When you strike up a conversation with someone new and you just feel that click, we call it chemistry. But it turns out that not only might it actually be math, but also … pink?
Bear with us for a moment.
Dartmouth researchers, possibly recovering from one too many fundraising mixers, wondered why some conversations are highly enjoyable while others invite you to fake a medical emergency. They tested a hunch across 1,656 conversations: a good one may follow a pattern called pink noise.
You know it from Spotify playlists with titles like “8 Hours of Flow State for Crushing your KPIs.” The colors describe sound energy across frequencies: Pink noise resembles gentle rain or susurrating trees, white noise hisses like radio static and brown noise rumbles.
The researchers then applied this math to meaning. (Incidentally, in the 1970s, physicists Richard Voss—then at IBM—and John Clarke found similar results when they applied it to music.)
Using AI, they treated conversations as a time series, tracking fluctuations in semantic similarity between remarks. White-noise chatter is someone recounting a dream: they’re at school, then in space, then their dentist is a horse. Brown noise is the 40th minute of a “level-set” meeting about your enterprise taxonomy. Pink lies in between, where ideas develop, wander and reconnect.
Participants rated pinker conversations as more enjoyable. This pattern was evident in 31 speed dates, where pairs who were open to meeting again had pinker chats. In another analysis, podcast cohosts’ conversations got pinker over their first 50 episodes, suggesting that conversational patterns can improve over time.
The researchers then turned to Claude for 50 “good” and 50 “bad” coffee shop conversations with 100 turns per person. Human judges preferred the good ones, which were also pinker. Success!
Then we read the transcripts. Things took a turn. Claude’s bad conversations invariably feature a relentless pest interrogating someone who makes it abundantly clear she is not accepting new acquaintances. Now, to be fair, Claude had to keep them at it for 100 turns. In real life, person two would likely put on headphones or perhaps deposit coffee into person one’s lap. Instead, the pest keeps going.
Claude’s “good” conversations are somehow worse and read like LinkedIn fan fiction. An English teacher and designer turn a cardamom bun into an educational partnership. A marine biologist and an architect schedule a meeting about kelp. One likens their new friendship to “mycorrhizal networks forming in healthy soil.” (Sounds like a real fungi.)
All exchange contact information and leave with action items involving arts education, sustainable food systems and environmental conservation.
Claude’s tone-deafness aside, the findings stand, and perhaps the loveliest of them is that the pattern was stronger in the conversation as a whole than in either speaker alone. The good stuff happens between us—even if it doesn’t always result in a nonprofit over coffee.
