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Deeper conversations result in a better connection

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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.

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.

I hoped Georgie could teach me how to have not just more conversations, like an extrovert, but more meaningful conversations, like an agreeable person. Many people can grit their teeth through a five-minute chat by the breakroom microwave, but agreeableness involves caring about other people—and showing it in the way you talk to them. Conversation is, as Vivian Gornick argued, “the most vital form of connection other than sex.”

People felt more connected after asking each other things like “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” rather than “How is your day going so far?” “I’ve now done this with well over a thousand people in experiments,” Epley said. Participants, he told me, often say, “ ‘I was surprised by how open the other person was, and that when I opened up to them, they opened up back.’ Psychologists respond to that by saying, ‘No duh.’ That’s the way reciprocity works…. You earn intimacy by showing intimacy to somebody.”

People miscalculate how well these deep interactions will go because we tend to evaluate our own behavior in terms of competency: How well am I doing this? But others evaluate us in terms of our warmth: How kind is this person? When we obsess about being agreeable “correctly,” we underestimate how important it is to do it at all.