Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How much do we mind wander during conversations, and how does that affect objective outcomes and subjective per-ceptions of the conversation? We studied computed-mediated dyadic negotiations during which participants (N = 144)discreetly reported whenever they were thinking about something else, and whenever they thought their partner was not at-tending. Participants mind wandered around 19% of the time. Surprisingly, the number of times that a participant thoughtthat their counterpart was not attending correlated almost perfectly with the first participants own number of mind wander-ing reports (r-partial = .941), but very poorly with the other participants number of reports (r-partial = .004) (controlled fortime until agreement). Mind wandering negatively affected subjective (F(1, 57) = 6.48, p = .014) but not objective (F(1,57) = .089, p = .766) outcomes. These findings suggest that mind wandering, and the attribution of mind wandering toothers, leads to worse social psychological outcomes.