Confirmed: “Awkward silence” takes four seconds

People who experienced the awkward silence reported feeling “distressed, afraid, hurt, and rejected,” according to the paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“Even when people are not consciously aware that there is a silence, they immediately sense that there is something wrong,” Koudenburg says. “Experiencing conversational flow is probably more than just detecting a silence. There may also be other ways in which a conversation is not as smooth as you would want it to be.”