Most people assume habits like this come from enthusiasm. Someone mentions a rough flight and another person jumps in with their own delayed-flight story, and the natural assumption is that they’re relating, proving common ground, showing they understand.
That assumption is generous, and according to research on why this happens, it’s usually wrong. The habit even has a name, given by someone who spent years listening to exactly this kind of exchange happen in real time, one ordinary dinner conversation after another.
What years of listening to ordinary conversation actually showed
At Boston College, Charles Derber teaches sociology, and the research behind his book The Pursuit of Attention grew out of studying how people actually respond to each other in casual talk, not how they think they respond. What he found was a repeating pattern: most replies fall into one of two categories, a shift response that redirects the spotlight back to the speaker, or a support response that keeps it on the person who was originally talking.
A shift response is the “that reminds me of the time I” move: technically connected to what the other person just said, but functionally a redirect of attention toward yourself. It doesn’t have to be rude or even conscious. It’s often just the fastest bridge between two people’s need to be heard, and in that exchange, one of the two people usually loses.
Derber’s own term for the underlying pattern was conversational narcissism, and the label sounds harsher than the behavior actually looks in practice. Nobody involved is usually being cruel. Most shift responses are dressed up as connection, a way of saying I know exactly what you mean because this happened to me too. The trouble is that the sentence which follows almost never returns to the original story. It becomes a new one, and the floor stays changed.
Why this quietly costs something, even in a good conversation
The habit is easy to dismiss as minor, a small tic rather than a real problem, especially coming from someone who otherwise seems genuinely interested in other people. But research on group conversation backs up something Derber’s work already suggested: unequal attention has a measurable cost, and not only to the person who feels unheard.
A 2010 study led by Carnegie Mellon researcher Anita Woolley, working with a team at MIT, tested 699 people split into small groups of two to five and had them work through a wide range of tasks: visual puzzles, negotiations, brainstorming sessions, short games, and a complex design assignment. Across all of it, the groups showed something the researchers called a collective intelligence factor, a general ability to perform well together that predicted around 30 to 40 percent of how a group did on any given task. Individual IQ, whether averaged across the group or taken from its smartest member, barely predicted anything.
What did predict it, alongside how well members read each other’s emotions, was how evenly the conversation moved around the group. MIT management professor Thomas Malone, one of the study’s authors, put the finding plainly: “In groups where one person dominated, the group was less intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.”
That study measured task performance, not friendship, but the mechanism showing up is the same one sitting inside a dinner conversation. When one voice consistently takes over, whether the tool is a shift response, interrupting, or simply talking longer than everyone else combined, the room ends up working with less of what everyone in it actually knows.
A small redirect still counts
It’s tempting to file all of this under obviously bad conversational behavior: the person who never asks a follow-up question, who visibly waits out a story so they can tell theirs. But the research on shift responses covers something much smaller and far more common than that. A single “that reminds me of the time I” doesn’t make someone a bad listener. The pattern only becomes a problem in aggregate, across the dozens of small handoffs a normal conversation contains, most of which nobody involved is tracking in the moment. Add up a week of exchanges like that, though, and the imbalance becomes far easier to spot, even if any single moment felt like nothing at the time.
That’s part of what makes the habit so persistent. A shift response rarely feels like a decision. A friend mentions their grandmother’s illness and the listener’s brain, doing exactly what brains do, immediately surfaces a related memory of its own. Saying that memory out loud feels like empathy in real time. Whether it lands as empathy or as a hijack usually depends on one thing: whether the conversation eventually finds its way back to the person who was originally talking, or whether it just keeps moving forward on the new topic instead.
The fix is smaller than it sounds
Journalist and radio host Celeste Headlee, who studies conversation for a living, describes the alternative plainly: “A support response basically says two things: It says ‘I hear you’ and ‘Please continue.'”
Putting that into practice doesn’t require much. It means letting a question sit for a second longer before answering it with a story of your own, or asking one more follow-up question before changing the subject. Nodding along while privately waiting for an opening does not count, since the other person can usually tell the difference. The more reliable version is treating the other person’s story as the actual point of the exchange, even when a related story of your own is sitting right there, ready to go.
The shift is noticing the exact moment a story wants to become about you, and letting it stay about the other person for one more beat. The story someone was telling before the “that reminds me” moment usually was not finished, and it rarely needed rescuing with a better one. It’s a habit built out of thousands of small repetitions, which also means it’s one of the easier habits to change once someone actually starts noticing it.
