Being close to spouse doesn’t help communicability

LONDON - If your spouse does not understand you, the simple explanation is that you are too close to him.

Psychologists believe that when two people know each other too well they assume too much shared knowledge. Their language becomes dangerously ambiguous.

This “closeness communication bias” can lead to long term misunderstandings, rows and even relationship problems, they believe, the journal of Experimental Social Psychology reports.

The research by University of Chicago and Williams College in Massachusetts in the US, found that often couples and good friends communicate with each other no better than they do with strangers.

Sometimes, they are clearer with strangers because they assume no common knowledge, according to the Telegraph.

“People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers,” said Boaz Keysar, study co-author.

“That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate. Your language can become so ambiguous. The brain becomes lazy. But it can backfire and the misunderstanding can lead to rows in the future.”

Keysar, who said he carried out the work to tell his wife that some things she thinks are clear are not always clear, and the team tested the theory on a group of married couples.

The spouses sat in chairs with their backs to each other and tried to discern the meaning of each other’s ambiguous phrases.

Researchers used phrases common in daily chats to see if the spouses were better at understanding phrases from their partners than from people they did not know.

The spouses consistently overestimated their ability to communicate, and did so more with their partners than with strangers.

Kenneth Savitsky, Keysar’s colleague, said: “A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting hot in here,’ as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead.

A similar experiment with 60 Williams College students showed that the phenomenon also applies to close friends too.