Difficult conversations as self-regulatory conflicts

Why do people fail to initiate important but difficult conversations? The dominant explanation in extant literature is that people are overly pessimistic about the outcomes of having these conversations. From this perspective, motivating conversational engagement should be as simple as correcting this misperception. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that people still delay having conversations they expect will be more beneficial than costly, suggesting the pessimism account may be incomplete. We address this puzzle by proving the first empirical test of a self-regulatory account of difficult conversations. We argue that difficult conversations often involve both expecting positive outcomes following a conversation and a negative experience while having it. Like other self-regulatory conflicts—such as going to the gym or eating healthily—initiating difficult conversations involves choosing an uncomfortable, short-term experience to obtain a positive, long-term outcome. Across three experiments with U.S. adults (online, university lab; N = 976), we show that conversational decisions are similarly sensitive to time: people are more willing to initiate conversations in the future (vs. now). However, it is not the case that people want to put off conversation generally because this effect is specific to conversations for which the benefits are expected to outweigh the costs. Furthermore, people are aware of this self-regulatory dynamic: they are willing to use costly commitment devices to get themselves to have the conversation. In sum, we provide the first empirical test of a self-regulatory account of difficult conversations, highlighting a new mechanism driving conversational avoidance.