people deep conversations with strangers

In one experiment, participants who had a deep conversation with one partner and a shallow conversation with another partner initially expected to prefer the shallow conversation but actually preferred the deep one. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. Afterward, they rated the awkwardness, connectedness and enjoyment they actually felt. Shallow questions included typical small-talk topics, such as, “What is the best TV show you’ve seen in the last month? Tell your partner about it,” or “What do you think about the weather today?” Deep questions elicited more personal and intimate information, such as, “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?” or “If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future or anything else, what would you want to know?” In other experiments, people generated their own deep and shallow conversation topics.īefore the conversations, participants predicted how awkward they thought the conversations would be, how connected they thought they would feel to their conversation partner, and how much they would enjoy the conversation. In some experiments, people received shallow or deep questions to discuss. The researchers asked pairs of people - mainly strangers - to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. Kumar and his colleagues, Michael Kardas of Northwestern University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, designed a series of 12 experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. The findings appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “But we’d likely be happier if we dug deeper when we’re interacting with others.” “We wrongly assume that other people are somewhat indifferent towards us, so we avoid more intimate conversation, thinking it would be awkward,” said Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business and co-author of the study. The findings have important practical implications, especially as the pandemic wanes and people become more social again. People benefit from deep conversations, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much they’re interested in our lives, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

People deep conversations with strangers