Advertisement One evening Adam Mastroianni was reluctantly putting on his bow tie for yet another black-tie party at the University of Oxford that he had no interest in attending. Inevitably, Mastroianni, then a master’s student in psychology at the university, knew that he would wind up stuck in some endless conversation that he did not want with no way to politely extricate himself. Even worse, he suddenly realized, he might unknowingly be the one to perpetuate unwanted conversation traps for others. “What if both people are thinking exactly the same thing, but we’re both stuck because we can’t move on when we’re really done?” he wondered.