How does a stranger eventually become your friend, or your partner or your spouse? How do you develop deep relationships in the first place? You need to have these interactions in order for a stranger to become someone that you're close with. This is the way that we build connections with other people. We like the other person more and we enjoy the conversation way more. Q: What happens when we throw caution to the wind and have intimate conversations with strangers?Ī: It just ends up being more enjoyable than we expect and less awkward. It just turns out that we're sort of systematically miscalibrated, and we don't recognize this sociality in others. Our choice to dive a little deeper is guided by how we think a conversation is going to go,Īnd how much we think that our partner will care about the meaningful details of our life. The expectations that we have to affect our decisions to engage in deeper interactions. But it turns out that people are more interested than we expect. You and I might assume that we care more about the intimate details of someone else’s life than that same person would care about those revelations from us. And it turns out that part of what's going on here is that we also tend to underestimate how much other people will care about what we have to These miscalibrated expectations of awkwardness and discomfort seemed to stand in the way of digging a little bit deeper. They also lead to stronger bonds, more liking and greater happiness than people anticipate. It seems like fears of awkwardness are a big part of the barrier, but deeper conversations actually tend to feel less awkward. We had participants report how they expected to feel after these conversations and compared the expectations with how they actually felt. Q: Why is it that we stick to surface-level topics when we don’t know someone well?Ī: Our main finding here is that people really seem to underestimate the positivity of these deeper, more meaningful, more intimate conversations. They were questions like: What are you most grateful for in your life? Or, when was the last time you cried in front of another person? In our experiments, we sometimes gave people deep conversation topics. Q: In your recent paper you use the terms “small talk” and “deep talk.” What is deep talk and what makes it deep?Ī: Deep conversations are essentially those that include self-disclosure - revealing personally intimate information about what someone's thinking, what they're feeling, what they're experiencing or what their beliefs are. Kumar is an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and a primary author on the recent study, Overly Shallow?: Miscalibrated Expectations Create a Barrier to Deeper Conversation. So, what’s stopping us from talking about what really matters? spoke with research psychologist Amit Kumar about the psychological barriers that stop us from having intimate conversations and how to overcome them. Yet, other research has observed that less than half of conversations are meaningful exchanges. Responsibilities of their day job or pontificating about the weather to a stranger, then why do we keep doing it?įor years, research has indicated that substantive, intimate conversations strengthen social bonds between people and, in turn, make them happier. “I hate small talk.” It seems to be a popular sentiment. But if no one likes recanting the
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |