![]() ![]() In the final experiments, participants who expected they would be speaking to a caring person chose to discuss deeper questions than participants who expected to speak to an uncaring partner. “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.” “Human beings are deeply social and tend to reciprocate in conversation. Prof Epley said: “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. ![]() On average, people consistently underestimated how interested their partners would be in learning about them. In some of the experiments, the researchers asked participants to predict how interested their conversation partner would be in the discussion. In light of the findings, the researchers suggest people may not be having more deep conversations with strangers because they might underestimate how interested strangers are in learning about their deeper thoughts and feelings. Racegoers chat whilst sitting on a bench during day five of Royal Ascot (Steven Paston/PA) 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. The deeper conversations were also more enjoyable and led to a stronger sense of connection. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be significantly more than those who discussed shallow questions, the study suggests. Researchers found the effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. The study found that overall both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and participants felt greater feelings of connections and enjoyment than expected. They also predicted how connected they thought they would feel to their partner and how much they would enjoy the conversation.Īfter the talk they rated how awkward the conversations actually were, how connected they felt and how much they enjoyed the experience. ![]() 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. While deep questions resulted in 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?”. “Tell your partner about it”, or “what do you think about the weather today?”. Shallow questions included small-talk topics like “what is the best TV show you’ve seen in the last month?” Pairs of people, mainly strangers, were asked to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. In a bid to answer this question researchers designed a series of 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants. “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?” ![]()
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