What I’ve Learned From Thousands of Conversations
I really, really like talking to people. It’s just a phenomenal experience. I find communication in general exhilarating, and every new person I meet makes me feel like my mind is expanding.
However, not all conversations are created equal. For me, personally, most of them are good. However, there’s definitely a gap between good and amazing, and I’ve noticed that some things can influence where a conversation falls along that spectrum.
I think the two most important things I’ve learned are that almost everyone is interesting and most people are bad conversationalists. There is actually nothing contradictory about these, and I’ll examine them each:
Almost everyone is interesting: Most people have a variety of unusual life experiences, ideas, opinions, hobbies, etc. Even people who see themselves as boring pretty much always have these. The thing that distinguishes self-identified boring people from self-identified interesting people is the degree to which they look at their own experiences and see them as same-old, same-old or as “Oh, wow, I bet tons of people have no idea what this is about”. This probably has a lot to do with how much you believe the people around you are different - I have rarely met an immigrant who hadn’t learnt that they weren’t boring.
In my experience, what makes an idea or experience interesting to learn about is when it’s distinct from my own experiences, but I can also see the relationship between it and what I know and care about. Seeing the path from here to there. The existence of that pathway, and how clearly I can see it, is what leads to the feeling of stimulation.
This is related to the idea of inferential distance. If someone’s interests and experiences are very far away from yours, you may see no obvious route to them. This is where a lot of the work of making conversations interesting comes in - you have the build the pathway, so that each step seems natural.
This is where people being bad conversationalists comes in. Most people don’t do this naturally or, when they do, they do it in a rather slip-shod manner. This has led to me having to very awkwardly ask “Oh, so would you say X is like Y?” a lot, while often getting an “eh, not reeeally…” reaction. But, hey, you gotta try a few possible connections until one sticks. Once you have one, you can get pulled along toward the object of interest pretty quickly.
Another way most people are bad at conversation is topic generation or topic-chaining. Most people don’t come up with things to talk about at a particularly high rate or do it very clunkily. This works out OK once someone else is willing to adopt the work of keeping the conversation moving forward. What’s much worse is when people respond to your attempts to open up the conversational field by shutting it down. The reason social advice warns against responding to questions with one-word answers is because it limits the potential to move the conversation, but people do this all the time anyway.
Which is alright for me, honestly. I can still usually get to great conversational territory, even if I have to wade through poor conversational skills to get there. But I think this is another axis of social interaction that’s often overlooked: Patience. You can be a good conversationalist without being a patient conversationalist, or vice versa.
A good conversationalist can maintain a good conversation. A patient conversationalist can put in the time and effort it takes to make the conversation good. Two good conversationalists can have an exciting conversation, but an exciting conversation with a bad conversationalist only happens when the other person is very patient.
I know some good conversationalists who are very impatient. They walk into a conversation and expect it to go from silence to glowy-Buddha-brain!insightful in under sixty seconds. They definitely have pretty cool conversations, but they have them with only a small number of people, while thinking the vast majority of people have nothing worthwhile to say.
While those people are a minority, I definitely expect I’m waaay into the tails when it comes to conversational patience. I know very, very few people who are as patient in conversation as I am, and they tend to become councilors or priests or something else that utilises edge-case levels of patience. Personally, I just like bumping into people who’ll talk to me and going from there - I can give pretty detailed biographic summaries of the last four Uber drivers I met.
After a self-sustaining conversation is established, there can still be things that make it more or less pleasant. Most of the things I find unpleasant manifest as some sort of conversational friction. They make the conversation grating and difficult to engage in. An external cause might be a loud environment, and an internal one might be having an auditory processing disorder.
However, the most important ones (and the hardest to deal with) tend to be interactional. ie: they’re only the case because of the specific people interacting. It might be a failure to understand each other’s accents, or each other’s politeness customs, or to communicate boundaries. The worst ones cause an interaction to just fail, but many of them are just small annoyances that add up to a less pleasant experience. A common one for me would be being interrupted.
Another thing that seems to mess with most types of conversation is having an elephant in the room. Whether it’s the small talk before a sales pitch, or chatting with your professor before working up to asking them for a recommendation, the conversations that are built around dancing toward a request tend to suck. Like, really bad, compared to almost anything that doesn’t have this aspect. I think this might be part of why talking to people on online dating sites is so terrible: besides people just being bad conversationalists, they’re also being bad conversationalists with an elephant in the room (ie: going on a date).
Unfortunately, I can’t really give an exhaustive list of causes of friction, because I don’t hold them all in my head. It’s mostly a matter of being distracted by them in the moment - having the grating feeling - before setting it aside to get on with the conversation. This has costs and benefits. It’s good that I can set it aside quickly so that I can keep enjoying most conversation, but bad in that it makes it hard to figure out what I should do about it. One of the few things I’ve definitely been able to figure out is that, on average, I experience markedly more friction with men, which may have left me with an unconscious bias toward spending time with other women.
Generally, as people get to know each other’s ins and outs more, the friction goes down. They figure out how they need to communicate with each other to be understood and not get on other’s nerves. Most of the elephants leave the room. They become familiar enough that the feeling of awkwardness (often the most oppressive friction) goes away.
I’ve found that, by far, one of the things with the largest influence on conversational quality is the environment you’re conversing in. Even apart from the obvious things like how noisy it is, the environment can have a dramatic impact. One way is by reducing tensions and making the participants feel relaxed. (I generally find sitting on beds to be most relaxing, but a lot of other people seem to read this as sexual, which makes it more uncomfortable.)
But a less-appreciated way is by priming conversations. A room with a lot of stuff in it does this well, because lots of things pop into your head as your eyes drift over the items in it. Each gadget and doodad and tchotchke fires off a different thought, which can lead to a new line of conversation or alter the path of your current one. Having lots of books or magazines or art around is ideal for this.
Of course, it’s important to have a stimulating environment, rather than a distracting environment. A stimulating environment keeps your brain generating new thoughts. It will prod you to think of things when your mind wanders, but can itself fade into the background when you’re in the middle of something more important. A distracting environment is one that can’t fade into the background. It’s one that detracts from conversation by making it harder to focus on what’s being said. In my experience, having objects that move around or flicker is the worst for this.
An environment can also be stimulating by being good for eavesdropping. If people nearby are having interesting conversations, it can prompt you to also go down interesting lines of conversation. Here it’s again important to distinguish between stimulating and distracting - you want interesting conversations to be audible to you, but not to drown you out. And, of course, you want this to be a space where overhearing others (and being overheard) isn’t rude. I’ve found that study halls and common rooms at universities are the best places for this. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were intended for this purpose.
For reasons of coziness and stimulation, I’ve found that the very best place I can go to have a meaningful conversation with someone is to their home. If not there, a study hall is the best runner up (or anywhere else that’s like a library you can talk in). After that, I’d go with a walk along a quiet road, or going off into nature.
Notably, I’ve found that conversations over text usually aren’t as good as equivalent conversations in person. This is largely because a text field is less stimulating, but also because text conversation is usually far lower bandwidth. People tend to speak much more quickly than they can write, so you can usually have a higher level of stimulation from speech (unless you think very carefully before you speak, or you have an auditory processing problem). The gap in information-transfer jumps much further if you can read body language. For these reasons, I will pretty much always prefer speaking in person to texting (even apart from the fact that I like physical contact and gesticulate a lot).
Given what a huge part of my quality of life consists of human interaction, I might be happy living as a nomad for a year or more. Traveling from place to place to meet new people and learn new things from them. This was basically my experience of couch-surfing in London, and it was very good for me. I would love it if I could be like Paul Erdős; travelling from place to place to meet as many people as possible and share ideas (though probably with less math).
As it stands, my house is a pretty good substitute. The people in it don’t change much, but all my housemates are fun people to talk to. It’s especially exciting to get several of them into a single discussion, because they bounce ideas around really well. They all have broad knowledge and broad interests, but with specialties in different areas, which I think is ideal.
But I want to talk to everyone - no matter how bad of a conversationalist - because everyone has unique interests and insights. And, for finding new voices and new perspectives, nothing seems to beat going to where the people are.
[Is there anything you’ve learned in your life about how conversations work, what your personal preferences for them are, or what the strengths and weaknesses of different environments might be? Please let me know!]
