Public Profile
The Center for Discursive Throughput is a research center at the University of Michigan, jointly administered by the Department of Psychology and the Department of Communication and Media, devoted to the measurement of how much of a belief survives the act of saying it. Founded in 2014, the center occupies the third floor of a former audiology building on East Huron Street, a space it retains chiefly for its soundproofing.
The center’s premise, set out in its founding prospectus and unchanged since, is that human belief is held in parallel and delivered in series, and that the conversion between the two states is lossy in ways that can be quantified. Its instruments accordingly do not measure what a subject thinks; they measure the difference between what a subject thinks and what a listener carries away. The center’s standard protocol, full elicitation, obtains a subject’s complete position in writing over repeated sessions — the mean duration is six hours and forty minutes — and then compares that document against a listener’s reconstruction of the same position after hearing it spoken. The gap is the center’s entire subject matter.
The center is best known for the four-year federal study Throughput Limits in the Oral Expression of Political Belief, funded under Section 9(d) of the 2022 reauthorization of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences and transmitted to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in August 2026. Working from a cohort of 4,117 adults in eleven states, the study established that the complete serial delivery of an average American political position would require nineteen hours and forty minutes of uninterrupted speech, that the median political conversation permits forty-one seconds, and that a listener’s reconstruction of a speaker’s views correlates at r = 0.81 with the speaker’s first independent clause and at r = 0.04 with everything after it.
The study introduced the term the bolus — the undifferentiated mass of belief awaiting transmission, held all at once and possessing, in the center’s formulation, no natural front. The center maintains that political silence is not avoidance but a bandwidth judgment, and that the judgment is correct.
The center publishes Throughput, a semiannual journal, and hosts the Ann Arbor Colloquium on Serial Expression, which since 2021 has been conducted entirely in writing.
Notable Publications
- The Ordering Problem: Clause Selection Under Conversational Time Pressure (Kolbeck, 2019)
- Fidelity Loss in Spoken Belief: A Replication Across Four Registers (Kolbeck & Ibarra, 2023)
- Throughput Limits in the Oral Expression of Political Belief (Center Press, 2026)
Leadership
- Dr. Terrence Kolbeck — Director and Principal Investigator
- Dr. Priscilla Ibarra — Associate Director, Field Protocols
- Advisory Board — nine members, who convene by circulated memorandum
Articles
- American Men Are Not Afraid to Discuss Politics, Study Finds; Their Views Simply Will Not Fit Through the Mouth — The average American political position requires nineteen hours and forty minutes to say aloud. The median listener reaches a conclusion at forty-one seconds.
- Man Who Once Talked to Himself Now Only Rants to Himself, and Says He Tries Not to Take It Personally — Asked how it felt to be on the receiving end, Mr. Amato said he knew it wasn't about him, because he knew where he was coming from.