![]() Deep 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. 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 how awkward the conversations actually were, how connected they actually felt and how much enjoyment they actually experienced. 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?” while 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. ![]() To answer that question, Epley and his colleagues designed a series of 12 experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. He is a coauthor of the study published in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology." “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?” “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,” said Nicholas Epley, PhD, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. WASHINGTON - People benefit from deep and meaningful conversations that help us forge connections with one another, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much others are interested in our lives and wrongly believe that deeper conversations will be more awkward and less enjoyable than they actually are, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
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