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As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”
Quite the icebreaker, right? Faced with that, you might think you’d be making your excuses and beating a hasty retreat. But first, keep in mind the social milieu: This dinner took place in Madrid, not Minneapolis. More to the point, the hostess introduced the topic with a rare degree of grace and skill: She did so in a way that communicated genuine curiosity about other people’s experience, and with warmth, humor, and love. Her question drew fascinating, candid, thoughtful responses—so, far from itching to leave, I found that the hours flew by (no small feat, given that many dinners in Madrid go past midnight).
The occasion left me thinking that most of us could learn a thing or two about how to participate in a conversation—even a delicate or difficult one—so that the exchange inspires joy and interest. Luckily, plenty of research exists that can show how to do just that.
[Read: Have the conversation before it’s too late]
Some people have an easier time with conversation than others. Extroverts in particular find social intercourse invigorating, whereas introverts typically experience it as taxing. Neuroscientists have offered an interesting explanation for this. For a 2011 paper in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers used electroencephalography to measure a form of brain activity, known as the P300 wave, when subjects were presented with human faces. They found that extroverts had higher P300 amplitudes than introverts, meaning that social stimuli grabbed their attention (an obvious precondition for, say, engaging energetically in conversation). The introverts showed less brain activity associated with attraction to, or interest in, the faces of potential interlocutors—so individuals of this type, we can reasonably assume, would be less primed for lively conversation.
Another group for whom conversations can be difficult is people on the autism spectrum, even if their autism is mild and they are very high-functioning. Experts in this field offer three explanations for this: a resistance to changing topics, a failure to ask follow-up questions, and a tendency to fixate on a particular topic to the exclusion of others.
One common problem with conversations is that we don’t understand one another as well as we think we do. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011, five scholars showed that even among friends and spouses, people believe they understand the intended meaning of what others say 85 percent of the time, whereas the true figure for the reliability of their comprehension is 44 percent. As the researchers note, a query as innocent as “What have you been up to?” could convey genuine interest, annoyance at the other person’s lateness, or suspicion about what they’ve been doing. This instability of meaning might be because of tonal ambiguity or because people actually don’t listen to one another well enough. In one recent experiment in which subjects were assigned the task of getting to know someone, a conversational partner was in fact not listening to the other person for 24 percent of the interaction.
[Listen: Best of How To: Make small talk]
Arguably, the foremost reason that conversations are difficult is because we don’t prepare for them or work to get better at them. This is the argument of my Harvard colleague Alison Wood Brooks (no relation), whose new book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, follows decades of research on how we interact with people, and how to do it better and more enjoyably. As Brooks shows, people generally spend more time thinking about what they will wear to a dinner party than what they will talk about. Researchers have found that, laziness aside, this insouciance about conversation is because 50 percent believe that thinking about topics in advance will make a conversation feel forced and artificial; only 12 percent of people think such mental preparation will enhance the experience.
Brooks helpfully lays out four research-backed principles for conducting a strong and enjoyable conversation, for which she provides a mnemonic device called, appropriately enough, TALK.
T is for topics.
Before you go into a conversation, think of a few subjects that you’d like to discuss with your partners. This no doubt was on the mind of our hostess in Madrid. She was well aware that her guests shared her values and beliefs about marriage, and almost certainly weighed the risks beforehand of launching a delicate topic. Her icebreaker was not spontaneous but premeditated, which—far from making the gambit awkward—raised the level of trust around the table.
This tactic is appropriate for settings other than dinner parties. I typically write down significant questions that I want to ask my wife. Try to keep a running list of topics that would be good when talking with various significant people in your life. You might use a prepared question as a good reason for a call or visit.
A is for asking.
Obviously, a stiff interrogation does not make for a great conversation. My young-adult students commonly complain that this mode of questioning is the only way their parents communicate with them, which suggests that some parents get stuck in a pattern dating from when their children were little and have not developed a relationship with them as mature adults. That is a particular generational and perhaps intra-familial problem. But as a rule, a conversation without questions is unrewarding—it’s no fun to talk with someone who seems totally incurious.
The difference is that good questioning requires deep listening. When you’re genuinely focused on what the other person is saying, follow-up questions come naturally. In contrast, when listening means nothing more than waiting to talk—so often the case in my world of academia—follow-up questions are either nonexistent or pro forma.
L is for levity.
Brooks is a big proponent of humor, because it makes conversations fun. This doesn’t mean that you need to join an improv-comedy troupe. In fact, successful humor rarely means telling jokes; it means maintaining a “good humor”: a lightness and a gentle wit, which keep things from being too heavy and serious. We might think of laughter more as a social lubricant than a response to a punch line. Indeed, in one study, researchers found that only 10 to 15 percent of laughter in a conversation was responding to something actually humorous.
An easy way to maintain this type of good humor is simply by smiling—as much for your own benefit as your conversational partners’. Psychologists have long known that when we smile, it can raise our own mood. Moreover, good humor transmitted with a smile has been shown to be contagious in interactions; a person will tend to take the emotional cue of a sympathetic smiling face and feel happier themselves. As you get ready for your next dinner party, try smiling in the mirror while putting on your tie or makeup.
K is for kindness.
This is probably the most important ingredient in a good conversation. You might think of it as generosity, because it involves thinking about what the other person in a conversation needs and then giving it. As Brooks notes, this might be encouragement, hard feedback, new ideas, a quick laugh, a sounding board, challenging questions, or just a break. But it always means focusing primarily on the other person, rather than on yourself.
Perhaps that sounds exhausting or unenjoyable. Quite the contrary. As many studies have found, using your resources for others tends to promote greater happiness than using them on yourself. This doesn’t have to be limited to material resources, of course—in fact, your attention may be the most valuable thing you can share at any given moment.
[Arthur C. Brooks: The benefit of doing things you’re bad at]
One last thing to keep in mind about having better conversations: At our Madrid dinner party, the main ingredient of the sparkling exchange was its depth. The reason I shy away from dinners in general is their shallowness, their focus on topics of no true significance, the kind of encounter that simply passes the time innocuously, with no real investment or risk. I don’t care about your new golf clubs. Life is short; go deep or go home, I say.
Am I a weirdo, to hold this attitude? The science says not. A 2010 study in the journal Psychological Science found that the higher the percentage of conversation that is small talk, the lower the participants’ well-being, whereas the higher the percentage of substantive topics, the higher the well-being.
So go ahead: Invite us over and ask about our marriage. Mrs. Brooks and I will happily stay past midnight.