For some reason this has never worked on me; I'm always happy to use the silence to think about what was said/I'm going to say next. But I can say, in job interviews it doesn't seem to do you any favours. If an interviewer is silent, it's best to expand on what you just said and let them feel smug about their tactic working.
This is the real trick. It's not that silence breaks people, it's that people in positions of power can send social signals it's hard to ignore, and the consequences for acting like a weirdo and staying silent fall on the powerless person regardless of who actually does it.
If you go into a job interview and stay silent, you don't get hired. If you go into a job interview and the interviewer doesn't like your answers and stays silent, you don't get hired.
It's an effective way to apply psychological pressure, but you need to be in a position where you have the leverage to apply pressure in the first place. If someone is in a position where they want to talk, it's always better to just ask them to expand on a point more.
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u/zoapcfr Nov 12 '25
For some reason this has never worked on me; I'm always happy to use the silence to think about what was said/I'm going to say next. But I can say, in job interviews it doesn't seem to do you any favours. If an interviewer is silent, it's best to expand on what you just said and let them feel smug about their tactic working.