![]() ![]() In another experiment, the researchers told people about the results of the previous experiments-letting them know that most people underestimate the degree to which other people are interested in hearing about their personal and deeper thoughts. Participants who expected they would be speaking to the caring person chose to discuss deeper questions. In one experiment, they told the participants to imagine that they would be speaking to a particularly caring and interested person, or to a particularly uncaring and uninterested one. In the final experiments, the researchers examined whether having more accurate expectations about a conversation partner increased people's interest in having a deeper conversation. Across all these different samples of participants, we find similar effects." We even had older business executives at a financial services firm talking about the last time they cried in front of another person. Our different experiments recruited students from around the world, online participants, and people who just happened to be at a public park. ![]() "People care about what we have to say, just as we care about what they have to say," Kumar said. On average, people consistently underestimated how interested their partners would be in learning about them. In some of the experiments, the researchers asked participants to predict how interested their conversation partner would be in the discussion, and then afterward to indicate how interested their partner actually was in the discussion. If deep conversations are genuinely better and people in these experiments said they wanted to have deep conversations, then why aren't they having more of them? The researchers suspected it might be because people underestimate how interested strangers are in learning about their deeper thoughts and feelings. Shallow questions included typical small-talk topics, such as, "What is the best TV show you've seen in the last month? Tell your partner about it," or "What do you think about the weather today?" Deep questions elicited more personal and intimate information, such as, "Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?" or "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future or anything else, what would you want to know?" In other experiments, people generated their own deep and shallow conversation topics. In some experiments, people received shallow or deep questions to discuss. The researchers asked pairs of people-mainly strangers-to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. Kumar and his colleagues, Michael Kardas of Northwestern University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, designed a series of 12 experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. The findings appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ![]() "But we'd likely be happier if we dug deeper when we're interacting with others." "We wrongly assume that other people are somewhat indifferent towards us, so we avoid more intimate conversation, thinking it would be awkward," said Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business and co-author of the study. The findings have important practical implications, especially as the pandemic wanes and people become more social again. ![]()
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