Psychology in Everyday Life

Exploring the science behind how we think, feel and behave.

Why We Avoid Conversations We’d Probably Enjoy

A little while ago, I went to a networking event and, although I had been looking forward to it beforehand, I felt completely out of place when I first arrived. Other people seemed to know one another, conversations were already happening, and I found myself wondering where to stand, who to speak to and how on earth you are supposed to join a group of people who are already talking without feeling as though you are intruding.

For a while, I genuinely considered leaving early.

I’m very glad I didn’t, because by the end of the evening I was one of the last people to leave. I had met some fabulous people, had several conversations I would never have expected to have, and came away feeling completely differently from the way I had felt when I walked in.

It turns out that psychology may have something to say about this.

Recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that we are not actually very good at predicting how much we are going to enjoy talking to other people. Across nine experiments involving around 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how enjoyable conversations would be.

Some of the conversations were with friends and some were with strangers, while some took place face-to-face and others online. The researchers even included topics that participants thought would be boring, such as maths, onions and the stock market.

Yet the conversations generally turned out to be more enjoyable than people had expected.

So why do we get it wrong?

One possibility is that, before a conversation starts, we focus heavily on the topic itself. We wonder whether we will have anything interesting to say, whether the other person will be bored, whether we have enough in common or whether the conversation will simply become awkward. What we are less able to predict is what happens once two people actually begin talking.

Conversations are not just exchanges of information. Someone asks an unexpected question, one story leads to another, we discover a shared experience, somebody makes us laugh or says something that makes us think. In other words, the enjoyment can come from the interaction itself rather than from how exciting the original topic seemed.

That made me think again about the networking event.

When I arrived, I looked at the room as a whole and thought about how uncomfortable I felt. Once I began speaking to individual people, that changed. The room stopped being full of strangers and became full of people with stories, ideas and experiences of their own.

This fits with a wider body of psychological research showing that people often underestimate the benefits of everyday social contact, including talking to strangers, reconnecting with somebody they have not spoken to for a while or simply being a little more sociable than usual.

Perhaps the interesting thing is that we often assume confidence has to come first. We think we need to feel comfortable before we approach somebody, or that we need to have something clever or particularly interesting to say. In reality, confidence may sometimes come afterwards.

The person standing on the other side of the room may also be wondering who to talk to, whether they fit in and whether they should leave early.

So perhaps there is a small experiment worth trying the next time you find yourself somewhere unfamiliar. Before reaching automatically for your phone or deciding that you are not enjoying yourself, give it a little longer and speak to somebody.

Ask how they came to be there. Comment on something happening around you. Say hello.

It does not have to become a profound conversation, and you do not have to suddenly transform into the most confident person in the room.

You may simply find that the conversation is much more enjoyable than you expected.

I certainly did.