moment to the next plays a significant role as well.
When two people discuss perfectly aligned opinions, the conversation can become boring. But when there’s more pink noise, it can be more enjoyable.
Pink noise captures fluctuations in speech patterns such as alignments in word choice during a chat.
It refers to how speakers move between staying on the same wavelength and introducing new ideas, without becoming too predictable or losing track of each other’s ideas.
“Speakers remain aligned for a while, diverge as one introduces something new, then realign as the other picks it up and develops it further,” researchers elaborate about pink noise in the latest study.
Researchers trained an AI model to analyse thousands of real-life two-people conversations, including nearly 1,600 video calls between strangers, speed-dating chats, podcasts with two co-hosts, and chats between friends.
The AI analysed the transcripts of the conversations to look for pink noise patterns. It particularly measured how closely what one person said was related to what the other said next. Researchers assessed how this similarity changed throughout each conversation. They then probed whether the pink noise strength was linked to how much people enjoyed their conversations and how connected they felt with each other.
Speed-dating pairs who expressed an interest in seeing each other again seemed to display stronger pink noise patterns than those who didn’t match, the study found.
Researchers also prompted Anthropic’s Claude AI to produce both enjoyable and unenjoyable conversational scripts.
They found that enjoyable scripts contained more pink noise, likely stemming from the model’s ingestion of human-authored text.
Overall, the new research suggests that pink noise is a key ingredient of a good conversation. However, researchers caution the study is limited because it is observational and doesn’t prove pink noise always leads to better conversations.
They say more research about the role of pink noise in conversations may “allow for the development of more human-like artificial conversation agents”.