Link: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs
这篇文章以“门把手”为喻，阐述了良好对话的关键在于创造和抓住“对话性可供性”（affordances），即提供和识别那些能让对话自然延续、深入的互动机会，而非僵化地扮演“提问者”（giver）或“宣告者”（taker）。文章指出，虽然“给予者”和“索取者”各有优缺点，但真正的挑战在于克服自我中心主义和对深层交流的恐惧，主动抛出能引发对方回应的“门把手”（如个人洞见、大胆观点），并敏锐地捕捉对方提供的线索，从而让对话像即兴表演一样充满活力，双方都能轻松地接过话头，共同推动交流向前发展。
原文
Or “Spiderman Is My Boyfriend”
Photo cred: my dad.
I used to perform in an improvised musical comedy show where we could burst into song at any time. You’d be doing a scene about, say, bringing your boyfriend to Thanksgiving for the first time and having to explain to your parents that he’s Spiderman, and all of the sudden the pianist would thunder out some chords and now you’re singing something like:
SPIDERMAN, SPIDERMAN
THAT’S WHO I’M DATING, MOM AND DAD
WILL HE EAT?
DO NOT ASK
HE WILL NOT REMOVE HIS MASK
Doing this on the spot is really hard, and the trick that kept us afloat was called “take-and-take of focus,” meaning that whoever was singing had to keep going until someone jumped in to take the spotlight from them, which should happen quickly and often. Though it’s nearly impossible to invent a whole funny song, you can probably fire off a verse, your teammate can come in with the chorus, and if you can do that twice and toss some harmony on top, the audience will go wild.
For me, learning take-and-take suggested a solution not just to songs about Spiderman, but to a scientific mystery. I was in graduate school at the time, running studies aimed at answering the question, “Do conversations end when people want them to?” I watched a stupefying number of conversations unfold, some of them blooming into beautiful repartee (one pair of participants exchanged numbers afterward), others collapsing into awkward silences. Why did some conversations unfurl and others wilt? One answer, I realized, may be the clash of take-and-take vs. give-and-take.
Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
It’s easy to assume that givers are virtuous and takers are villainous, but that’s giver propaganda. Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still. Takers can paddle for both sides, relieving their partners of the duty to generate the next thing. It’s easy to remember how lonely it feels when a taker refuses to cede the spotlight to you, but easy to forget how lovely it feels when you don’t want the spotlight and a taker lets you recline on the mezzanine while they fill the stage. When you’re tired or shy or anxious or bored, there’s nothing better than hopping on the back of a conversational motorcycle, wrapping your arms around your partner’s waist, and holding on for dear life while they rocket you to somewhere new.
Takers are especially valuable when you add more minds to the mix. Some of my research is about how turn-taking works differently in two-person vs. multi-person conversations. When it’s just you and me, taking turns is easy: you go, I go, repeat. When it’s you and me and Nina and Marlon, who should talk next? It’s often unclear, so we all stand around waiting for someone else to take their turn or to invite us to take ours. Givers try to salvage these situations by turning them into laborious seminar discussions (“Why don’t we all say what we thought about the movie?”). Takers, on the other hand, simply make conversation happen (“That movie sucked and anybody who liked it can fight me!”). When we’re all standing on the perimeter of an empty dance circle, takers are the martyrs who will launch themselves into the middle and do the stanky legg.
While takers deserve some redemption, givers deserve some scrutiny. On day one of Improv 101 they’ll tell you not to ask questions in a scene because it puts undue pressure on your partner. “Hey, what are you doing?” “Uhh I’m making things up in an improv scene.” Similarly, refusing to take the spotlight in a conversation may seem generous, but in fact can burden the other person to keep the show going. (“What’s up?” is one of the most dreadful texts to get; it’s short for “Hello, I’d like you to entertain me now.”) And asking your partner question after question and resenting them when they don’t return the favor isn’t generosity; it’s social entrapment, like not telling your friends that it’s your birthday and then seething that they didn’t get you cake.
Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting a Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique. And the way to do that, I think, is by adding a bunch of doorknobs.
When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.
What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has––how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread––and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).
There’s some recent evidence that what makes conversations pop off is indeed the social equivalent of doorknobs. You might think that the best conversationalists wait patiently for their partners to finish talking before they start concocting a response in their head. It turns out that we like people the best when they respond to us the fastest––so fast (mere milliseconds!) that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn. Abundant affordances allow for this rapid-fire rapport, each utterance offering an obvious opportunity to respond.
A few unfortunate psychological biases hold us back from creating these conversational doorknobs and from grabbing them when we see them. We think people want to hear about exciting stuff we did without them (“I went to Budapest!”) when they actually are happier talking about mundane stuff we did together (“Remember when we got stuck in traffic driving to DC?”). We overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk and so we stick to the boring, affordance-less shallows. Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off. That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”).
The main reason we don’t create more affordances, however, is pure egocentrism. When we just say whatever pops into our heads, we may think we’re making craggy, climbable conversational rock walls, when in fact we’re creating completely frictionless surfaces. For example, I’m thrilled to tell you about the 126 escape rooms I’ve done, but my love for paying people $35 to lock me in a room blinds me to the fact that you probably do not give a hoot. I may even think I’m being generous by asking about your experiences with escape rooms, when my supposed giving is really just selfishness with a question mark at the end (“Enough of me talking about stuff I like. Time for you to talk about stuff I like!”).
There is no known cure for egocentrism; the condition appears to be congenital. The best we can do is offer our interlocutors all sorts of doorknobs––ornate French door handles, commercial-grade push bars, ADA-compliant auto-open buttons––and listen closely for any that they might give us in return. The best improvisers, like the best conversation partners, have very sharp hearing; they can echolocate a door slightly left ajar, waiting for a gentle push from the outside.
So the next time you find yourself slogging through a conversation that just ain’t working, remember this little ditty:
GIVE-AND-TAKE, TAKE-AND-TAKE
IT’S ABOUT THE AFFORDANCES THAT YOU MAKE
DO NOT BE
A SOCIAL SLOB
USE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS
译文
或者说“蜘蛛侠是我的男朋友”
我以前参加一个即兴音乐喜剧表演，我们随时都可以唱歌。你可能正在表演一个场景，比如第一次带男朋友回家过感恩节，不得不向父母解释他是蜘蛛侠，突然钢琴师弹奏出一些和弦，然后你开始唱：
蜘蛛侠，蜘蛛侠
那就是我约会的对象，爸爸妈妈
他会吃饭吗？
别问
他不会摘下面具
即兴表演真的很难，而让我们得以继续的诀窍叫做“焦点轮流”，意思是唱歌的人必须一直唱下去，直到有人跳出来抢走他们的风头，这应该发生得很快很频繁。虽然凭空创作一首有趣的歌几乎不可能，但你可能可以快速唱出一节，你的队友可以接着唱副歌，如果你能这样做两次，再加一些和声，观众就会为之疯狂。
对我来说，学习“焦点轮流”不仅为关于蜘蛛侠的歌曲提供了一个解决方案，也为一道科学谜题提供了答案。我当时还在读研究生，正在进行旨在回答“对话是否在人们希望的时候结束？”这个问题的研究。我观察了无数令人惊叹的对话展开，有些对话绽放出美丽的交谈（一对参与者甚至在之后交换了电话号码），另一些则陷入尴尬的沉默。为什么有些对话能顺利进行，有些却枯萎了呢？我意识到，一个答案可能在于“轮流”与“你来我往”的冲突。
“给予者”认为对话是一系列邀请的展开；“索取者”认为对话是一系列声明的展开。当给予者遇到给予者，或者索取者遇到索取者时，一切都很好。然而，当给予者遇到索取者时，给予者给予，索取者索取，给予者感到不满（“他为什么不问我一个问题？”），而索取者则玩得很开心（“她一定觉得我很有趣！”）或者感到恼火（“我的工作太无聊了，她为什么一直问我？”）。
很容易认为给予者是高尚的，索取者是邪恶的，但这只是给予者的宣传。对话，就像即兴表演场景一样，如果停滞不前就会开始沉沦。索取者可以为双方划桨，减轻他们的伙伴产生下一个话题的责任。很容易记住当索取者拒绝把聚光灯让给你时那种孤独的感觉，但很容易忘记当你不想成为焦点时，索取者让你在夹层休息，而他们则占据舞台的那种美妙感觉。当你疲惫、害羞、焦虑或无聊时，没有什么比跳上对话的摩托车后座，搂住你伙伴的腰，紧紧抓住，让他们带你飞向新地方更好的了。
当有更多人加入时，索取者尤其有价值。我的一些研究是关于两人对话和多人对话中轮流方式的不同。当只有你和我时，轮流很容易：你来，我来，重复。当有你、我、妮娜和马龙时，谁该接着说呢？这通常不清楚，所以我们都站在那里等待别人轮到他们，或者邀请我们轮到我们。给予者试图通过将这些情况变成费力的研讨会讨论来挽救（“我们都说说对这部电影的看法吧？”）。而索取者则简单地让对话发生（“那部电影糟透了，任何喜欢它的人都可以来和我辩论！”）。当我们都站在空舞池的边缘时，索取者就是那些会冲到中间跳“stanky legg”的殉道者。
虽然索取者值得一些救赎，但给予者也值得一些审视。在即兴表演101的第一天，他们会告诉你不要在场景中提问，因为它会给你的搭档带来不必要的压力。“嘿，你在做什么？”“呃，我在即兴表演场景中编造东西。”同样，在对话中拒绝成为焦点可能看起来很慷慨，但实际上会给对方带来继续表演的负担。（“怎么了？”是最令人讨厌的短信之一；它的意思是“你好，我现在想让你娱乐我。”）而一个接一个地问你的搭档问题，当他们不回报时就怨恨他们，这不是慷慨；这是社交陷阱，就像不告诉你的朋友今天是你的生日，然后因为他们没有给你买蛋糕而生气。
无论是给予者还是索取者，都没有百分之百的正确，他们的冲突往往源于双方都坚持对方必须改变或灭亡。与其对我们的对话者进行审判，我们不如专注于完善自己的技巧。我认为，做到这一点的方法就是增加一堆“门把手”。
做得好的时候，给予和索取都会创造心理学家所说的“可供性”：环境中允许你做某事的功能。物理可供性是楼梯、把手和长凳之类的东西。对话可供性是离题、坦白和大胆的声明，这些都引人回应。与另一个人交谈就像攀岩，只不过你是我攀岩的岩壁，我也是你的。如果你伸出手，我可以抓住你的手，我们都可以把自己向上拉。也许这就是为什么一次真正好的对话感觉有点像漂浮。
那么，最重要的不是我们给予或索取多少，而是我们是否提供和接受可供性。索取者可以提供大而易握的门把手（“当情侣把他们的狗当孩子一样对待时，我有点毛骨悚然”），也可以不提供（“让我告诉你电影《必须爱狗》的情节……”）。好的索取会让对方也想索取（“我知道！我的朋友让我做他们雪纳瑞的教父，太疯狂了！”“什么？！有仪式吗？”）。同样，有些问题有门把手（“你觉得你和你哥哥为什么会如此不同？”），有些则没有（“你的祖父母还有多少人健在？”）。但即使是没有可供性的给予，也可以通过充满可供性的索取来回应（“我还有一个奶奶健在，我经常思考她所拥有的所有知识——如何养家，如何应对悲剧，如何制作巧克力西葫芦面包——以及我感到焦虑，想在她还在世的时候向她学习”）。
最近有一些证据表明，让对话活跃起来的确实是社交上的“门把手”。你可能认为最好的谈话者会耐心等待对方说完，然后才在脑海中构思回应。结果表明，当人们对我们回应最快时，我们最喜欢他们——快到（仅仅几毫秒！）他们一定在我们说完之前很久就开始构思他们的回复了。丰富的可供性允许这种快速的默契，每一次发言都提供了显而易见的回复机会。
一些不幸的心理偏见阻碍我们创造这些对话“门把手”，也阻碍我们在看到它们时抓住它们。我们认为人们想听我们没有参与的激动人心的事情（“我去了布达佩斯！”），而实际上他们更乐意谈论我们一起做的平凡事情（“还记得我们开车去华盛顿特区时堵车吗？”）。我们高估了深入交谈的尴尬，所以我们坚持无聊、缺乏可供性的肤浅话题。对话可供性通常需要说一些至少有点私密的事情，所以即使是双方最微弱的被拒绝的恐惧，也可能阻止对话的展开。这就是为什么当心理学家想在实验室中启动友谊时，他们会让参与者回答一系列需要逐渐增加自我披露的问题（你可能见过这被称为“导致爱情的36个问题”）。
然而，我们不创造更多可供性的主要原因是纯粹的自我中心。当我们只是说出脑海中冒出的任何东西时，我们可能认为我们正在建造崎岖、可攀爬的对话岩壁，而实际上我们正在创造完全光滑的表面。例如，我很乐意告诉你我玩过的126个密室逃脱游戏，但我对花35美元把自己锁在房间里的热爱让我忽略了你可能根本不在乎这个事实。我甚至可能认为我通过询问你密室逃脱的经历来表现慷慨，而我所谓的给予实际上只是自私地加上一个问号（“我谈论我喜欢的东西够了。现在轮到你谈论我喜欢的东西了！”）。
自我中心症没有已知的治疗方法；这种状况似乎是先天性的。我们能做的最好的事情就是为我们的对话者提供各种各样的门把手——华丽的法式门把手、商业级的推杆、符合ADA标准的自动开启按钮——并仔细聆听他们可能回报给我们的任何门把手。最好的即兴表演者，就像最好的对话伙伴一样，听力非常敏锐；他们可以通过回声定位找到一扇稍微虚掩的门，等待着来自外部的轻轻一推。
所以下次当你发现自己艰难地进行着一场不顺利的对话时，请记住这首小诗：
你来我往，轮流发言
关键在于你创造的可供性
不要做一个
社交懒汉
使用对话的门把手