While we may believe that we want our colleagues to be competent rather than likable, recent research from Binghamton University suggests that when push comes to shove, we tend to prefer our colleagues to be amenable than challenging.
“We assume that people are selected for important task forces and teams because of the knowledge, skills and abilities they bring to the table. However, this research suggests that people may often get picked because team members feel comfortable with them,” the researchers say. “People may be willing to sacrifice a bit in terms of performance in order to have a really positive team experience.”
Building relations
So how can we build these relationships with our peers? A study from the University of Georgia suggests that a good approach may be to slow down and take our time.
The researchers used a job interview as their Petri dish to explore how we can best build a rapport with others. The study sought to compare the relative effectiveness of both verbal and nonverbal approaches to establishing a rapport with someone, with the researchers believing it could be relevant regardless of whether in a job interview, a medical consultation, or even a police interrogation.
“It was a bit of a surprise to find that using verbal and nonverbal techniques together backfired,” the researchers explain. “In hindsight it was probably seen as forced or too much, making the interviewee feel that any rapport that resulted was fake. The bottom line is that using one technique or the other is better than neither or both.”
The experiment featured one-on-one interviews with 80 volunteers, with four different strategies used to try and build a rapport with them. For instance, one of these used what is known as verbal commonalities, which is where the interviewer discloses information about their own life to try and establish some common ground. This is based on the concept that we tend to like people who are similar to us, and are therefore more likely to open up as a result.
A second approach used the mirroring nonverbal technique whereby the interviewer copies the posture and body movements of the interviewee. This is a more subconscious attempt to suggest similarities between the two parties, again with the hope that it will encourage the interviewee to open up.
The third method combined these two approaches, while the fourth set of interviews acted as the control and therefore didn’t deploy any of the strategies at all.
Understanding others
Before the interviews, the volunteers were asked to complete a survey in which they had to rank various topics in terms of their personal importance. These included friends, mental health, romance, personal finances, and medical history. This information was available to the interviewer who used the topics to determine a theme for the interview. At the end of the interviews, the volunteers were asked to rate them based on their willingness to carry on discussions with the interviewer, which was the proxy for a rapport between the two.
The results suggest that interviewees were most likely to open up and discuss more personal topics when a rapport was built using verbal commonalities on their own. By contrast, when mirroring was used alone, it didn’t really produce any more disclosure than in the control group. When verbal and nonverbal methods were used together, this produced the lowest rapport of any of the methods, including none at all.
“Based on the literature, we knew that verbal and nonverbal techniques work to help build rapport during an interview, but we didn’t know what happened if you used both,” the researchers explain. “This applies to everything from investigative interviewing to therapists and their clients, so we were interested in knowing which technique—or combination of techniques—was going to be most effective.”
Not easy
While these verbal techniques can be learned, they are certainly not easy and require preparation and concentration during our conversations. Not only does it require us to formulate potent questions beforehand but also deploys active listening throughout the conversation to help establish a strong rapport, which can easily overload us. The researchers believe it is something that we can develop with practice, however.
One positive, in terms of our cognitive load, is that when we try to deploy verbal and nonverbal methods it appears to seem forced or phony to those we’re conversing with. The authors argue that it becomes evident that we’re trying to actively build rapport with the other person, which in turn puts them off and removes any of the gains achieved from either technique.
While the apparent willingness of participants to discuss sensitive topics with relative strangers surprised the researchers, a study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggests this should not be quite so surprising. The study found that we tend to think that personal conversations will be far more awkward than they actually are.
“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?”
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.”
