We derive meaning from understanding ourselves because of the deep human need for self-expression. When a conversation allows you to better understand something important about yourself, the other person or the world – then it really becomes meaningful. To count as truly meaningful, the nature of what you learn matters. Of course, you can learn something from a conversation with an electrician who comes to your house, or during a doctor’s appointment. ‘If people start discussing information,’ he says, ‘then it becomes substantive … the most important point is that you get absorbed in the conversation, there’s information, there’s learning.’ For Mehl, who refers to these kinds of conversations as ‘substantive’, the key feature of deeper conversations is that you learn something. By this, I mean conversation where we leave behind the shallows of small talk – however pleasant they might be – and dive deeper. Compared with how they felt before, she says that, after the call, her participants ‘reported feeling a greater sense of trust in other people and feeling like people in general are benevolent – that they’re good and kind and fair’.īut while it’s important to recognise the value of small talk and that it needn’t be painful, it still falls well short of what many of us are really craving: meaningful conversation. For example, for a recent, not-yet-published study during the pandemic, Gillian Sandstrom, a social psychologist at the University of Essex, paired up strangers to have chats together on Zoom about whatever they liked. There’s a body of research that focuses on how relatively fleeting social interactions with people – even strangers – can boost our mood and even our beliefs about humankind. In fact, when it goes well, small talk can be not only pleasurable, but beneficial. Much of this guidance aims to elevate bad small talk to enjoyable small talk, for example by commenting on a shared experience or asking open-ended questions. Many of us are crying out for help with small talk, and the internet has answered with countless articles suggesting solutions and offering advice. And it’s not just in lifts: whether we’re at the hairdresser’s, in a taxi, or even with our best friend, sometimes it can be painful to figure out what to say, how exactly to hit upon a topic to fill the silent, stale air between us. Thanks to more lift journeys than I care to remember, I can vouch that some small talk is, unfortunately, both boring and awkward.
The vacuousness of small talk helps to explain why it’s often so boring, but it can be worse than that. ‘If afterwards I know nothing more about you than I knew before,’ he tells me, ‘then that will be small talk.’ The psychologist Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona studies conversations, and he defines small talk on the basis of how much information is exchanged. The world over, lifts are a microcosm of that most pained aspect of social interaction – small talk. One reason is the typical duration of a lift journey – long enough to feel the social pressure to say something, anything, but never long enough to say something worthwhile. Have you ever had a decent conversation in a lift? If not, join the club – being in a lift with a stranger is a universally awkward experience.
0 kommentar(er)
