‘So,why did you decide to do this?’ Soliciting and formulating motives for speed dating

Abstract

We bring a conversation analytic perspective to the phenomenon of soliciting and providing motives for participation in speed dating. Using data from three speed-dating events, we analyze how college-aged volunteers in a research study collaboratively formulate motives for participation and identities as speed daters. The findings reveal detailed and sequentially organized procedures by which participants display, monitor, and enforce normative expectations about how people of their age should treat this institutional activity. In particular, participants use a three-turn motive solicitation sequence to produce ‘casual’ accounts for participation that suggest a disinvested orientation toward speed dating. In the few cases in which what might be considered the ‘obvious’ motive for speed dating is invoked – meeting someone to date – it tends to be done ironically. When offered in earnest, however, interlocutors withhold alignment with this motive and treat it as accountable.

Keywords

Accounts conversation analysis irony motives reported speech and thought reports speed dating

Introduction

Speed dating has become in the past two decades a pervasive and well-known institutional activity in North American society and beyond. In the busy, fast-paced world of (post)-modernity, it provides a venue for singles to meet prospective romantic partners in a speedy, efficient way. Concurrently, scholars from a variety of disciplines – psychology (Eastwick and Finkel, 2008; Finkel et al., 2007), economics (Fisman et al., 2006), and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Korobov, 2011a, 2011b; Stokoe, 2010) – have begun to use speed dating as a vehicle for research on attraction and relationship formation. As Finkel et al. (2007) point out, an advantage of using a research design modeled on speed dating is that it allows the researcher to examine initial romantic interactions in a naturalistic, non-laboratory setting. Conversation analysts have used similar research designs in the past to generate naturally occurring data of strangers getting acquainted (Maynard and Zimmerman, 1984) and the effects of shyness on the acquaintanceship process (Manning and Ray, 1993). More recently, Korobov organized a speed-dating event similar to our own, in which he examined mate preference talk (2011b) and the negotiation of gender norms in interaction (2011a). Although the present article is primarily concerned with the interactional construction of motives for speed dating by college-aged participants, and only tangentially with the topics just discussed, the two aforementioned research streams – one experimental, the other discursive and conversation analytic – provided its impetus. Like Edwards’ (2008) discursive psychological study of intentionality in police interrogations, our purpose in general terms is to ‘examine how and when people deploy and manage notions of intent in the description of actions, and what such formulations accomplish, on and for the occasions of their deployment’ (p. 179). More specifically, we show how motives for speed dating are collaboratively produced in organized ways by and for participants, and do not make claims about their ‘real’ motives or intentions (Mills, 1940).

In the spring of 2009, we hosted and audio/video-recorded three speed-dating events for college-aged volunteers. In analyzing the recordings, we took an unmotivated, conversation analytic approach (Sacks, 1992), examining the data while avoiding strong theoretical preconceptions as much as possible. We found that participants often reflexively brought up as a topic of conversation the activity in which they were presently involved, which was simultaneously speed dating and a research study. Some oriented more towards the activity as speed dating, whereas others treated it more as a study. This talk-in-interaction displayed sequential and other forms of organization that we wished to better understand. For instance, when participants discussed the speed dating study, they would recurrently either solicit assessments of each other’s ongoing experience of it (Turowetz and Hollander, 2012), or solicit motives and accounts for each other’s participation. The latter coherent phenomenon – the topic of the present article – is an especially important way in and by which the volunteers treat participation as accountable. They belong to an age group for which speed dating is an unusual way to meet a prospective partner, and it seems unlikely that many of them would have sought out a commercial event requiring customers to pay to speed date. College students typically meet people to date at social events and through informal networks, rather than through commercial matchmaking services. As some of the participants remarked during their dates (and reiterated in their post-event interviews with us):

Pamela [Simplified Transcript]

P: … most college students meet people out at bars or out at- y’know events social events so they don’t feel the need to do this?

Tom [Simplified Transcript]

T: a lot of people uh have been- making fun of the speed dating signs all over the place and I’m like- yeah I signed up for that.

In our solicitation materials, email correspondence with volunteers, and the orientation meeting immediately preceding each event, we characterized the activity as being actual speed dating as well as a research study. Participants were told that, to be eligible to attend, they should be ‘sincerely looking for someone to date’. As we will see, in their interactions with one another the participants provide a variety of motives for participation, only one of which is meeting someone to date. In fact, they make efforts to distance themselves from this type of justification for their presence. This feature of the interactions may be due to the fact that, as an atypical activity for their age group, speed dating leaves participants vulnerable to the inference that they are there because they are desperate to meet someone to date and cannot do so through more conventional channels. While speed dating constitutes a potentially face-threatening situation for participants in all age groups (Stokoe, 2010), this seems to be especially the case for those of college age.¹

Stokoe’s prior work (2010) on speed dating among 30–40-year-olds resembles ours in that it is discursive, using conversation analysis to illuminate patterns of talk-in-interaction in a speed-dating setting. However, important differences should be noted. First, her data come from commercial speed dating; she did not organize events as a research study and it is clear that the people she studied participated independently of her research. Second and relatedly, the interactions she studied were of 30–40-year-olds, a different age group than the 18–22-year-olds in our data. Like our volunteers, these people constructed motives for their participation by orienting to the relevance of their age and life-stage categories. But they did so primarily in terms of a motive that strongly contrasts with what we find in our data: meeting someone to date. Her 30–40-year-olds, often justifying participation by claiming they do not have time to meet people due to the hectic structure of their work lives, treat speed dating as a means to meet romantic prospects. By contrast, our participants construct in various detailed ways both the decision to attend the event and the reason for being there as meeting someone to date as problematic. Indeed, they go to considerable lengths to distance themselves from any suspicion that they are there primarily to ‘date’, often presenting themselves as having quite different motives and intentions. To do this, they rely on and use as resources both the fact that the activity can be legitimately characterized as either a speed dating event or a research study, and their membership of a social category (‘college student’) not typically associated with speed dating. Given that we built a measure of ambiguity – speed dating or study? – into the situation, our participants had options as to whether and to what extent they would identify themselves as speed daters. They could switch to another social gestalt – research study – which would identify them as research subjects and invoke a contrasting set of institutional relevancies. By managing the presentation of their identities in such ways, our participants trade on and exploit this ambiguity as a resource for presenting their motives, intentions, and selves to one another.

This article’s investigation of ways social actors can discursively construct motives, justifications, and identities in a particular setting is grounded in classical perspectives in social psychology, ethnography, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. A major question for these disciplines has concerned the relationship between people’s motives and intentions, on the one hand, and their actions, on the other. Drawing on classical pragmatists such as Burke (1936), Dewey (1896), and Mead (1934), Mills (1940) initiated a tradition in sociological social psychology that conceptualizes motives as instances of language use, rather than internal states or mechanisms that cause action. According to this school, people use ‘vocabularies’ of motives as resources for impelling and justifying the actions they perform. Classic ethnographic and theoretical work by Becker (1963), Cressey (1953), Scott and Lyman (1968), and Sykes and Matza (1957) extended and elaborated on this approach. Like Mills, these scholars all thought of motives as verbal sense-making devices rather than cognitive causes of behavior. Around the same time in the 1950s and ’60s, Garfinkel (1967) was developing in sociology a far-reaching conception of social action in which accounts play a prominent role as omnipresent ways in which members of society render situations intelligible, routine, and familiar. A recent article by Housley and Fitzgerald (2008) provides a comprehensive overview of historical and theoretical contributions to the analysis of motives and accounts made by scholars in the EM/CA tradition. While ethnomethodologists have explicated how motives are used as sense-making devices in the organization of social action, conversation analysts have drawn attention to the sequential organization and preferential structuring of the everyday and institutional construction of motives. Our article also complements more recent research on motives in discursive psychology (Edwards, 2008; Edwards et al., 2009; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) and cultural sociology (Swidler, 1986, 2001, 2008; Vaisey, 2008, 2009). In particular, it extends recent work on the solicitation and production of accounts (Bolden and Robinson, 2011; Robinson and Bolden, 2010). Specifically, we build on Bolden and Robinson’s analysis of why-interrogatives that, while soliciting an account, simultaneously convey a challenging stance on the matter being discussed.

Finally, the article should also be seen as contributing to conversation analytic research on institutional interaction. When our participants orient to their current activity as – alternately – speed dating or a research study, they attend to a set of background expectations, rules, and objectives. Following Drew and Heritage (1992: 22), we can describe speed dating in terms of three essential features shared by institutional settings: (1) orientation to a core goal or identity – the goal of speed dating is to meet romantically eligible people in an efficient manner; (2) particular constraints – all interactions are limited in time (six minutes) and space (a specific room with a standardized setup), and there are ‘match rules’ (both participants must say ‘yes’ to one another for a match to occur) – moreover, as we will see, participants interact in a routinized fashion and sanction deviations from this pattern; and (3) participants employ inferential frameworks and procedures – as noted, simply by attending a speed dating event, participants can be relevantly seen and treated as looking for someone to date. In sum, volunteers in an unfamiliar institutional setting, a speed-dating study, draw on and modify everyday practices and competencies to accomplish participation, where such organized practices include the construction of motives for participation.

Data and methods

As mentioned, our use of speed dating was inspired by the social psychological experiment described in Finkel et al. (2007) and by previous conversation analytic studies of social interaction in research study contexts (e.g. Korobov, 2011a, 2011b; Manning and Ray, 1993; Maynard and Zimmerman, 1984). Our project was not itself an experiment – no independent variables were manipulated and participants were not randomly assigned to conditions. Rather, our purpose was to create a research study context where we could use conversation analytic methods to examine the mechanics of institutional interaction in speed dating. A further contrast between our approach and the experimental one employed by Finkel et al. (2007) is that we did not make advance assumptions as to which variables would affect speed-dating interactions and outcomes. As noted, following Sacks (1992) we instead took an unmotivated approach to the data, focusing on phenomena which participants treated as relevant to, and procedurally consequential for, the endogenous organization of their interactions (see also Schegloff, 2007). We consider this approach to be complementary to experimental approaches to speed dating, in that it opens the ‘black box’ of this institutional activity by investigating how participants accomplish speed dating and produce its outcomes (Stokoe, 2010).

All participants in our three events were undergraduates ranging in age from 18 to 22 years. Events were organized primarily by age, with the first ranging from 20 to 22, the second from 18 to 20, and the third from 18 to 22. All participants expressed an interest in finding a romantic partner, and none was involved in a romantic relationship at the time they participated.² We recruited participants through a combination of in-class announcements, emails from professors who agreed to forward information about the study to their students, fliers posted around campus, and word of mouth. A total of 39 participants (each of whom signed an informed consent form) attended the three events; in each, all women dated all men in succession. The events ended after each man had dated each woman once. In the first two events, each woman was assigned to her own classroom and remained stationary while the men rotated from room to room; in the third event, the men were assigned to rooms and the women rotated. This process yielded a total of 128 speed-date interactions, of which 120 were captured on video and 128 on audio (each room was equipped with a video-camera and a digital audio recorder). After each six-minute date, participants separated and privately filled out a match form on which they indicated whether they would be interested in seeing the other person again (by checking ‘yes’ or ‘no’), as well as answering some questions on another form about the date and the other person. We subsequently used this material to inform participants via email of any matches (yes–yes) they made, directing them to an online email account we created for each match. This allowed match-partners to contact each other, if they so chose, without our disclosing their personal email addresses. Finally, we conducted post-event interviews (audio-recorded, semi-structured, 20–50 minutes each) with 34 subjects, which allowed further insight into their perspectives. Each was then compensated with $10 for completing the study.

The following analysis of constructing motives for participation is based on a collection of 60 instances gleaned from the audio/video recordings. In the first three sections, we analyze the interactional production of motives as they are solicited and formulated in terms of a motive solicitation sequence. A fourth substantive section then examines motive construction outside the context of this sequence, explicating how interactants may foreground meeting someone to date as a reason for participation. The article concludes with a summary and discussion of these findings.

A motive solicitation sequence

In general, the participants in our speed dating events talked about their motives in response to a solicitation question. Recurrently, these solicitations are produced in and through a sequential structure, which has the following components: (1) a direct question about why the recipient decided to attend the event, or less direct inquiry about how they heard of it. As Bolden and Robinson (2011: 98) observe in their conversation analytic investigation of why-questions that solicit accounts, ‘why-interrogatives … communicate a stance that the accountable event does not accord with common sense, and thus is possibly inappropriate or unwarranted’. By comparison, how-questions do not directly solicit an account for the recipient’s participation. These differences notwithstanding, both types of question elicit (2) a dispreferred response (i.e. delayed, mitigated) from the recipient. The features of the response are highly structured. In an overwhelming majority of cases, recipients provide a delayed response consisting of a report component concerning how they first heard about the event, followed by a motive component that accounts for their decision to participate. These features appear even when the motive component is not directly requested – that is, when the question only overtly solicits how the recipient heard about the event. This fact suggests that recipients orient to how-questions as indirect solicitations of motive talk. Finally, regardless of the type of motive produced, askers (3) readily align with it in a subsequent turn, and may go on to offer their own motive for participating. The following schematic provides an illustration of this sequence:

Solicitation Question (‘why’ or ‘how’)

Delay + Report + Motive

Alignment

As we argue in more detail later, both the sequential positioning and lexical content of motive talk convey a casual attitude toward speed dating; this is so regardless of whether a how- or why-question format is used. With regard to content, the participants in our speed-dating events offered a number of recurrent motives for their participation. These types typically indicate a past attitude of expectation of having fun at – or interest in – the event, of participating instrumentally in order to receive the $10 monetary compensation, or in terms of simply deciding to attend ‘on a whim’ or a lark. These motives present the speaker as not invested in speed dating or in meeting someone to date (cf. Edwards, 2005; Potter, 1996, Ch. 5). Participants thereby depict their motivation as not deliberate or pre-meditated, as having given little thought to why they are participating, and as extemporaneously making sense of their participation (Garfinkel, 1967). This self-presentation is also furthered by the practices of dispreference that mark their responses. Moreover, participants’ motive talk is consistent with what is typically expected of people in their age group and circumstances (Potter and Wetherell, 1987, Ch. 4; Scott and Lyman, 1968; see also the excerpts in the Introduction).

A further notable aspect of motive talk is the use of reported thought in producing motives. As Haakana (2006) observes in his analysis of reported thought in complaint stories, reported thought is to be distinguished from reported speech in terms of the interactional activities it performs. In Haakana’s data, reported thought is used to voice an unspoken critical attitude toward what a third party did or said (2006: 175). In our data, it serves a different interactional function – presenting a motive as the upshot of a narrative progression. This difference aside, however, there are a number of similarities between the ways reported thought is used in different contexts. First, in complaint stories and motive-presentation, reported thought seems to occur in conjunction with, and often is the climax of, an extended story. Second, it serves to guide the recipient’s evaluation of the story. In complaint stories, it encourages recipients to match the narrator’s ‘affective keying’ (Haakana, 2006: 176) toward the events being narrated. In motive talk, it conveys a casual attitude toward doing speed dating, often suggesting to the recipient that the narrator’s decision to participate was made on the spur of the moment without much prior thought or deliberation. Finally, speakers in our data make use of paralinguistic practices in reporting past thoughts. Like Haakana (2006: 158–159), we find that those reporting past thoughts make use of animated voice – for example high pitch, sing-song speech, tempo modulation, etc. In our data, they also make use of gestures such as shrugging and eye rolling. These practices contribute to the ‘casual’ affective keying that participants aim to achieve.

Another relevant feature of reported thought is that it suggests a speaker’s intentions toward an object or event. As Edwards (2008: 181) observes, verbs like think are routinely used to account for actions by attributing intentional states to individuals. He finds that ‘In ordinary conversation, for intent to be invoked there is generally some sense of expectations being thwarted, or obstacles intervening between intention and action, foiling the intention’s realization’ (Edwards, 2008: 195). As we have seen, speed dating is an unexpected, and therefore accountable, activity for college students. Further, as we will see below, the formulation ‘I thought’ dramatizes a participant’s unanticipated receipt of news about speed dating and spontaneous decision to participate, as well as suggesting that her intentions for doing so are casual and non-serious.

Soliciting motive talk with why-questions

The paradigmatic format in which the motive solicitation sequence is used in speed dating is illustrated in the following extract, which begins with a why-question (line 1). The numbers to the left of the transcript mark the different phases of the motive-solicitation sequence (rather than put ‘2’ at each line of the response, we use it to indicate the onset of delay and the inception of the report component).³

Extract 1: Megan and Ricky

1 M: (1) So why did you do the speed dating thing?

2 (2) (0.7)

3 R: ↑U:::m?

4 (1.3)

5 R: (2) >Kinda my-< my teacher mentioned it, (.) [a:nd- ]=

6 M: [Really?]=

7 R: =mm hmm, and I was jus: (0.5) like kinda why no:t,=

8 M: (3) =I know.

At line 1, Megan uses a why-question to solicit Ricky’s motive for speed dating. This receives a delayed, dispreferred reply from Ricky. Following a silence (line 2), some hesitation (line 3), and a further silence (line 4), he starts a report about how he found out about the event (line 5). Rather than actively seeking out the event, Ricky’s brief narrative suggests he happened upon the information and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to participate. His motive, ‘why no:t’ (line 7), takes the form of an upshot to his report – that is, as following the report – and appears to be presented as reported thought (‘I was jus:…like’, see Haakana, 2006).⁴ Also, both his report and motive are designed with components – ‘kinda,’ ‘I was jus:,’ ‘like kinda’ – that display a measure of uncertainty about the adequacy of his response, as well as a lack of commitment to and investment in the event. Finally, after Ricky’s turn comes to possible completion, Megan aligns with the motive he offered (line 8).

The motive solicitation sequence sets up slots for the production of motive talk. Participants orient to these slots in the overall sequence to such an extent that even in cases like Extracts 2 and 3, where the recipient arguably does not provide an explicit motive, the asker nonetheless treats what s/he does in this slot as an adequate response to the question.⁵

Extract 2: Megan and Tim

1 M: (1) Well Yeah: So: why did you decide to do $this$

2 (2) (0.8)

3 T: U::::m

4 (0.4)

5 T: I don’t know I just-

6 (0.5)

7 T: (2) I- I saw the: uh the flyer an’ I thought ↑hey. ((← Shrugs))

8 (0.3)

9 M: (3) I know I was l(h)ike hih .hh [but I was li:ke ]=

10 T: [Why the hell ↑not,]= ((← Shrugs))

11 M: =↑He:y ten bucks that’s two cups.

Extract 3: Sally and Greg

1 S: (1) Tch So:: (0.5) why are you ↑doing this $like,$

2 (2) (0.6)((← G rolls eyes, shrugs))

3 G: (2) U::m my roommate’s: in a sociology cla:ss:?=

4 S: =[Oh ]

5 G: =[an’] he saw like a (0.5) ((← shrugs)) >poster I

6 guess for it n’<

7 (0.7) ((← G shrugs))

8 G: (2) [So: we <decided> to do it=

9 S: [Yeah

10 S: (3) =Okay

11 (0.2) ((← G emphatic nodding))

12 S: Really.

13 G: Yeah:

14 S: So yer (0.2) tight with your roommate er:

At line 1 of Extract 2, Megan produces a why-question about speed dating. Her use of smile voice and vague reference term ‘this’ to indicate the setting and current activity may soften the directness and forwardness of the question. Also, the pro-term ‘this’ leaves open exactly what this activity is. She thereby defers the naming of the activity for Tim to do (or not do). Tim’s answer features many of the same practices mobilized by Ricky in Extract 1. Specifically, Tim’s use of silence, hesitation, and a disclaimer of knowledge embody effort in formulating an adequate response. In the majority of cases, recipients of a motive-solicitation produce a report before offering a motive. Tim may display an orientation to this generic practice by cutting short his turn at line 5, which appears to project a motive upshot, before restarting with a report at line 7. The motive upshot that follows – ‘↑hey’ – is presented as a reported past thought and is produced with a shrugging and animated voice (captured in the transcript with an upward pitch shift followed by a downward one). In this context, ‘↑hey’ also reports a noticing that may be akin to the change-of-state tokens analyzed by Heritage (1984). This conveys the unpremeditated, spur-of-the-moment, and abrupt character of his decision while also suggesting that the intent behind it was casual (see Edwards, 2008). Even though no more explicit motive is immediately forthcoming, Megan nevertheless treats Tim’s response as adequate (line 9), first aligning (‘I know’) and offering her own motive in overlap with Tim’s elaboration on his (‘why the hell↑not’, line 10). Tim’s motive at line 10 is similar to the one offered by Ricky in the previous extract in both its linguistic and paralinguistic (e.g. shrugging) features. Tim’s motive, however, is done in a more emphatic way, with the addition of an oath/expletive formulation (‘hell’) and an upward pitch shift on ‘↑not’ (line 10).

In Extract 3, Sally solicits a motive with a why-question (line 1). Like Tim in the previous extract, she references the activity they are currently doing with the pro-term ‘this’. Moreover, she tempers the directness of the question with smile voice and the addition of a ‘like’ particle to the end of her turn (see Bolden and Robinson, 2011). Greg’s answer features delay and hesitation markers (lines 2, 3), along with mitigating devices that display a degree of uncertainty. For example, his shrug at line 5 suggests that he is making an effort to come up with the appropriate noun and that he does not have a reply on the tip of his tongue, so to speak. His use of the formulation ‘I guess’ (line 5) has a similar effect. Finally, like Tim’s ‘hey’ in example 2 (line 7), ‘we <decided> to do it’ (line 8), while not literally answering the question, does occupy the motive-production slot, that is, it works as the upshot of a report or brief narrative. Sally treats this response as adequate, which she marks with an ‘okay’ token (line 10) followed by a downward intoned ‘Really’ (line 12). She then goes on to initiate a stepwise topic-shift (Jefferson, 1984) at line 14.

Occasionally, the recipient of a why-question offers a motive component without a preceding report. In these cases, solicitation recipients will often use ‘I don’t know’ in the sequential slot where a report would generally occur. Nowhere in our collection does this formulation appear immediately before or after a report. This could be evidence that ‘I don’t know’ is working to elide and mark the absence of a report component.⁶

Extract 4: Sally and Dave

1 S: (1) Why did you: °do this:.°

2 (2) (0.4)

3 D: (2) Oh ↑I dunno: ((← shrugs)) >I mean I-< I just thought it

4 would be like a funny, ((← shrugs)) like kinda interesting

5 thing to $do, s(hh)o$,

6 (0.4) ((S nods quickly))

7 S: (3) Yeah.

At line 1, Sally asks a why-question that refers to the activity in progress in a vague way (‘this’). As mentioned, Dave’s dispreferred response includes a disclaimer of knowledge (‘oh I dunno:’) that may elide the report component of his answer. It may also display disinterest in talking at length on the topic introduced by Sally’s question. Following Potter (1996, Ch. 5), we can observe that the use of ‘I don’t know’ may also be preempting the inference that Dave has a stake in the motive talk that is forthcoming – that is, it may be accomplishing stake inoculation, which effectively communicates a casual attitude toward speed dating. Further, in the context where it is produced, the oh-preface to ‘I don’t know’ appears to mark the question as challenging or inapposite (Heritage, 1998). The show of defensiveness exhibited by Dave’s ‘I mean’ particle supports this interpretation (see Maynard, 2013). Along the same lines, the ‘just’ component of his turn may project that the upcoming motive is the most – or all – that he has to say on the subject. The casual quality of Dave’s reasons for participating is accentuated by the paralinguistic and gestural practices that accompany his motive talk. These practices include his shrugs after ‘I dunno:’, and ‘funny’ (line 4), the upward pitch-shift on ‘I dunno:’, and the laugh particles and smile voice with which he completes his turn (line 5). Sally then aligns with Dave’s motive talk, first by nodding (line 6) and then with a ‘Yeah’ token (line 7).

Soliciting motive talk with how-questions

In contrast to why-questions, how-questions do not directly solicit an account for the recipient’s participation. Recipients can satisfy the conditional relevancies projected by the question without accounting for their presence at the event.⁷ Nevertheless, participants treat the two question formats in largely the same way. Like recipients of why-questions, those asked how-questions provide dispreferred responses marked by delay, hesitation, prefacing, and the use of mitigation. Furthermore, they answer with the same report + motive-component structure generated by why-questions, despite the fact that no motive is explicitly solicited. Consider the following examples:

Extract 5: Lynn and Ricky

1 L: (1) So how did you get into this?

2 (2) (0.6)

3 R: U:::m?

4 (.)

5 R: (2) My criminology:: (0.4) teacher actually mentioned it

6 and I just, ((R shrugs))

7 (0.4)

8 L: Oh really?

9 R: Ye:ah.

10 (0.4)

11 R: I was just like ↑uh:: why ↓no:t.=((R shrugs))

12 L: (3) =°Why not, yeah° ((L shrugs))

Extract 6: Adam and Cheryl

1 A: (1) Um so w- how did you get the email

2 (0.3)

3 A: °for this- (0.2) speed dating thing°=

4 C: (2) =(h) Huh huh °the sp(h)eed (dating)° .hh u:::m

5 (0.3)

6 C: (2) I:: (0.3) know a bunch of the:: AFG* guys=

7 A: =Okay=

8 C: =.hhh a:::::nd: (.) there’s this (0.3) big- joke and one

9 of these guys thought it would be really funny they’re like

10 oh here: you should sign up for this speed dating thing=

11 A: Yeah: [yeah]

12 C: [So: ]:: as a joke back at them I actually did it.

13 A: (3) Eh- exce[llent: excellent]

14 C: [Uh(h) heh heh ]

*AFG is a pseudonym for a Greek fraternity.

In Extract 5, Lynn asks Ricky how he got into ‘this’, referring to the speed dating study (line 1). As with answers to why-questions, Ricky’s response features delay (lines 2–4), a brief narrative of how he heard about the event (lines 5–6), and a motive component that appears as the upshot of his report (line 11). Like Tim in Extract 2, Ricky responds with a report and pauses at the point where a motive may be due (‘and I just’, line 6). Also, like Tim (and Greg, Extract 3), he is shrugging as he starts this pause. Lynn then does an oh-prefaced news-mark (line 8), prompting elaboration (Maynard, 2003), and Ricky goes on to offer the same type of motive that Tim did – and to the same effect (‘why↓no:t’, line 11). Specifically, his rising pitch and sound stretch on ‘↑uh::’, accompanied by a shrug, suggest that his decision to speed date was made on the spur of the moment, as embodied in his subsequent ‘why ↓no:t’ component.

In Extract 6, Adam’s how-question presumes that Cheryl heard about the event by email. His initial formulation of the question (line 1) presumes that his reference to ‘the email’ is sufficient for Cheryl to recognize what he means (see Schegloff, 1972). When no recognition is forthcoming (line 2), however, he further specifies the referent – ‘this … speed dating thing’ (line 3). The ambiguity of this formulation is similar to references to the current activity in several prior extracts. Cheryl then provides a laugh-prefaced and infused reply (line 4), which treats the formulation ‘this … speed dating thing’ as one that displays a non-serious orientation to the event. She then tells a story about a group of fraternity members (‘AFG guys’) that she knows (line 6), and goes on to report that the ‘guys’ were encouraging her to participate in the event as a kind of joke. This narrative appears to trade on the background knowledge that, at least for college students, speed dating is a laughable activity (see the ‘Tom’ transcript in the introduction). She then formulates the upshot of her report, that she ‘actually did it’ as a ‘joke back at them’ (line 12). Like Extract 5, the structure of Cheryl’s response to Adam’s how-question is report + motive.

Extract 6 illustrates a further feature that responses to how- and why-questions have in common, which is their use of reported speech and thought. As Haakana (2006) observes (with respect to complaint stories), reported speech can be attributed to another person or to oneself, whereas reported thought is attributed to oneself. In our data, the originator of the speech systematically differs depending on the context in which the report occurs. When it occurs in the report component, this speech is attributed to an absent third party, such as a roommate, friend, or professor – or, in this case, the ‘AFG guys’. When it occurs in the motive-component, by contrast, it is self-oriented in that it reports one’s past thoughts about speed dating. The latter placement is exemplified in Extract 2 at lines 7 and 10; recall how Tim prefaces his whim motive (‘↑hey … why the hell not’) with the formulation ‘I thought’ (line 7). The motive-component itself, such as the self-reported speech, begins with a token (‘hey’ or ‘eh’) that in our data characteristically displays a sudden high shift in intonation/prosody. These tokens animate the recipient’s reaction to being informed of the event, and are typically followed by an explicit motive for participating.

Comparing why- and how-questions

Although recipients deal with how- and why-questions in largely the same way, there is some evidence that participants treat how-questions as more cautious, indirect versions of why-questions. This evidence comes both from how askers produce the questions and how recipients answer them. A first difference is that askers of how-questions produce the question in a straightforward, direct way. By contrast, most askers of why-questions temper their directness in some fashion. This is consistent with what Bolden and Robinson (2011) report in their investigation of why-questions, which is that askers commonly downgrade the challenging thrust of why-questions that solicit accounts. Thus, most participants in our study variously make use of smile voice, laughter, soft-voice, and additional turn components when articulating why-questions. For example:

Extract 7: Megan and Tim

M: Well Yeah: So: why did you decide to do $this$

Extract 8: Megan and Brian

M: So why’d you do $this:$ (h)hm

Extract 9: Sally and Dave

S: Why did you: °do this:.°

Extract 10: Sally and Greg

S: Tch So:: (0.5) why are you ↑doing this $like,$

A second difference between why- and how-questions is in how recipients treat them. Specifically, recipients of why-questions sometimes use the formulation ‘I don’t know’. This device, which in our data only shows up in the context of why-questions, typically follows delay but precedes the formulation of a motive. As we have seen, the ‘I don’t know’ formulation, as a knowledge disclaimer, suggests that the answer to the question is not immediately accessible to recipients. Thus, recipients present themselves as not having transparent knowledge of their motives for participating, suggesting a certain disinterest in, or lack of extensive thought about, participating in the event before signing up. As with other practices we have seen, then, the ‘I don’t know’ formulation seems to be a way of performing casualness.

‘Dating’ as a motive for participation

Whether solicited with why- or how-questions, most motives in our collection project a casual, non-invested attitude toward speed dating on the part of the speaker. Further, as we have seen, recipients of these motives readily align with them. It appears that one reason these motives are treated as easy to align with is that they are consonant with participants’ background expectations about reasonable accounts for participating in a speed dating study by college students, such as having fun or a new experience, doing it on a whim or lark, or to earn some money. Occasionally, however, a participant will invoke a different motive: meeting someone to date. When this motive is invoked ironically, it receives the same ready affiliation as the other motives in our collection. However, when the motive is produced in an earnest way, the recipient tends to disaffiliate with it in a way that suggests it is inapposite.

It is noteworthy that meeting someone to date, as a motive, does not appear in our collection in response to why- or how-questions. That is, when a motive is directly or indirectly solicited, recipients do not account for their participation by suggesting they want to meet a romantic prospect. When talk about this motive occurs, it is either produced in the context of topical talk about speed dating but outside the motive-solicitation sequence, or it is invoked in an environment where speed dating is not currently being discussed at all. As an example of the latter, consider a case where two daters, Megan and Neil, are discussing sports teams at their university:

Extract 11: Megan and Neil

1 M: Reediculous year for sports:,

2 N: Yeah really

3 (0.4)

4 M: Ree:diculous=

5 N: =Except for the cross country team

6 (0.4)

7 M: Oh really?

8 (0.4) ((N slaps his thighs))

9 N: °#Yeah# but no one cares about cross country°=

10 M: =No I:

11 (.)

12 N: [heh heh heh hm]

13 M: [I (didn’t) ] like=R(h)eal(h)ize [w(h)e h(h)ad o(h)ne]

14 N: [>heh heh heh heh< ]

15 (0.3)

16 N: Aw you suck=

17 M: =.h=

18 N: =>heh [heh heh heh< ]

19 M: [Are you on it?]

20 (0.3)

21 N: No I m- (0.2) I (0.3) if I w- if I was on: uh: the cross country

22 team (0.7) I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t go to speed dating events=

23 M: =Aw[:::, ]

24 N: [I’d be too] cool for that,

25 M: You[m(hh)e: oh↓ ]:: I [see how it is, ]: huh!

26 N: [eh heh heh heh heh] [heh heh heh heh heh]

27 (0.5)

28 N: I mean I’d be a Mollusk* athlete

29 (0.2)

30 M: Uh(h) [huh huh] huh=

31 N: [s:- ]

32 N: =just like walk around with like your Mollusk clothing and like

33 girls will just like be:

34 (0.4)

35 M: [I know isn’t that] °ridiculous?°

*Mollusk is a pseudonym for the name of the University’s sports teams.

While much could be said about this excerpt, the portion relevant to motives for speed dating begins with Neil’s response to Megan’s question (line 19–22; both bolded in the transcript for clarity). She asks whether he is on their school’s cross-country team. After a delay, he replies that he is not on the team (line 21), followed by a turn component that seems to project an I-mean-prefaced utterance, which may display an orientation to a misunderstanding on Megan’s part (see Maynard, 2013). This turn component is abandoned, however, and, after some more restarts, Neil elaborates on his ‘no’ with a hypothetical claim that if he were on the team he ‘wouldn’t go to speed dating events’ (lines 21–22). The elaboration treats Megan’s question (line 19) as inapposite – given that he is present at a speed-dating event, it should be clear that he is not on the team. Furthermore, in its implication that Neil needs to be at a speed-dating event to meet people, this utterance is self-deprecating, which is how Megan treats it by offering a sympathetic assessment at line 23 (Goodwin, 1986: 214; Maynard, 2003: 104–105). However, in overlap with Megan’s display of sympathy, Neil goes on to formulate the upshot that if he were on the cross-country team, he’d be ‘too cool’ for speed dating (line 24). This component elicits an emphatic change-of-state token (Heritage, 1984) by Megan, and the two then break into laughter.

Neil’s response to Megan’s sympathetic uptake suggests that she misunderstood the ironic intention of his utterance. While Megan’s display of sympathy appears to treat Neil’s response as doing troubles talk, his elaboration makes explicit what was only implicit in his initial turn – people who ‘need to’ attend speed-dating events are not cool. Megan then revises her understanding of Neil’s remarks. As she starts to project repair (‘You m(hh)e’), Neil comes in with laugh tokens (line 26), suggesting that her projected candidate understanding is correct. She then produces a change-of-state token (Heritage, 1984), followed by a claim to ‘see how it is’ (line 25). She thereby displays an understanding of what he was doing as teasing and ironic and, by extension, indicates that she misconstrued the irony in Neil’s ostensibly self-effacing remarks. As Clift (1999: 524) observes, misunderstandings of this sort create an environment in which members can and do (re)-orient to what is being done as ironic.⁸ Neil’s ironic and self-and-other-deprecating invocation of the motive of meeting someone to date effectively distances him from it, even as he puts it in play.

As a further example of ironic motive talk, consider the following extract. Whereas in the previous excerpt Neil attributes an inapposite motive for participation to himself, here he imputes it to his partner, who proceeds to disavow it.

Extract 12: Lynn and Neil

1 N: >How d’you-< how d’you feel about it.

2 (0.2)

3 N: You been meeting a bunch of u:h-

4 (0.2)

5 L: ↑Nah it’s- it’s [↓interesting. ]

6 N: [future husband]s,

7 (.)

8 L: Huh huh [huh .h h ha I- I don’t know about that .h ]h=

9 N: [>Ha hah ha hah< heh >heh heh heh<]

10 L: =U:m it’s ↑interesting actually.

11 (0.4)

12 L: I dunno (0.4) um:

13 (2.1)

14 L: °We’ll see what happens [(I guess)]((L shrugs))

15 N: [>Huh huh ] huh huh<

16 (0.2)

17 L: °I dunno° if <no:thing ↑else ↓te:n ↑bucks> (( Shrugs, head tilt, 18 (0.6) and open palms))

19 L: [((claps hands)) ↓Al]↑ri:ght

20 N: [<↓Not ↑bad.> ]

Lynn and Neil have been discussing their lack of prior familiarity with speed dating. At line 1, Neil asks Lynn how she ‘feel[s] about’ the activity in which they are currently engaged. No uptake is forthcoming at line 2, and Neil produces a further turn-component that projects a proposal about the kinds of people Lynn has met so far. Following a silence (line 4), Lynn produces a ‘Nah’ token, which may suggest that she hears his last turn as portending a criticism of other participants (line 5; bolded in transcript). She then goes on to assess the event as ‘interesting’ (line 5). In overlap with this assessment, Neil completes his prior turn by asking if she has been meeting ‘future husbands’ (line 6). In doing so, he imputes a romantic, non-casual motive for her presence at the event – meeting someone to marry. A brief silence ensues (line 7), and Lynn responds with laughter, which displays an interpretation of Neil’s suggestion as teasing and ironic. Neil joins in the laughter (line 9), and Lynn goes on to disavow the motive he suggested (‘I don’t know about that’, line 8) and reiterate her assessment from line 5. The assessment is accompanied by an ‘actually’ token (line 10), which contrasts her serious assessment with the non-serious talk that preceded it (Schegloff, 2001). She thereby insists on her initial assessment and, in effect, disaffiliates with Neil. However, she then proceeds to offer a different motive than the one Neil ironically proposed – ‘if <no:thing↑else↓te:n bucks>’ (line 17), which is among the motives commonly seen in our data. In combination with her use of practices like ‘I dunno’ (line 17) and shrugging (line 14), Lynn conveys a casual attitude toward speed dating while mitigating the disaffiliative implications of her prior turns. Further, by providing this kind of conventional motive, she gives Neil an opportunity to easily affiliate, which he does at lines 15 and 20.

As mentioned, when participants invoke in a non-ironic way being at the event to meet someone to date, their recipients tend to treat this as problematic. This reaction can be seen in the following extract, which begins with Sally soliciting a motive from Mike with a why-question. From there, the discussion develops along familiar lines until line 24, where Mike does a self-deprecating disclosure in an earnest manner.

Extract 13: Sally and Mike

1 S: >So why are you doing this,<

2 (0.7)

3 M: Umm? (0.4) >I don’t know,< I guess just to meet some new

4 people:? an:d, (0.6) see how it goes:? I mean, (0.5) I’ve

5 never been in a::, (0.2) experiment before?

6 S: >Me [either,<] yea:h.

7 M: [Or: ]

8 (0.3)

9 M: or: uh:: (.) s:peed dating thing so:.=

10 S: =Yea:h.

11 (0.2)((S moves torso, head left-right, line 12))

12 S: >I was like< (0.2)[>I’m g(h)onna try: it,<]

13 M: [Maybe I’ll give ] it a try:,

14 yea:h, ah huh=

15 S: =It’s kinda fun, I don’t know,

16 (0.3)

17 S: I like to talk to people, ((S shifts torso, tilts head))

18 (.)

19 M: [Yeah:]

20 S: [So: ]

21 (.)

22 M: Well *that’s goo:d.((*Breaks gaze))

23 (0.2)

24 M: I gotta:, (0.4) do better a:t (0.4) talking tuh people:

25 S: [Uh(h)::: ]

26 M: [jus’ interact (with]out//y’know)-

27 (1.3)

28 M: I don’t know

29 (0.8)

30 M: I’m jus:t, (.) <no:t real good at this: sor[ta: stuff:] so,>

31 S: [↑Really:? ]

32 (0.5)

33 S: Keep the eye contact like you’re do:ing? >you’re doing a

34 good job,<=

35 M: =Mmhmm(h)=

36 S: =Y’know?

37 (0.2)

38 S: [That’s]: (.) that’s good

39 M: [Right ]

Sally’s why-question at line 1 topicalizes motives for speed dating. Mike’s initial response mobilizes practices we have seen in previous excerpts: delay, knowledge disclaimer, and articulation of a common motive for participating – meeting new people. He also orients to the dual-gestalt character of the situation by variously describing the event as both an experiment (line 5) and as ‘a s:peed-dating thing’ (line 9). Sally acknowledges his response and aligns with him (line 12). She then offers a series of common reasons for participating (lines 12, 15, 17), thereby extending talk on motives. Like others, Sally suggests that having fun and meeting people are her reasons for participating. Topic attrition then follows (lines 19–20; see Jefferson, 1993; Maynard, 1980), which may mark the relevance of topical shift or closure.

Mike goes on, however, to do what appears to be an earnest invocation of meeting someone to date as a motive for being at the event. At line 22, Mike does a well-prefaced assessment that may project disaffiliation (Pomerantz, 1984), while providing for further topical talk. He follows this with a self-deprecating disclosure (Antaki et al., 2005) in which he volunteers that he has ‘gotta:, do better a:t talking tuh people’ (line 24). This suggests a contrast with Sally’s stance on talking tuh people. Unlike Neil (Extract 11), Mike’s self-deprecation is not constructed in an ironic way, and occurs in a topical environment in which providing motives for speed dating remains relevant. Indeed, given the question with which this extract begins, the formulation can be seen as elaborating on his initial response: he is here to practice his ability to ‘talk to people’. Mike’s disclosure occasions an elongated, laugh-punctuated ‘uh’ token from Sally (line 25), who withholds alignment and may be adopting a ‘wait and see’ (Garfinkel, 1967, Ch. 2) strategy with respect to how Mike’s action should be interpreted. Sally’s response is done in overlap with Mike’s elaboration of his disclosure, and after a silence (line 27) he produces a knowledge disclaimer (line 28). Another silence follows (line 29), and Mike produces a further self-deprecation at line 30. Sally responds initially in overlap with a challenging ‘↑Really:?’ and then with a preferred response to a self-deprecation (Pomerantz, 1984). Sally disagrees with his claim and provides a contrasting assessment. She does this by first suggesting that he ‘keep the eye contact’ (thereby suggesting that he has already been making eye contact), and proposing that he’s ‘doing a good job’ (lines 33–34). She then offers a kind of standard or formulaic praising utterance at line 38 in overlap with his agreement to her previous (lines 33–34, 36) formulations. Sally is thus responding to Mike’s self-deprecation with tactful face-work (Goffman, 1967) that treats seriously his self-disclosure while simultaneously moving towards topical closure.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we have examined the interactional organization of motive construction in the context of a speed-dating study. We have explicated the concrete, sequential practices through which motive talk is formulated and receipted in such interactions. Speed-dating motives are produced in and through a structured sequence of turns that recurrently displays the following organization: (1) a how- or why-question regarding the decision to participate in speed dating; (2) a delayed answer that generally includes report and motive components; and (3) an aligning and/or affiliating turn. A counterintuitive finding that emerges from this analysis is that, regardless of the how- or why-formulation, recipients treat the different question formats in largely the same manner. Similarities notwithstanding, however, our analysis did turn up differences between the two question formats in terms of how they are produced and receipted. Regarding how the question is produced, in addition to selecting between how- and why-question formats, askers can soften why-questions in various ways (as per Bolden and Robinson, 2011). By contrast, how-questions are formulated in a relatively straightforward manner. And in terms of how the question is receipted, recipients can respond to why-questions with ‘I don’t know’ formulations, whereas these do not appear in response to how-questions.

To slightly alter Mills’s (1940) famous phrase, participants produce motive vocabularies for speed dating that render their presence at the event according to a particular kind of accountability. Accordingly, a further finding from our analysis is that in and through the motive solicitation sequence, participants display a casual, nonchalant attitude toward speed dating. They do this by producing motives that suggest they are there to ‘meet people’, ‘have fun/new experiences’, and/or that they are participating on a whim or lark (‘why not?’). A number of participants also offer instrumental accounts for participating, claiming that they are interested in monetary compensation, while others treat with ambiguity and delicacy the naming of the activity in which they are participating (a speed dating event and a research study). The casual character of participants’ motives is further heightened by various means, including reported past thought and speech, the insinuation that the intent to participate was formed extemporaneously, and the use of paralinguistic practices like pitch-modulation and physical gesturing (e.g. shrugging). Participants’ displayed motives are thus consonant with background expectations about what is typical for the category ‘college student’ (Sacks, 1984). Notably, almost none of the participants explicitly align with what could be considered the ‘obvious’ motive for speed dating – meeting a romantic partner. Indeed, they indicate that social venues such as bars are the usual places to meet people to date, and that other students have been ‘making fun’ of the event in which they are now involved (see the ‘Tom’ transcript in the Introduction). When participants do offer the meeting-people-to-date motive, it is done in an ironic fashion (e.g. Extracts 11 and 12), or, if done seriously, it is sanctioned by way of disagreement, contrasting and formulaic praise, and topic exit (Extract 13).

Finally, as noted in the Introduction, the participants in our study can be compared to the 30–40-year-old participants in Stokoe’s study (2010) insofar as both groups treat speed dating as an activity that is accountable. However, whereas her participants’ motives appear to largely invoke and align with the notion that one does speed dating to meet a prospective partner (Stokoe, 2010: 264–265), ours typically distance themselves from it, both with non-dating and casual motive talk, and with ironic invocations of the dating motive. A further contribution of our article, then, is to show that motives for participation, as well as the particular actions they perform – for example self-distancing and casual self-presentation – appear to significantly vary by age and social category- membership. Or, put the other way around, motive talk in speed dating is a way in which age and category-membership are actively and collaboratively accomplished. Motive talk is orderly and systematic in terms of its constituent sequencing and turn design. Future research is needed to determine the generality of such structures as the motive-solicitation sequence identified in this article across other demographic groupings and contexts, as well as similarities and differences in the content of the motives that are proffered. A further topic for future research is examining similarities and differences in how motive talk is produced and receipted across various institutional settings, as well as between institutional settings and everyday conversation. Such inquiry would shed considerable light on whether and precisely how institutional contexts such as speed dating modify ordinary practices for producing motive talk.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix:

Audio Transcribing Conventions^**

1. Overlapping speech	Left hand brackets mark a point of overlap, while right hand brackets indicate where overlapping talk ends.
A: Oh you do? R[eally ]
B: [Um hmmm]
2. Silences	Numbers in parentheses indicate elapsed time in tenths of seconds.
A: I’m not use ta that. (1.4)
B: Yeah me neither.
3. Missing speech	Ellipses indicate where part of an utterance is left out of the transcript.
A: Are they?
B: Yes because …
4. Sound stretching	Colon(s) indicate the prior sound is prolonged. More colons, more stretching.
4. Sound stretching	B: I did oka::y.
5. Volume	Capital letters indicate increased volume.
A: That’s where I REALLY want to go.	Capital letters indicate increased volume.
6. Emphasis	Underline indicates increased emphasis.
A: I do not want it.	Underline indicates increased emphasis.
7. Breathing	The “h” indicates audible breathing. The more “h’s” the longer the breath. A period placed before it indicates inbreath; no period indicates outbreath.
A: You didn’t have to worry about having the .hh hhh curtains closed.
8. Laugh tokens	The “h” within a word or sound indicates explosive aspirations; e.g., laughter, breathlessness, etc.
A: Tha(h)t was really neat.
9. Explanatory material	Materials in double parentheses indicate audible phenomena other than actual verbalization.
A: Well ((cough)) I don’t know
10. Candidate hearing	Materials in single parentheses indicate that transcribers were not sure about spoken words. If no words are in parentheses, the talk was indecipherable.
B: (Is that right?) ( )
11. Intonation.	A period indicates fall in tone, a comma indicates continuing intonation, a question mark indicates increased tone. Up arrows (↑) or down arrows (↓) indicate marked rising and falling shifts in intonation immediately prior to the rise or fall.
A: It was unbelievable. I ↑had a three point six? I ↓think.
B: You did.
12. Sound cut off	Dashes indicate an abrupt cutoff of sound.
A: This- this is true	Dashes indicate an abrupt cutoff of sound.
13. Soft volume	Material between degree signs is spoken more quietly than surrounding talk.
A: °Yes.° That’s true.
14. Latching	Equal signs indicate where there is no gap or interval between adjacent utterances.
A: I am absolutely sure.=
B: =You are.
A: This is one thing [that I=	Equal signs also link different parts of a speaker’s utterance when that utterance carries over to another transcript line.
B: [Yes?
A: =really want to do.
15. Speech pacing	Part of an utterance delivered at a pace faster than surrounding talk is enclosed between “greater than” and “less than” signs.
A: What is it?
B: >I ain’t tellin< you

Adapted from Gail Jefferson, “Error Correction as an Interactional Resource,” Language in Society 2: 181–199, 1974. See also: J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis,” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Matthew M Hollander is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His research interests include interpersonal relationships, obedience to authority in interaction, social psychology, and conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. His dissertation research examines directive/response sequences and resistance in a large collection of recordings of the Milgram Obedience Experiment.

Jason Turowetz is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His research interests include interpersonal relationships, mental health, social psychology, and conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. His dissertation research focuses on the clinical assessment and diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders.

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