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.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Putting on headphones immediatelyDid this help you?
- 2Using body language and reading social cuesDid this help you?
- 3Giving polite short answers before returning to books, movies, or sleepDid this help you?
- 4Overcoming social conditioning to shut down unwanted conversationsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, 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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