"It shows I'm engaged"

Start with the belief that seems strongest, because there's good evidence for half of it.

Emma Templeton and colleagues, in 2022, had pairs of friends and pairs of strangers talk, and asked them afterwards how connected they'd felt. The thing that predicted it, in both friends and strangers, was speed of response. Conversations with faster responses felt more connected. Within a conversation, the moments that felt most connected were the moments with the fastest responses. And it was the partner's speed that mattered. People felt connected in proportion to how quickly the other person came back to them, not how quickly they came back to the other person. The timescale was under a quarter of a second, which is too fast for conscious control, and the researchers argued that this is what makes it an honest signal. Outsiders listening to the recordings used the same cue. Faster conversations sounded more connected to them too.

So you're right that speed signals engagement, and right that people feel it. What I'd ask you to look at is what "fast" meant in that study. It meant a short gap after the other person finished. A quarter of a second, a fifth, less. Not a reply that started before the finish. A jump is a different thing, and I think the difference is the whole of this book.

Tanya Stivers and ten colleagues, in 2009, measured turn-taking in ten languages, from large world languages to small indigenous ones, and found the same pattern everywhere. People avoid overlapping talk and they minimise silence between turns. Every language did both. The average gap between turns varied a little from one language to another, but within a quarter of a second of the overall mean, and nowhere was overlap the norm. The system, in every culture they looked at, is one person speaks, then a very short gap, then the next.

Put the two studies together and you get the distinction I want you to hold. Fast is after the finish. Fast is the quarter-second gap that Templeton's participants felt as connection. A jump isn't fast. It's early. It happens before the finish, in overlap, in the one place that every language avoids. And I'd suggest, though this is my reading and not a finding, that the signal it sends is close to the opposite of the one you mean. A quick reply says "I was with you to the end". A jump says "I'd stopped needing you to get there".

You're engaged. I believe you. The question is whether the other person can tell, and the evidence says they read engagement from the gap, and a jump has no gap.

There's a practical consequence that I think is good news. If you're a jumper, you're already fast. The reply is ready before the finish. All that has to change is that it waits a second and then arrives in the gap, and in the gap it does everything you wanted the jump to do. It says you were with them. It says you're quick. The engagement you feel finally gets delivered, to the one place the other person can receive it.