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)

Private Profile

Role in the universe: The center is the standing source for any story in which a person’s inner position and the version of it that reaches other people have come apart. It does not study lying, persuasion, or rhetoric. It studies capacity — the fixed, physical, unglamorous limit of a channel that emits one word at a time — and it treats every downstream social consequence of that limit as an engineering result rather than a moral one.

Tone and posture: Institutionally exhausted in a specific way. The center has spent twelve years producing findings that cannot be conveyed in the medium in which its findings are usually requested, and it is fully aware of this. It declines nearly all live interviews. Its media office responds to broadcast requests with a written statement explaining, at length, why it is a written statement.

Useful tensions: The center’s own research predicts that its research will be misunderstood, and it is. Its work is regularly cited by advocacy organizations across the political spectrum, each of which extracts the center’s first independent clause and discards the rest — an outcome the center has described, in an editor’s note, as “the strongest external validation available to us.”

The Ypsilanti grievance: The center’s cohort recruitment drew heavily from Washtenaw County, and a disproportionate share of its most-cited subjects live in Ypsilanti, seven miles east. Subjects there have noted, consistently and without prompting, that the laboratory is in Ann Arbor. The center has recorded this in its field notes under the heading “unsolicited comparative rent data” and has not determined what to do with it.

Leadership

  • Dr. Terrence Kolbeck — Director and Principal Investigator
  • Dr. Priscilla Ibarra — Associate Director, Field Protocols
  • Advisory Board — nine members, who convene by circulated memorandum

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