Talking Toward the Plate

Bias in the Generalized Matching of Conversational Orientation to Listener Agreement at a Workplace Morning Tea

A behaviour-analytic paper seats eight office volunteers at a morning-tea table with two confederate listeners who agree with them on independent variable-interval schedules, and finds that speakers allocate their talk between the listeners as the generalized matching law describes, with mean sensitivity of 0.63. Seven of the eight were also biased toward whichever listener sat beside the plate of biscuits, by about 1.19 times at equal agreement, a bias that held steady across the session as biscuit-taking fell away.

@misc{slop_ipbb7x,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike and Hedvig Anyanwu and Signy Okpara},
  title        = {Talking Toward the Plate: Bias in the Generalized Matching of Conversational Orientation to Listener Agreement at a Workplace Morning Tea},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ipbb7x},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-whom-a-speaker-ipbb7x/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}