How to make a conversation with a new acquaintance go smoothly
Social scientists have been studying the art of the "getting acquainted conversation" for decades. Here's some tips on what works and what doesn't.
When I first started studying “new acquaintance” conversations—those between people who either barely know each other or were laying eyes on each other for the first time—I stumbled across more ways of making things cringy and awkward than I could have imagined.
Sometimes, this was my goal. For many years I studied the “fragility of intergroup encounters,” where through a series of socially torturous paradigms, my fellow scientists and I showcased how easy it was to make people feel like crawling out of their skin when talking to someone who didn’t share their racial group membership. In of our more creative endeavors, my collaborators Adam Pearson, Jack Dovidio, and I found that a simple one-second delay over audio-visual communication (which we created using TiVO—a shoutout to my GenX readers), made people feel more anxious and less interested in becoming friends with a different-race interaction partner than a same-race one. In fact, the same-race partners (think two White people or two Black people) laughed the awkwardness off. They kind of enjoyed the experience.
In another study, I made people interact with someone they thought was so hopped up on caffeine, her heart rate was through the roof (the video of her was accompanied by a cute “live” (but fake) heart rate signal so people wouldn’t forget). She was fidgeting and awkward the whole time, and I had a hypothesis that if people could knowingly attribute her anxiety to the caffeine (and not to the interaction) all would be well (it didn’t work out—I found the opposite). And even though she was a confederate—a talented actress from the Tish school at NYU who was professionally trained to look anxious—people avoided her on the streets for months after the experiment wrapped up. They did this knowing she was hired by me; the whole thing one assistant professor’s idea of a “naturalistic encounter.”
Feeling uncomfortable during getting-acquainted interactions is a lasting experience. And I’ve come to believe that most of these interactions are “fragile” in the beginning. At work, a bad first interaction can have serious consequences. A stilted pre-interview conversation with a recruiter can mean this is the end for you. The same experience with a new team can mean losing your status quickly, and in turn, your ability to weigh in on important decisions. This is to say nothing of countless first dates.
This post is dedicated to the art of turning a potentially awkward, get-me-the-hell-out-of-here getting acquainted conversation around. To help you build skills for better early conversations, and critically, to change the assumptions you make in the moment, when things seem to be taking a turn for the worst.
Apply these tips to any getting-acquainted conversation, whether it’s a first date, meeting a roommate, or networking with a stranger to learn more about their career (the topic of another one of my posts and my upcoming book Job Therapy).
Tip one: It’s okay to come prepared with a list of starter questions. Don’t expect things to be “free flowing” until the relationship is well-established.
One of the first mistakes I made in trying to kick-start getting-acquainted conversations in the lab was giving people no instructions at all. “Just get to know each other” was the instruction, and you have 10 minutes to do it. Most people just stared at each other, and within three minutes, broke down and asked the experimenter to come back into the room so they could move on to the next part of the study. Spontaneous topic generation is not in most people’s toolbox.
Eventually my collaborators and I settled on a set of “getting to know you” questions that gave people some starting points. Most people think that scaffolding like this feels artificial, and in casual interactions shouldn’t be needed. But in those early stages, a little bit of structure goes a long way. Giving people a heads-up for what those starter questions will look like is a strong predictor of getting a stranger to agree to a conversation.
Emma Templeton, a scholar who studies the art of the perfect conversation, found that when talking to a stranger, it’s best to start with a launch pad topic; something general enough it could easily branch out to other topics. Friends don’t need these topics to start a conversation because they have a ton of idiosyncratic shared experiences that they can spontaneously dive into, even if it’s been years since they last visited the topic. But strangers do, with no history to lean on.
During interviews, these launch pad topics not only make conversations go more smoothly and organically (a good launch pad topic has many ways in which it could branch out), but also, go a long way in reducing the bias that can happen when we focus on similarities we share with someone—an old fallback method we rely on when we run out of things to say. Focusing on how you “like the same things” (which is often code for shared social class) or went to the same school (again, social class) isn’t a direction we should aim to go in during career conversations or interviews.
Tip two: Pick “launch pad” topics that are thought provoking and novel, but don’t force people to self-disclose.
Social psychologists often use an approach called the “Fast friends paradigm” to get new acquaintances chatting. It consists of a series of questions that require increasing amounts of self-disclosure as they progress, with the assumption being that as you become closer, you feel more comfortable opening up. By the end you’re asking your partner: “If your housing was burning down and you could save one thing, what would it be and why?”
It’s intense.
When I first started studying getting-acquainted interactions, I relied on the paradigm to create rapport between people. It didn’t take long for me to realize that instead, I was creating a fertile breeding ground for anxiety. It turns out very few people like to disclose the intimate details of their lives to a stranger, no matter how fascinating the answers might be (below is an image from one of my studies following the prompt “what is the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done?” with someone’s actual answer).
So what then, are appropriate launch pad topics? Stick with something that feels novel and interesting but doesn’t directly prompt self-disclosure. It can indirectly coax it, but the key is it doesn’t force it.
This doesn’t mean you have to ask people something that feels like the type of small talk you have with your dental hygienist. In one of my studies, I had people share their answers to “Would you rather?” questions going into an interaction for launch pad questions. Simply having similar answers to these forced choice questions reduced anxiety and discomfort, and even made teams better at coordinating actions while building a Lego model. Why? Because it gave them lots of things to scaffold off of—a key process to rapport building.
When people answer one “would you rather” question, they spontaneously come up with other ones. These silly questions allow you to learn things about people’s past experiences that would be tough to ask about directly. For example, one person said, “I would rather fly than be invisible because as a kid I wanted to go to space camp and I still have that dream!” From there, the group talked about their childhood dreams.
Another benefit to questions like these is that they allow you to benefit from the type of spontaneity in conversations that we typically only see in close relationships.
Neuroscientist Sebastian Speer and his colleagues found that in close relationships, people often bounce around topics (rather than “sticking to the script”) because of a shared reality and shared history that allows for spontaneous topic generation. Would you rathers allow for that spontaneity, but within person rather than between them. The person thinking about flying might spontaneously remember her long-lost space dream and share it with the group, as a way of disclosing something unusual and unprompted about herself.
The key to making them not feel gimicky is that the answers allow people to be creative. They aren’t simple and flat, with nowhere to go from there (anyone subject to a corporate ice breaker knows what I mean). The most interesting launch pad question I was asked was during a dinner with a group of physicists, one of whom asked everyone what they wanted to happen to their body when they died (scientists can be morbid). The answers were hilarious, and I learned more about what made those people tick in that one hour than I would have with some generic “Getting to know you” material.
Tip three: Come mentally prepared for long gaps in turn taking. There’s fewer of them in close relationships, but in new-acquaintance interactions, they aren’t necessarily a sign that something is wrong.
Thalia Wheatley and her colleagues found that by and large, when people feel connected, there’s short gaps in conversational turns. A gap of 2 seconds or more among strangers usually means that people are running out of things to say. But among friends, these gaps mean something else: it means they are reflecting on their own thoughts, and don’t feel the need to fill up air space. These gaps can mean the same thing in stranger interactions, but we often interpret them with surplus meaning. We assume that if our partner doesn’t respond immediately, they can’t think of anything else to say or are starting to disengage.
Not necessarily.
As a professor I’ve had to work hard to tolerate gaps in conversations, especially when teaching small classes. I might ask the class a question and wait a full minute and a half before an arm shoots up. It took me a decade to not cut in and start answering my own question.
Gaps might mean the person is reflecting on their own thoughts, or critically, during interviews, are carefully planning out their answer. If you’re the person asking the question and are met with a long silence on the receiving end, try to resist the urge to break the silence immediately. You might feel self-conscious about the space between you, but your partner is probably engaging in some strong planning that you can’t see. And if you’re the quiet-but-thoughtful type, feel free to warn your partner, “is it okay if I give this one a minute of thought?” Removing the attributional ambiguity as to why you’re sitting quietly can help reduce the tension. Your partner will appreciate it.
Tip 4: And if you really do need to fill the space, don’t ramble on about yourself, ask your partner to build on the answers to the questions you asked them about themselves.
This tip seems obvious, but it’s remarkable how often an awkward silence prompts us to talk about ourselves. One of the best things we can do to move a conversation forward is to scaffold off our partner’s answer to a question by probing deeper. Sharing about yourself is important, but if you catch yourself saying, “Yeah I too…” followed by some related thing about yourself every time your partner shares something, you’re probably being a little too me-centric.
To execute on the best version of this conversation tactic, come prepared with some information about your partner, if you can, that you can ask about. Most of us don’t enter a getting-acquainted conversation with knowing nothing about our partners (except the subjects in my study). A little (non-stalker) digging ahead of time shows interest. If this is a networking conversation at work or an interview, small details about the company, or a person’s (LinkedIn available) work history are great places to start. “I noticed you worked for a startup called X before this. How different was that work environment from this one?” for example.
The best version of this I’ve seen is with my dean at NYU, who meets with every job candidate across all of the sciences, including ones that are way outside of his field. Most of the candidates would walk out shocked at how well the conversation went (most walked in terribly intimidated). This dean would look people up, read a little about their research, and come prepared with one or two probing questions about a study or two. It worked wonders to make them comfortable. And afterall, people do love talking about themselves.
Tip five: don’t rely on laughter as a cue that things are going well. If someone isn’t laughing at your jokes, it probably has more to do with them than you (unless of course, no one ever laughs at your jokes).
If you’ve seen live comedy as much as I have, you will come across a comedian who breaks script and starts talking about how weird it is that the exact same set of jokes lands perfectly with one audience, and totally falls flat with another. Comedians are in the business of figuring out why. So too, are people who are trying to have a good getting-acquainted conversation.
But it turns out, they should probably give up (comedians and the rest of us), because most of the variance of laughter in conversations is due to the person laughing, not the person soliciting the laughter (nearly 50% of it, in fact, compared to 5% due to the person who is trying to be funny).
It’s great if you can make someone laugh, and kudos to you if you do it reliably. But don’t put too much stock in the presence or absence of it. There are people who laugh a lot and those who don’t, and you might just have stumbled upon the latter.
Tip six: Don’t always try to be “in sync” with your partner. Breaking that synchrony, especially when creativity is involved, is also an important step to rapport building.
Social scientists love to talk about the benefits of synchrony. Match your partner’s moves at a bar and they will go out with you. Mimic their speaking style, and same thing. Eye contact is another form of synchrony (our eyes are in sync) that we know is a marker of a good conversation. So too is tapping our feet. But it turns out, sometimes breaking that synchrony is a better idea than maintaining it. Thalia Wheately (who published the eye contact study) found that sometimes, breaking eye contact, particularly when going off on your own creative exploration of ideas, can move a relationship forward. Other work has found that asynchronous eye hand movements are associated with better model building of cars. My work has found that surgical teams made up of nurses and junior surgeons show asynchronous sympathetic arousal with surgeons; when the lead surgeon is most physiologically engaged, the other members of the team are the least engaged, especially during moments of acute demand (like a kidney is bleeding out). This asynchrony is a sign that the surgery team is handing over the reins to the most expert person in the room.
What does this research mean for you? Often, we try to mimic people—consciously or unconsciously—in an effort to facilitate rapport. But sometimes, complimentary behaviors are better. Try breaking eye contact occasionally, especially if you want to explore a novel topic, or take on speaker and listener roles instead of mirroring the actions of your partner. Don’t worry about being too “in sync” with your body, your speech patterns, or your eye contact. Breaking things up once in a while will feel like a more natural way to move the relationship past the early stage.
With these 6 tips in mind, I wish you a happy and healthy getting-acquainted conversation!
Job Therapy is now available for pre-order.
Job Therapy comes out July 23, 2024, and it’s available now for pre-order here.