Worth the Wait?: The Effect of Responsiveness on Interpersonal Attraction Among Known Acquaintances

As users adopt new communication technologies, they also develop new norms and expectations about responsiveness: the time it takes an interaction partner to respond to a message. Prior work suggests violation of responsiveness expectations can lead to negative evaluations, but this has not been studied within the modern communication ecosystem, where ubiquitous mobile devices and connectivity enable constant contact with friends and colleagues. We present results from a lab-based experiment examining how violation of such expectations can affect interpersonal attraction. In studying pairs of known acquaintances, we find that low-responsive partners are rated lower in social attraction than high-responsive partners. We also provide an exploratory analysis of chat logs from the experiment which indicates that responsiveness behavior is part of an interactive process where parties involved negotiate for each other’s attention over time.