How To Do Meaningful Conversations?
Have you ever had a good conversation in an elevator? If your answer is “no,” you're not alone; being in an elevator with a stranger is a universally embarrassing experience.
One reason is the duration of the elevator journey - it's long enough to feel the social pressure to say something but not long enough to say something meaningful. Elevators around the world are a microcosm of the most painful aspect of social interaction: small talk.
Psychologist Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona studies conversations, specifying short discussions based on how much information is exchanged and saying, “If I don't know more about you in the end than I did before, then it's a short conversation”.
The emptiness that permeates small talk explains why it is boring, but it may be worse. Certainly, some short conversations are unfortunately boring and embarrassing, and it is not limited to those in the elevator; we may even see those conversations at the hairdresser, in the taxi, or even with our best friend. It is sometimes difficult to know what to say and how to find a conversation that breaks the silence and fills the space between us.
Many of us ask for help with small talk, and the internet has responded with countless articles suggesting solutions and offering advice.
Many of these tips aim to turn bad short talk into interesting short talk, for example, by commenting on a shared experience or asking an open question.
In fact, when it goes well, small talk is not only fun; it's also helpful. A body of research focuses on how relatively transient social interaction between people - and even strangers - can boost our mood and even our beliefs about the human race.
For example, according to a recent study conducted during the pandemic, Jillian Sandstorm, a social psychologist at the University of Essex, brought together strangers to have a conversation on Zoom about what they wanted. Compared to what they felt before, she said that after the call, participants reported feeling more confident in others and feeling that people are generally good, kind, gentle and fair.
Although it's critical to understand the value of small talk and that it doesn't have to be intrusive, it still falls short of what many of us crave: a meaningful conversation. By this, I mean a conversation where we forgo the surface-level small talk, no matter how entertaining, and dive deeply.
Mehl calls these conversations "basic," and believes that your knowledge is the key to having successful ones: "If people start discussing information, it becomes basic, and most importantly , you participate in the conversation.
Of course, you can learn something from conversations with an electrician who comes to your home or during a doctor's appointment. To be meaningful , the nature of the information you receive must be important. When a conversation allows you to understand something important about yourself, the other person, or even the world, it becomes meaningful.
We derive meaning from understanding ourselves because of the deep human need for self-expression. Social psychologist Kristy Gardiner at the University of East London studies social interactions and identifies self-expression - sharing the essential aspects of our personality - as the first of the three components that make a conversation meaningful.
Most of us crave an opportunity to share what we think, to clarify and explore what matters to us. Having a chance to formulate these abstract ideas into words and share them with an interested listener who appreciates them makes us feel understood.
In meaningful discussions, the role of the listener is vital (which is why meaningful conversation can be so much more rewarding than just writing down our thoughts or talking to ourselves when we're alone at home).
An active listener allows us to receive feedback on how we look in their eyes. According to Gardiner - the second important part of meaningful conversations - it helps us understand ourselves more, “We often do this when we reflect our feelings on others. Speaking and listening help us understand ourselves better and facilitates a sense of connection. Gardiner classifies it as the final component of meaningful conversations - Absolutely, such discussions make us feel more connected to others and thus satisfy a deep and fundamental human impulse.
Of course, in two-way conversations, we switch roles between listening and speaking. The other person will also talk and share what they know and think, which gives us a chance to learn something important about them. Valuable conversations, in short, allow us to learn something important about ourselves, the other person, or the world. When this happens, we feel better about understanding and communicating with those around us.
This sense of understanding and communication makes us feel good and is essential to our well-being. In one study, Mehl and his colleagues asked volunteers to complete questionnaires and carry a recording device for several days; this allowed them to analyze the quality of their conversations. The researchers found that the more substantive the volunteers' conversations, the more satisfied they felt with life.
Happier people may tend to have more substantive conversations rather than regular conversations, but there is other evidence to suggest the power of meaningful conversations. For example, Research conducted by American psychologist Arthur Aron in the 1990s found that encouraging couples of people to have conversations about deeper, more personal topics led them to get closer together.
If meaningful conversations are so rewarding and useful, how can we have more of them? For many of us, given the amount of time we spend with others, such good conversations are annoyingly rare, but fortunately, with a little effort and some new approaches, we can find a way to enjoy them a lot.
What to do?
1. Note that short conversations are an essential step
To improve your conversations, do not ignore short conversations at all; It has long been recognized as a universal way to create an atmosphere and enhance intimacy. The leading anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski said in an article published in 1923 these initial dialogical exchanges, although "not a reflection of an intellectual response, and not necessarily a reflection of the listener, serve a social function" and wrote that through short conversations, "the bonds of union arise".
“I liken small talk to the ineffective elements found in medicines, while the inactive element is necessary to hold the pills together. The short talk does exactly that. You need to have a short talk in the hope of having more substantive conversations”.
In other words, it's worth taking the trouble to talk short because it lays the foundations for something richer. Maybe when you meet someone for the first time, you have to talk about your trip, but you don't just have to talk about it, and luckily , there are many things you can do to reach deeper conversations faster.
2. Ask better questions
For obvious reasons, many of us like to talk about topics that interest us personally, but the key to having better conversations is to step out of your thoughts for a moment and think about the other person more; this means asking questions. American journalist and writer Celeste Headlee, who participated in a Ted Talk in 2015 about ways to have better conversations, was seen by more than 23 million people.
She recommends using open-ended questions in a journalistic style, starting with who, what, when, where, how, why, and how. She said, "Ask the other person like, 'How was that?' or “How did you feel?” Because then they might have to pause for a moment and think about it, and you'll get a more interesting response”.
For more inspiration, check out a list of 36 questions Aaron and his colleagues compiled in the 1990s, now known as the Fast Friends Procedure. The list was later published in The New York Times in an article titled “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This” in 2015 but was designed for non-romantic content to see if two strangers going through these questions would end up feeling close to each other in just 45 minutes.
There are three sets of questions, which gradually become more personal, culminating in questions like “If you were to die this evening without having had a chance to connect with anyone, what would you regret most not telling someone? Why haven't you told them yet? In the original study, Aaron's team found that two strangers felt closer to each other after passing the 36 questions from couples who answered a list of short talk questions like “How often do you cut your hair?”.
However, asking the right questions involves judging your partner in the conversation and the context in which you are located.
In a 2013 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Aaron advised caution: “You have to slow down the pace of your speech and give others a chance to talk". Psychologists conducted a 2017 study at Harvard University and found that people who ask questions tend to be more favored by their conversation partners. And that's not really surprising - when you ask questions - you give the other person a chance to express themselves and share their opinions, and that's what almost all of us enjoy.
3. Listening to answers
Asking questions is just the beginning. What comes up repeatedly in good conversations is the importance of really listening, and how rarely people do that. Stephen Covey wrote in his classic book Self-Help: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Most of us don't listen with the intention of understanding; we listen with the intention of responding, and go beyond that instinct, in addition to asking good questions, you need to make a concerted effort to really listen to the response.
This effort does not have to be a chore. In fact, Sandstorm believes that part of the fun that comes from good conversations is investing your curiosity, and says, “Conversation is likely to be better if you focus on the other person and try to get to know them”.
If you have difficulty finding the motivation to ask questions and listen to others, it might be helpful to think again about how much this person appreciates it. Sandstrom says: “Following up questions makes people feel heard and listened to, and it's worth noting that the Harvard study showed how much we admire people who ask questions, and also found that we especially appreciate people who follow up by asking questions.
4. Get ready to share something about yourself
There's a crucial transitional moment in the development of all relationships - whether it's a shift from acquaintances to emotional attention, from colleague to close friend, or from neighbor to friend - it's the moment you decide to share something personal about yourself. Psychologists call this self-disclosure, an essential step in creating familiarity.
Communication experts Amanda Carpenter and Kathryn Greene at Rutgers University say self-disclosure is like peeling an onion. Every time an individual shares something important about themselves, a layer is removed, revealing something deeper and more important until they eventually get to the core. They wrote in 2016: “Getting to the core of another person takes a long time; the core includes most of the most intimate details about the person”.
Revealing something of your own - even if it's “tier one” - helps you have better conversations, encouraging your partner to open up too. Thanks to “reciprocity,” the other person will have to do it in return - to maintain a sense of fairness and balance - Sandstrom says: “Self-disclosure is an important thing that helps people feel closer to each other. When you disclose to someone else, it encourages them to tell as well, and this mutual escalation and self-disclosure leads to a sense of closeness”.
If this sounds a bit daunting, remember that you don't have to go straight to the “pulp of the onion.” Self-disclosure can include sharing a relatively small part of yourself. It can also be helpful to recognize that it's a brave gesture, says Gardiner: “Perhaps the smallest thing to focus on, in your current relationships, is to be brave and share something about yourself; it can be fear, or it can be a goal, or even a value or a belief, and it may be something that happened to you in the past that you didn't tell them. I think that will make it a bit easier".
5. Willingness to know the other party
If you already know that you will meet a specific person or group of people, then, to increase the chances of a more meaningful meeting, it may also be useful to adopt a "learner" mentality; this is especially appropriate for meaningful conversations, whether in the framework of work or in an educational context, the meaning is not necessarily derived from the exchange of personal conversations, but from having a substantive and satisfying conversation on an interesting topic or issue.
This may involve a bit of preparation beforehand (such as reading something about a person's interests or professional background or reading about a topic about which you plan to have a conversation in advance). Still, it also requires a touch of humility and openness - a willingness to acknowledge what you don't know and a willingness to learn - this attitude can provide you with a rich environment to learn something new, which can ultimately bring meaning to you.
6. Willingness to listen and respond
The essence of good conversations is reciprocity, and talking is likely to be reinforced when you and the other party stick to an easy rule: give space to talk and listen well to what they have to say. “You adhere to the principle of reciprocity,” says Mehl. You show interest in the other person, so the other person shows interest in you. Then you feel a sense of belonging through mutual interactions; in this way , meaningful conversations are about giving and taking, constantly observing what the other person is saying, what you are saying, and how they respond and you respond to them.
None of this is easy and may not come naturally, which is probably why great conversations are so scarce, but if we remember the importance of giving and taking. We're willing to make an effort; there's no reason why we can't all find opportunities to enjoy more meaningful conversations.