Some people don't stay quiet in arguments because they're calm, they stay quiet because they ran the math years ago and concluded that saying the thing costs more than swallowing it, and they've been paying the cheaper price so long they forgot it was a choice - Silicon Canals

"The popular read on the quiet person in the argument is that they have achieved some kind of emotional mastery; non-reactive, regulated, a Zen thing. The assumption is that the stillness reflects an internal state that matches the external one."

"What is actually happening, in a great many cases, is a cost-benefit analysis so old and so automatic that the person running it no longer experiences it as a decision. They ran the numbers the first few hundred times."

"The ache was cheaper, so they paid the ache. Then they paid it again. Then a thousand more times. And at some point the ache stopped registering as a price at all, because the body got used to the transaction."

Silence during arguments is frequently misinterpreted as emotional control. Instead, it often stems from an automated cost-benefit analysis. Individuals may have previously calculated that speaking up leads to conflict, while remaining silent results in a manageable discomfort. Over time, this discomfort becomes normalized, and the individual no longer perceives it as a cost. The ongoing transaction of silence versus expression continues without conscious awareness, revealing a deeper mechanism at play in interpersonal dynamics.

Read at Silicon Canals