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NancyLebovitz comments on Mental Metadata - Less Wrong
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Sometimes when I ask people how things are going with them, I don't want a lot of technical detail, I want to know something about whether they're happy or not with how things are working out.
More generally, (and this might be worth another post) people are pretty inflexible about how much detail they give, and have trouble going to a more detailed style or a more summarized style than their usual.
I naturally give way more detail (especially qualifiers) than most people want in most situations. I can correct it somewhat in email (by revising; I can't omit unneeded detail without writing it out to see which parts are unneeded) although it takes much longer than just giving the detail. In a realtime conversation I'm not sure, although it's probably less bad because of the tighter feedback loop.
It sounds like you're saying this is a general phenomenon; do you have a cite, or is this based on personal experience?
Interestingly, I have to force myself to write out descriptive details when writing a narrative. Which means it's the kind of information, not just the amount. So maybe it's more linked to this article than you seem to be thinking?
Personal experience. I tend to like hearing less detail than people want to give, and it's difficult to get them to summarize.
People don't generally ask me to change my detail level-- I don't know whether I'm in a sweet spot, the tolerable range, or (as I strongly suspect) most people are much more inhibited about asking for a different detail level than I am.
If you ever figure out any tricks to get others to change, I'd be interested - I run in to the same problem :)
Conversely, I do get a fair number of requests to change my own detail level: I tend to strongly encourage people to ask for elaboration as needed, so I do get a fair number of "requests for additional detail". And occasionally I'll have someone cut me off for having answered a question they didn't intend (i.e. "I meant, what color is it?"). I've found demonstrating positive/happy body language in these situations, and verbally reinforcing that I like this, has made people do that more often.
It may also be a specific, rather than a general inhibition: if someone responded to me in a way that made me believe they wanted less detail than I was providing, I would not be inclined to ask them for more details about their answers even if I wanted more information than that in general.