It might seem rational to assume that typical encounters with strangers involve small talk rather than the kind of deeper and more meaningful conversations we reserve for people we know well.  Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggest we might do this out of a misguided belief in the interest the other person has in our life, when in actual fact they may be more interested than we believe.

“Connecting with others in meaningful ways tends to make people happier, and yet people also seem reluctant to engage in deeper and more meaningful conversation,” the researchers say. “This struck us as an interesting social paradox: If connecting with others in deep and meaningful ways increases well-being, then why aren’t people doing it more often in daily life?”

Social experiments

The researchers created a series of experiments involving nearly 2,000 volunteers, who were asked to pair up with the other volunteers, none of whom they knew.  They were asked to discuss either shallow topics or deeper topics, with some participants given questions to help get things started.

Before each conversation, the volunteers were asked to predict how awkward they thought the conversation might be, how much they would enjoy the conversation, and how connected they would be to their conversation partner.  The same questions were then asked again after the conversations had taken place.

The results reveal that people found not only deep conversations less awkward than they thought but also shallow ones too.  What’s more, there was also a greater sense of connectedness and enjoyment than people expected.

False perceptions

Those people who were engaged in deep conversations significantly overestimated the level of awkwardness from the conversations, especially in relation to shallower conversations.  Alas, the opposite was actually the case, with deeper conversations proving more enjoyable and less awkward.

All of which begs the question as to why we don’t have deeper conversations more often if they’re so enjoyable?  The researchers hypothesized that this might be because we tend to underestimate how interested other people actually are in our deeper thoughts.

This materialized in some of the conversations where participants were asked to predict how interested their partner would be in the conversation and then say how interested they were afterward.  As before, most people took an unduly pessimistic view of things and thought people would be less interested in learning about them than they actually were.

“People seemed to imagine that revealing something meaningful or important about themselves in conversation would be met with blank stares and silence, only to find this wasn’t true in the actual conversation,” the researchers say. “Human beings are deeply social and tend to reciprocate in conversation. If you share something meaningful and important, you are likely to get something meaningful and important exchanged in return, leading to a considerably better conversation.”

Optimistic outlook

The researchers then tested whether having a more positive outlook would influence our conversational habits.  For instance, they told some volunteers that their conversational partner was an interested and caring person, while others were told that their partner was the opposite.

When we expected our partner to care more about our views and feelings, this seemed to prompt us to hold deeper conversations than when we thought the other person would not be interested.  Indeed, even learning about the earlier experiments and their finding that people were generally more interested than we think was enough to prompt people to have deeper conversations with others.

“Our participants’ expectations about deeper conversations were not woefully misguided, but they were reliably miscalibrated in a way that could keep people from engaging a little more deeply with others in their daily lives,” the researchers conclude. “As the pandemic wanes and we all get back to talking with each other again, being aware that others also like meaningful conversation might lead you to spend less time in small talk and have more pleasant interactions as a result.”