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And when and how we break it
Although our language ability is our most powerful trait as human social animals, its absence — silence — is also surprisingly important for our social relationships.
Like the general complementary asymmetry between events and non-events in our lives — the alarm that rang or failed to ring, the illness we had or didn’t have, the path we took and the ones we didn’t take — our behavior consists of actions that we take and ones that we refrain from taking, and both can have meaningful consequences, including communicative effects.
Silence is probably most noticeable when it occurs in the presence of other people, although it is really unexpected silence and sometimes the duration of silence (long or short) that we notice. And what we expect is a result of our past experience — how we have grown and developed in our families and other cultures.
So it is only unexpected silence or the duration of silence that can have meaning for us, and that meaning depends on our experience with cultures of all sizes (and the people who animate them), from couples, to families, to larger groups, to whole societies. For example, in some cultures, adults are expected to do the talking and children are taught something like “don’t speak unless you are spoken to or it’s an emergency.” And there are some cultures…
