The Science of Having a Great Conversation

Forming meaningful bonds with others can improve your health, make you mentally sharper, and fuel creativity. Making friends can feel daunting, but research shows there are many ways to build better connections.

If you’ve ever spoken to someone and later felt that you would have better spent your time talking to a brick wall, you’ll surely identify with the observations of Rebecca West. “There is no such thing as conversation,” the novelist and literary critic wrote in her collection of stories, The Harsh Voice. “It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”

If someone feels that their conversations have left no impression on those around them, then that is the definition of existential isolation. You’ve probably experienced this on a bad date, at an awful dinner party, or during an interminable family gathering.

Psychological research has identified many habits and biases that impose barriers between ourselves and others—and if we wish to have greater connection with the people around us, we must learn how to overcome them. The good news is that corrections are very easy to put into practice. Tiny tweaks to our conversational style can bring enormous benefits.

Let’s begin with the sins of inattention. “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard,” declared the early 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt in his On the Conversation of Authors, published in 1820. “Some of the best talkers are, on this account, the worst company.”

Hazlitt noted that many of his literary acquaintances—who included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stendhal, and William Wordsworth—were so keen to show off their wit and intelligence that they lacked the basic civility of listening to others. He instead recommended that we imitate the painter James Northcote, who, he claimed, was the best listener and—as a result—the best converser that he knew. “I never ate or drank with Mr Northcote; but I have lived on his conversation with undiminished relish ever since I can remember,” Hazlitt wrote. Who wouldn’t want to leave their acquaintances feeling this way?

The simplest way of achieving this is to ask more questions, yet surprisingly few people have cultivated this habit effectively. While studying for a PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard University, Karen Huang invited more than 130 participants into her laboratory and asked them to converse in pairs for a quarter of an hour through an online instant messenger. She found that, even in these 15 minutes, people’s rates of question-asking varied widely, from around four or fewer at the low end to nine or more at the high end.

Asking more questions can make a big difference to someone’s likeability. In a separate experiment, Huang’s team analyzed recordings of people’s conversations during a speed-dating event. Some people consistently asked more questions than others, and this significantly predicted their chance of securing a second date.

It’s easy to understand why questions are so charming: They demonstrate your wish to build mutual understanding and give you the chance to validate each other’s experiences. But even if we do pose lots of questions, we may not be asking the right kind. In her analyses, Huang considered six different categories of questions. You can see the examples below:

1. Introductory
Hello!
Hey, how’s it going?

2. Follow-up
I’m planning a trip to Canada.
Oh, cool. Have you ever been there before?

3. Full switch
I am working at a dry cleaner’s.
What do you like doing for fun?

4. Partial switch
I’m not super outdoorsy, but not opposed to a hike or something once in a while.
Have you been to the beach much in Boston?

5. Mirror
What did you have for breakfast?
I had eggs and fruit. How about you?

6. Rhetorical
Yesterday I followed a marching band around.
Where were they going? It’s a mystery.

Huang found that follow-up questions, which ask for more information about a previous point, are much more appealing than the “switch” questions that change topic, or the “mirror” questions that simply copy what someone has already asked you. The most superficial are the introductory questions—essential social niceties, but which hardly demonstrate a genuine interest in another person.

You might also avoid boomerasking—that’s the habit of posing a question as an excuse to talk about yourself. We could ask about someone’s profession, for example—not because we care how their job is going, but because we want to brag about our own promotion. Emerging research suggests that this habit is particularly unlikeable.

The act of asking elaboration questions can become self-perpetuating. Once someone had made the effort to draw out their partner with one enquiry, it became much easier to ask another.

The Art of Attention

People are acutely aware of whether they are being listened to attentively, and their perception of receiving active attention from another predicts their feelings of trust, and contributes to the well-being boost that typically comes from strong social connections. The more attentive we are to someone, the happier they feel.

Unfortunately, many of us rely on the wrong cues to signal our interest in others. People can display their attention with nonverbal body language, such as leaning forward, nodding, or making empathetic facial expressions; they can employ “paralinguistic” cues such as murmuring sounds of assent or approval; or they may verbally acknowledge what the other person has said. While nonverbal and paralinguistic cues are often genuine signs of attention, they can also be feigned—and if we rely on these alone, our conversation partners may assume the worst.

It is much safer to demonstrate your attention explicitly in the words that you say. Paraphrasing what the other person has said, for example, offers direct proof that you have processed their remark. This is another reason why follow-up questions are so powerful: The details that you include provide the necessary confirmation that you were intent on hearing what they had to say.

Be careful to focus on the core point that the person has been trying to convey. If someone describes a bad date to you, for example, it’s no good inquiring about the bar or giving your opinions on the film that they watched.

You can validate what they are thinking and feeling or perhaps, after acknowledging what they have said, offer an alternative interpretation that may open their mind to a new way of seeing the situation. You must show that you are at least trying to see things their way before offering your alternative take.

As you converse, avoid being distracted by your surroundings. Each time that you show your mind is wandering, you weaken the connection that could have arisen from more attentive listening.

The practice of “phubbing”—or phone snubbing, constantly interrupting a conversation to check your smartphone—is similarly disruptive. In one observational study, researchers watched 100 pairs of participants conversing in local coffee shops. Some naturally took out their phones and held them in their hands or placed them on the table, while others left them out of sight. At the end of the conversation, the researchers asked each person to fill out a questionnaire exploring the experience, and they found that the mere presence of the phones on the table reduced the pair’s feelings of empathy for each other, resulting in a less fulfilling conversation.

The Fast Friends Procedure

Given Hazlitt’s Law, we might conclude that we should always allow our acquaintance to take center stage. This advice can be found in many influential etiquette guides, but psychological research shows that it is misguided: We should feel free to take our fair share of the airtime. The creation of a shared reality between two people relies on us understanding each other.

We should try to create conversations that allow both parties to open up about deeper thoughts and feelings to identify points of common ground. Arthur Aron has powerfully demonstrated the advantages of self-disclosure, using an experimental paradigm that is sometimes known as the “fast friends procedure.”

Aron’s participants were first sorted into pairs. They were then given a series of 36 questions to discuss over the next 45 minutes. Half the pairs saw questions that stimulated small talk:

• How did you celebrate last Halloween?
• Describe the last pet you owned.
• Where did you go to high school?

This was the low self-disclosure condition. They were perfectly reasonable questions—the kind you might happily ask on a first date—but they weren’t necessarily going to provide many profound insights into someone’s inner life.

The rest of the participants were asked to discuss more probing questions:

• What would constitute a perfect day for you?
• If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
• Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

This was the high self-disclosure condition. The aim was to get the pairs to open up to each other about their specific thoughts and feelings, with answers that more directly reflected the idiosyncrasies of their minds. In each case, the participants were asked to engage equally. “One of you should read aloud the first slip and then both do what it asks,” they were told.

After the 45 minutes were up, the participants were asked to describe how close they felt to their partner using a seven-point scale, a higher score indicating greater closeness.

The people in the high self-disclosure condition rated their relationship as 4, while those in the small talk condition rated themselves as 3. This would be a relatively large effect size for any single psychological intervention, but it’s especially noteworthy when you consider that most people’s lasting friendships do not score much higher.

These results have now been replicated in large studies, which have also shown that it is just as effective during remote communication as face-to-face interactions. Self-disclosure can even increase connection among people from different social groups, increasing closeness regardless of differences in demographic factors, such as age or immigration status, that you may expect to pose as barriers to friendship.

When asked to predict how they will feel during the exchange, most people expect that the fast friendship procedure will be painfully awkward. When they engage in the task, however, the conversation flows far more smoothly than they expected, and afterward they report feeling a greater sense of connection with their partners than they had thought possible.

People expect their partners to be indifferent to them and to be bored by their self-disclosure. But people are far more interested in our innermost thoughts and feelings than we imagine. Self-disclosure requires a leap of faith, but when we make it, we tend to land safely.

People who have undertaken heightened self-disclosure begin to show some of the physiological markers of social connection. When we form a shared reality with someone, our brains and bodies begin to synchronize as we both read and respond to the world in the same way. Our hormonal responses to stress become attuned, for example—so that levels of cortisol rise and fall in tandem as we experience the same events.

The warm feelings of affection and trust that arise from self-disclosure seem to be aroused by the release of natural opioids in the brain, which encourages further bonding. To prove this, in 2019 a group of Canadian scientists turned to a drug called naltrexone that blocks the brain’s opioid signaling. Someone who is given morphine after taking naltrexone won’t feel the pain relief or sense of bliss that typically accompanies the drug. If opioids can explain some of the buzz we get from social connection, then participants who have taken naltrexone should not reap such large benefits from the fast friends procedure.

The researchers recruited around 160 participants for their study, who were divided into pairs. Half were given naltrexone, and the others a placebo, before they each discussed the 36 self-disclosure questions. After their chat, each participant took a series of questionnaires describing how the conversation had evolved. As expected, the participants who had taken the naltrexone were less open in the conversations and this blunted the mood boost people normally experience following the exchange.

Needless to say, using the 36 questions must be conducted with tact and discretion. While you might slip one or two into a conversation, you would look odd if you rolled them out whenever you met a new acquaintance—unless, of course, you explain what you are doing.

More importantly, you should draw on the spirit of this research by being a little more transparent about your deeper thoughts and feelings. Whether you are describing a secret dream, expressing an unexpected emotional reaction to a news story, or talking about a particularly precious memory, be generous with the information that you provide.

Eschewing small talk in favor of deeper conversations should boost your long-term life satisfaction. Researchers recently equipped 486 participants with a small “electronically activated recorder” that allowed the scientists to eavesdrop on the participants’ interactions. The scientists found that the amount of time someone spent in small talk about daily banalities made almost no difference to their contentment, whereas deeper conversations involving the exchange of meaningful information about their circumstances and interests had a significant impact. When you bare your soul, others will often respond in kind—and you will all feel better for it.

The Novelty Penalty

We must look at one final psychological phenomenon, known as the “novelty penalty.” The term comes from an experiment by Gus Cooney, one of the researchers who discovered the liking gap—the disparity between how much someone thinks another person likes them, versus how much they actually do. His team first placed participants into groups of three. While alone, each member watched one of two short videos: a TED talk about the intelligence of crows or an interview with the owner of a specialist soda shop.

The trio then met as a group, and one member—the speaker—was asked to describe the video he or she had seen, while the other two members listened for two minutes. In some groups, the listeners and speakers had all watched the same video, while in others, the speaker spoke about the clip that the listeners hadn’t seen.

You would expect that learning something new would be far more enjoyable and interesting than hearing something that is already known to you. But the listeners had the opposite reaction: They tended to prefer hearing about the video they had just seen, remaining underwhelmed by the talk that contained fresh information. This is the novelty penalty: a general preference to hear about familiar experiences.

You will have almost certainly noticed the novelty penalty when you have returned from an exotic holiday. Your mind is still full of all the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the places and the amazing people that you met along the way. As you try to describe the experience, however, you may find people’s eyes glazing over. It’s not that your audience doesn’t care. They simply don’t have enough knowledge to immerse themselves in your descriptions and understand why the trip was so special to you. The informational gaps could create a feeling of distance that undermines the sense of a shared reality.

One strategy to avoid this would be to focus on topics that are equally familiar to both parties. You may think that it’s cool to talk about music that no one else listens to, or films no one else has seen—but this can have the very opposite effect. Looking for shared interests or common experiences to discuss is much healthier.

But avoiding all unfamiliar topics is far from the ideal way of building social connection; if a subject is central to your life and represents an important element of your personality, you need to find a way to express it—otherwise your shared reality with the other person will always have an important part missing. In these cases, you can escape the novelty penalty with vivid storytelling that helps to put the other person in your shoes. If you know that the person is a gastronome, for example, start out by discussing the food you ate on the trip, which should act as a bridge to their own interests and experiences.

As you move onto less familiar terrain, you must make sure that you provide enough details to avoid creating unnecessary informational gaps. Think carefully about their baseline knowledge, so that you don’t patronize them—if necessary, you should ask how familiar the subject already is—and use this to gauge the elements that you need to include to ease their understanding.

In Cooney’s experiments, speakers reduced the novelty penalty if they gave a more complete narrative of the videos under discussion. When they were recounting the recent scientific discoveries about crow intelligence, for example, it helped to describe the inspiration for the research, and a general overview of the main conclusions (crows are smart!), followed by more in-depth accounts of the individual findings. They ended by describing how we could train crows to pick up litter in sports stadiums—and how our understanding of crow intelligence might change the way we think about the human mind. With this level of detail, the speakers enjoyed the discussions almost as much as the discussion of the topic that was already familiar.

You might also remember the novelty penalty when the roles are reversed, and you are struggling to engage with someone else’s experiences. In the past, your general reluctance to ask questions might have prevented you from seeking out the additional information that would allow you to close the gap in understanding.

Whoever we are talking to, and whatever we are talking about, we should be looking for balance—in the exchanges between partners, in the depth of the discussion and in the familiarity of the topics. This is the crux of our fifth law of connection: In conversation, demonstrate active attention, engage in self-disclosure, and avoid the novelty penalty, to build mutual understanding and contribute to the merging of our minds. Whether we are on a first date or meeting a lifelong friend, each sentence we speak offers a new opportunity for greater connection.

Excerpt adapted from The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network by David Robson. Published by Pegasus Books on June 4, 2024.