Are deep conversations with strangers less awkward than we expect?

Details

The researchers tested whether people hesitate to have meaningful conversations with strangers partly because they underestimate how much the other person will care about what they share. Across a series of experiments, they compared participants’ expectations with their experiences after talking.

Conversations with strangers felt less awkward and brought more connection and happiness than participants expected. The tendency to overestimate awkwardness was especially pronounced for deep conversations compared with shallow ones. In separate experiments where participants had both kinds of conversation, they felt more connected to their deep-conversation partners.

Participants also underestimated strangers’ care and interest in their personal disclosures. Their predictions were more accurate when talking with close friends, family, or partners, whose interest was already more clearly known. Further experiments found that more accurate expectations encouraged deeper conversation.

These findings concern participants’ experiences in the studied conversations, not proof that a deep conversation creates a lasting relationship. The abstract does not report participant demographics, sample sizes, or the size of the differences, which limits judgments about how broadly or strongly the findings apply.