“Hey! How are you? It’s been such a long time since we last spoke. What have you been up to?” Many conversations start like this, but once that first sentence is out of your mouth, the rest often doesn’t flow as easily. It doesn’t matter if you’re speaking with a stranger or a long-lost friend, the conversation can quickly turn awkward, annoying, boring, embarrassing… or all those things at once.
Although communication is at the core of the human experience, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and shy away from it, dismissing it as too hard, says Adam Mastroianni, a Columbia Business School researcher who studies how people perceive each other. But having good conversations really isn’t that complicated. There are just a couple of things you’ll want to keep in mind.
A lot of people boast about their hate for small talk, but it exists for a reason, Mastroianni says. “You need to have some kind of baseline of a relationship with someone before you can get to the next step,” he explains. Conversations, in fact, are not just about information extraction—they also help us show that we care and are listening and attending to each other, even if we’re just talking about how our day went.
“Other primates do this by picking bugs out of their [community members’] hair. We do it using our words,” says Mastroianni. “Someone who doesn’t get that, to me, feels a little suspect. It’s like they want something instrumental out of this conversation, rather than doing it for the sake of drawing closer with someone.” So don’t worry that questions like, “How was your day?” and “How was your meal?” are too basic. Small talk can help ease into more meaningful conversations, gradually increasing reciprocal intimacy.
Constantly checking your phone while talking with somebody is rude, vexing, and makes you a worse conversation partner no matter how well you think you can multitask. You don’t have to take our word for it, either: research published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2018 showed that people who used their phones during a conversation felt more distracted and experienced less overall enjoyment.
Even if you think you’re exceptionally skilled at using your phone while chatting, you’re probably not. Another study published in the same journal four years later showed that people fail to recognize how negatively their phone use is affecting a social interaction, even though they can easily see how others’ phone use is affecting it. That’s because we all think we’re using our phones for a good reason, while others aren’t. So, seriously, keep your phone out of sight, and both you and the person you’re talking with will enjoy the conversation more.
Once you’re present and immersed in the conversation you’re having, you should be able to go with the flow. Imagine walking into a room full of mimes and pretending to shoot one of them with a bow and arrow, Mastroianni says. The target will go along with it, agreeing to the reality you’re creating and cooperating with you. “I think that is what a lot of people miss in a conversation,” he says. “Be willing to humor other people and see where it goes.”
People consistently underestimate how much other people like them, a phenomenon social psychologists have dubbed “the liking gap.” In short, this is the difference between how much you think someone likes you and how much they actually like you, and it’s a gap that can last months. You’ve been living with it most of your life, too: A study published by Psychological Science in 2021 found that the liking gap tends to appear when we are 5 years old—the age we start worrying about how we’re socially perceived. Similar research shows that we also underestimate how much others think about us after a conversation.
These findings aside, focusing on being liked generally isn’t a helpful way to build genuine relationships. “Many people spend a lot of time evaluating themselves or thinking about what other people will think of them. In general, this interferes with connecting with others,” says Gail Heyman, a University of California, San Diego, professor who specializes in social cognition.
[Related: Humans are so social that we try to fit in with robots]
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