Why We Need Deep, In-Person, Meaningful Conversations

There are signs that, on personal and organizational levels, having in-person meaningful, deep conversations has declined. Some have attributed it to the forceable isolation occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic, and some have pointed to the increased use of digital communication devices, which long preceded the pandemic. So, too, has increased political polarization and tribalism meant that having meaningful, deep conversations with others, particularly strangers, is less valued and entered into.

In my thirty plus years of training and coaching leaders, I’ve been struck by an often ignored important aspect of good leadership: the art of having meaningful conversations. I’m not referred to the typical one-on-one conversation between a leader and an subordinate or colleague that is specific task focused, or superficial, but rather, a deep conversation that touches upon the mental and emotional states of the other.

The Personal Conversation with Strangers

A 2014 study by Nicholas Eply and Juliana Schroeder published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found in nine new studies involving people on trains, planes, taxis and waiting rooms that although our instinct is to ignore strangers, we are happier when we chat with them. Importantly, this was true for introverts as well as extroverts. The researchers also found that the commuters were reluctant to converse with strangers due to a mistaken belief that strangers wouldn’t want to talk to them.

In 2021, a team that included Nicholas Epley, one of the authors of the initial paper, published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General showed that from a study of train commuters in London, those assigned to talk with a stranger reported having a significantly more positive experience and learning significantly more, than those assigned to a solitude or control condition.

Going Deep in Conversation

Many of us want to have deep and meaningful relationships with others, rather than superficial ones, and we know that sharing intimate stories can create them. But many people may need clarification about when to move past small talk to something more meaningful. According to a 2021 study again involving Epley and led by Michael Kardas, the answer is right away. The participants in this research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, overestimated how awkward a deep conversation with a stranger would be — and also underestimated how interested strangers would be in their revelations. And though the participants expected to prefer a shallow conversation over a deep one with a stranger, this was not the case. The deep conversations left them feeling more connected.

The researchers conducted twelve experiments with more than 1,800 participants to examine the degree to which others are interested in connecting through conversation.

In the initial experiments, participants discussed intimate questions with a stranger, such as, “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?” The participants reported how they expected to feel after these conversations and then reported their actual experiences. Participants underestimated their interest in listening to the other person and how interested they perceived their partner would be in listening to them. Participants also reported feeling less awkward, happier and more connected to their partner than anticipated.

“Deep conversations between strangers tend to go better than people expect,” Kardas told PsyPost. “Before speaking, people expected strangers to be relatively uninterested in the content of the conversation. Yet after speaking, people indicated that the person they spoke with was more interested and caring than expected. As a result, people felt more connected and happier after speaking with a stranger than anticipated, and ons between strangers felt less awkward than expected.”

Psychologist Matthias Mehl and his team set out to study happiness and deep talk. His study, published in Psychological Science, involved college students who wore an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their shirt collar that captured 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days. Effectively, this created a conversational “diary” of their day.

Then, researchers went through the conversations and categorized them as either small talk (talk about the weather, a recent TV show, etc.) or more substantive conversation (talk about philosophy, current affairs, etc.). Researchers were careful not to automatically label specific topics a certain way — if the speakers analyzed a TV show’s characters and their motivations, this conversation was considered substantive.

The researchers found that about a third of the students’ conversations were substantive, while a fifth consisted of small talk. Some conversations didn’t fit neatly into either category, such as discussions on practical matters like who would take out the trash.

The researchers also studied the participants' happiness, drawing data from life satisfaction reports the students completed and feedback from people in their lives.

The results? Mehl and his team found that the happiest person in the study had twice as many substantive conversations and the amount of small talk as the unhappiest person. Almost every other conversation the happiest person had — about 46 percent of the day’s conversations — was substantive.

Does Giving Positive Feedback to the Other Person Enhance Deep Conversation?

We may hesitate to give positive compliments in conversations with strangers because they are unfamiliar or we may be worried about how they would receive it. A research study by Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Earlier research has shown that giving compliments draws both strangers and friends closer together. It also costs nothing, either financially or in terms of effort. And yet this work, led by Xuan Zhao on participants in the US, consistently found that pairs of friends undervalued the positive effect of compliments made to the other — they underestimated the resulting feelings of warmth in the recipient. how awkward that recipient would feel. This mistaken viewpoint seemed to have real-world effects: the participants also reported giving fewer compliments than they felt they should or would like to give.

What if you don’t fully believe in the compliment that you’re giving? “People may be reluctant to flatter others with insincere compliments because they overestimate the likelihood that their insincerity will be detected,” the researchers write. In other words, do it anyway — odds are they’ll take your comment at face value.

Deep Conversations Leave a Lasting Memory

In 2021, a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Gus Cooney, Erica J. Boothby and Mariana Lee revealed the existence of another conversation-related gap: the “thought gap”. After a conversation, we tend to think about the person we’ve been talking to, reflecting on their stories or perhaps their advice, note Gus Cooney at the University of Philadelphia and colleagues. But though we do this ourselves, the team found in a series of studies that their participants mistakenly believed that they thought more afterwards about a person they’d had a conversation with than the other person did about them. “Collectively, these studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know,” the team writes. One of the reasons this message is important is this: in one of the studies, learning how much the other person was actually thinking about them affected their willingness to reconcile after an argument.

Overall, then, for such a social species, we’re surprisingly bad at judging how conversations, and the specific content of these conversations, affect our relationships, and our own wellbeing. But the overwhelming take away message from these studies, at least, is positive: it’s all better than you think, so stop worrying, and get sharing.

In her book, The Art of Conversation: A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure, Catherine Blyth points out the sorry state of disrepair that conversation has fallen into-and then, taking examples from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and popular culture, she gives us the tools to rebuild. She argues, "Research has found that with a serious topic or a good friend, we measure a conversation’s success by how enthralled we were by what the other person said. Whereas, the less familiar the other person, the more trivial the topic, the likelier we are to rate the experience by our performance.”

In his outstanding book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, psychologist Martin Seligman emphasizes the deep listening as a requisite for meaningful conversations.

How Social Media is Affecting Our Ability to Have Meaningful Conversations

In addition to the isolation and restrictions caused by COVID, that, social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, Facetime and Zoom have severely restricted peoples’ face-to-face conversations. In addition, we can talk to virtual assistants such as Alexa, Cortana or Siri — commanding them to play our favourite songs films, or tell us the weather forecast.

Often, these communication methods have cut the need or preference for in-person conversations. This has led to some of the conversational snippets of our daily lives now taking place mainly via technological devices. We no longer need to talk with shop assistants, receptionists, bus drivers or even coworkers, and we engage with a screen to communicate whatever we want to say.

For many people, the only time they may have conversations is when their digital technology is unavailable or doesn’t work. For instance, human contact occurs when we call for an assistant to help us when an item is not recognized at the self-service checkout.

As a result, people are devaluing the importance of having personal conversations other than quick transactional ones. It seems easier to text someone rather than meet with them.

Melanie Chan at Leeds Becket University has researched digital technologies and indicates that phrases such as “word of mouth” or “keeping in touch” point to the importance of face-to-face conversation. Indeed, face-to-face conversation can strengthen social ties with our neighbours, friends, work colleagues and other people we encounter during our day.

Chan argues that face-to-face conversations acknowledge peoples’ existence and humanness in ways that instant messaging and texting do not. A face-to-face conversation is a rich experience that involves drawing on memories, making connections, making mental images, associations and choosing a response. Face-to-face conversation is also multisensory: it’s not just about sending or receiving pre-programmed trinkets such as likes, cartoon love hearts and grinning yellow emojis.

When conversing using video you mainly see another person’s face only as a flat image on a screen. But when we have a real-life face-to-face conversation, we can look into their eyes and reach out and touch them. We can also observe the other person’s body posture and the gestures they use when speaking — and interpret these accordingly. All these factors contribute to the sensory intensity and depth of daily face-to-face conversations.

Sherry Turkle, professor of social studies of science and technology and author of The Empathy Diaries, tells us that when we first “speak through machines, [we] forget how essential face-to-face conversation is to our relationships, creativity, and capacity for empathy”. But then “we take a further step and speak not just through machines but to machines”.

Ultimately, our technological devices cannot fully replace the smell and observation of bodily cues we experience when having a face-to-face . Communicating and connecting with others through face-to-face discussion is valuable because it cannot be edited, paused or replayed.

Characteristics of a Deep Conversation

Wanda Thibodeau, writing in Inc.com, provides these characteristics of a deep conversation:

• Asking open-ended questions.
• Demonstrating your vulnerability.
• Focusing your attention on the other person.
• Showing empathy and compassion.
• Demonstrating active listening.
• Recollecting things the other person has said.

Deep Conversations in the Workplace

In their book, 5 Conversations: How to Transform Trust, Engagement, and Performance at Work by Nigel Purse and Nick Cowley, good leaders have one-on-one conversations with their employees that focus on:

• Establishing a trusting relationship: A conversation with a team member to share a deep, mutual understanding of your respective drivers, preferences, motivators, and de-motivators for high performance at work and to understand what makes each other tick.
• Showing genuine appreciation: A conversation to help team members focus on where they are being successful, to jointly understand the reasons for their success, to say how much you appreciate their contribution, and find further ways in which they can deploy their skills and talents to benefit both themselves and the organization.

In a paper presented at the International Conference on Organizational Learning (OLKC), authors Daina Mazuitis and Natalie Slawinski of the Ivey School of Business argued for the importance of meaningful conversations leaders must have with employees to enhance organizational learning and change. Their paper defines organizational learning as “a multi-level dynamic process through which the thoughts and actions of individuals and groups change and become embedded in the organization over time.” They stress that meaningful dialogue lies at the heart of authentic leadership and successful transformational change.

What Has Happened After the Pandemic?

In an article by Amit Kumar, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley on the importance of meaningful conversations during the pandemic, they contend: “Even as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, there’s hope that life will return to some level of normalcy in 2022. This includes more opportunities to meet new people and build friendships, a critical mental and physical well-being process.” They express this concern: “Even before fears of a virus compelled most people to stay physically distant, our research suggests that people were already keeping too much social distance from one another.

The authors conclude, “Our research suggests that people tend to be overly pessimistic about how conversations with new acquaintances will play out."

They said: “Across a dozen experiments that they conducted, participants consistently underestimated how much they would enjoy talking with strangers. This was especially true when we asked them to have the kinds of substantive conversations that foster friendships. Because of these mistaken beliefs, people seem to connect with others less often and in less meaningful ways than they probably should.”

In several experiments, the participants first reported how they expected to feel after discussing relatively weighty questions like, “What are you most grateful for in your life?” and “When was the last time you cried in front of another person?”

These participants believed they would feel awkward and only moderately happy discussing these topics with a stranger. However, after the researchers prompted them to do so, they reported that their conversations could have been more comfortable than anticipated.

Furthermore, they felt happier and more connected to the other person than they had assumed.

In other experiments, we asked people to write down questions they would normally discuss when first getting to know someone — “weird weather we’re having these days, isn’t it?” — and then to write down deeper and more intimate questions than they would normally discuss, like asking whether the other person was happy with their life.

Again, the researchers found that the participants were especially likely to overestimate how awkward the ensuing conversations about the more meaningful topics would be while underestimating how happy those conversations would make them.

These mistaken beliefs matter because they can create a barrier to human connection. If you mistakenly think a substantive conversation will feel uncomfortable, you may avoid it. And then you might need to realize that your expectations are off the mark.

The authors argue: “Having deeper conversations joins a growing list of opportunities for social engagement — including expressing gratitude, sharing compliments and reaching out and talking to an old friend — that end up feeling much better than we might think.”

Final Thoughts

The COVID pandemic and current political discord have deeply damaged intimate and personal connections, resulting in more transactional and superficial conversations. A movement toward deeper, meaningful conversations without rancour or aggression can do much to heal our relationships.

Be sure to pick up a copy of my new book, The Journey to Self-Mastery: Unlocking the Secrets to Personal Transformation, available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.