How to stop unwanted small talk with a plane seatmate
Polite social conditioning makes it difficult to shut down chatty seatmates without feeling rude. This forces travelers to endure unwanted conversation long after they want it to stop, trapping them in social obligations they don't know how to exit.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Putting on headphones immediately
- 2Using body language and reading social cues
- 3Giving polite short answers before returning to books, movies, or sleep
- 4Overcoming social conditioning to shut down unwanted conversations
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“If the other person tries to chat me up, I don’t mind for maybe 2 mins, after that I’m trying hard to stop.”source ↗
“I'm not the chatter, but I'm a midwesterner who is too polite. So if someone chatty is next to me on the plane and gets going, I have to try reeeally hard to overcome my social conditioning to shut it down or at least step it back.”source ↗
“I'm quite chatty, but I never know if the person next to me will get annoyed.”source ↗
Where this came up
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