"Smalltalk" is a programming language. "Small talk" (with a space) is a mode of conversation. The article's title confused me because of this.
This is very useful.
Upon reading this, I immediately synthesized the following practical advice (with offline conversations in mind):
1) To be a better talker, you need to know off the top of your head what to do with a "what's new" or similar invitation. Being prepared for likely specific inquiries (e.g. "How was your weekend" on a Monday) is also wise, keeping in mind that a certain amount of redirection is acceptable ("Not too much--I was resting after [interesting intense thing] last weekend").
2) To be a better listener, you need to be able to ask specific questions. I, for one, would be highly interested in a list of conversation items to drill this on, since generating these on the spot has been my failure point more times than I can count. (I don't mean trying to prepare follow-ups to everything someone might say, but rather practicing to get better at generating.)
That sounds completely right - in general having a library of short stories about yourself and your life for various conversational openings/topics is helpful.
For 2, something that has helped me is realizing that it's okay to be greedy - except for possibly the very highest status people, who get more than enough affirmation, people often really like it if you are curious about something very specific about them, and only hold back on talking about it because they don't want to bore you.
For me, I think this was a case of reverse typical mind fallacy (I don't know if there's a standard name for this) - assuming that other people couldn't possibly be like me, because I'm weird and nerdy and like to talk an unusual amount. When I learned to be more socially adept, a lot of it involved suppressing things I wanted to talk about because there was no conversational cue indicating that it was welcome. It took a little while to realize other people must be doing this too.
When I was a kid, my Mom taught me something like the following: When asked a question (presumably in a conversation you would like to continue), respond with more than just the minimum requirement for data, and then finish your reply with a question for them.
Example we still joke about:
A: Do you play any sports? B: Yeah, I play baseball. I play second base. How about you? Do you play any sports?
I'm not sure of the exact logic behind this. It seems to me that (1) Ending with a question is the clearest indicator you want to keep talking to this person, and (2) giving a little additional information, even when not asked for it, can provide some potential for making a further connection instead of just a quick, content-free exchange. In other words, it gives you more to talk about.
One interesting thing I've noticed is that if you greet someone with an unorthodox but still "within norms" greeting, it can break them out of this pattern.
For instance, I often greet people with "How do you do?". Most people of my generation don't really know how to react to this, and it makes them stop, think, and give a more "real" answer than if I asked "What's up?" or "How's it going?".
If you try to do this, though, be careful that you don't go too far-- I've seen people try to do a similar thing with stuff like "Good morrow" and it tends to look affected.
For instance, I often greet people with "How do you do?". Most people of my generation don't really know how to react to this, and it makes them stop, think, and give a more "real" answer than if I asked "What's up?" or "How's it going?".
This might backfire, though - at least in our English class, we were taught that the only acceptable response to being asked "How do you do" is to repeat "How do you do" back.
I worded my comment carefully in anticipation of this question. Note that I said that the acceptable response when being "asked" it is to "repeat it back", not "ask the same question". Clearly the protocol specifies that the same string doesn't count as a question anymore once it's sent in response to a query initiated by someone else.
Interestingly, in many topical online chats conversations like that are explicitly and actively discouraged. For example, if you have a math question in the Freenode ##math IRC channel and start with "hi" and/or "I have a math question", you will likely get a stern "just ask" from a regular, or just stony silence. Since people still need an outlet for more idle chat, the rooms with no-nonsense chat policies tend to have a satellite off-topic channel where people engage in the longer form of smalltalk you describe.
Note that in this case, unlike a two-party in-person conversation, lots of people are listening but doing something else. If there is no activity for a while, and then there is some activity, that attracts their attention. If the activity is not interesting, or more precisely not the kind of thing for which they spend time in the channel, these people may consider their time/attention wasted. (The same argument applies to "why do you care about off-topic when nobody is talking anyway?".)
I think that this is a perfectly good reason for it to be the conventional way to conduct a conversation in some cases and some media. Such rules also appeal to the "grow a thicker skin" culture, but that doesn't mean they're arbitrary.
Another reason you didn't get a response to "how are you" is that the person wasn't that interested to talk to you.
They must have had an a-priori low expectation of the amount of value to be gained by chatting with you. Your redundant "how are you" lowered the average value-per-line of a conversation with you further.
But if they'd had an a-priori high expectation of the amount of value to be gained by chatting with you, they would have responded enthusiastically to "how are you".
I think this is a pretty good model. I study these interactions every morning at work, when my goal is to get to my office as quickly as possible without being registered as aloof or unfriendly. I answer the 'how are you' as perfunctorily as possible, or sometimes I try to invest a little thought into an answer that is friendly and sincere but unlikely to add any more seconds such as, 'crazy busy!' or, 'trying to get some work done before my meeting at 2'.
When I'm asking the 'how are you', I hold my breath hoping the person doesn't make a bid for a more meaningful interaction. Sometimes it can't be helped -- if the person's basement flooded over the weekend, and they want to talk, I'll re-prioritize my morning a little. But I definitely don't want to get trapped small-talking with someone who just has more free time than I do.(Obviously this morning I have some free time.)
I have been on the other side. Last year I was in a tornado, and I wanted to talk about it with everyone, to try and get over the shock and put such a rare one-off event in perspective. I was amazed by the fraction of people who were able to dismiss this bid, usually just by sharing a couple sentences about the time they were somewhat near a tornado or saying, 'wow'. After just two exchanges, I saved face thereafter by choosing language that suggested I was only near a tornado, so the other person could talk about tornadoes only if they wanted to.
Last year I was in a tornado, and I wanted to talk about it with everyone, to try and get over the shock and put such a rare one-off event in perspective. I was amazed by the fraction of people who were able to dismiss this bid
(nods) Yup.
For about a year after my stroke, I was pretty much unable to talk about anything else, for similar reasons.
Eventually I got into the habit of letting people make conversational overtures, then dropping the stroke into my response (not unlike I just did, come to think of it). Some people would then talk to me about my stroke, some would continue along their primary path, and it all worked out reasonably well.
Eventualier this would evolve into a funny dynamic where several minutes into a conversation I'd make a passing reference to my stroke and they'd be like "WHAT? Talk about burying the lede, dude!" (Coming out to childhood friends is funny this way, also. "Husband? What? Huh?")
Is being in a tornado even remotely like it's portrayed in movies?
(in the context of "how's it going" and similar platitudes.)
This kind of thing drives crazy the kind of people who actually want to know how someone is, because people often assume that the question is meant insincerely....I’m one of the people driven crazy.
I'm driven crazy from the other direction. Such questions usually are insincere, and I hate having to come up with what amounts to a non-sequitur answer to a question someone doesn't mean in the first place. Checkout lines are a frequent offender. Sometimes I'll answer literally anyway, ju...
When I want to signal my presence and willingness to communicate, I'll often literally say "ping." It works well enough.
That doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The point of running any social protocol is to be able to perform common social operations with other people ("I come in peace"; "I acknowledge your status", etc.) without incurring the time expense and cognitive load of negotiating them through explicit communication. Rolling your own protocol is at best useless, and more likely actively off-putting: it adds another layer of inference, one that unlike the cultural standard won't automatically be dereferenced by the people you're talking to. Unless you already know them well, but at that point it doesn't much matter what idiom you're using.
Or it could work as a pretty effective bit of in-group signaling, recognized by a certain group of people even if you don't know them. Agree with you in general though.
Related, here's a model of first romantic encounters which explicitly includes some of those "handshaking" steps:
...Sociologist Murray Davis (1973), writing in the symbolic interactionist tradition, was the first to provide a systematic breakdown of the steps involved in making a successful overture. Both Trillin’s (2006) and Fowles’ (2003) accounts offer a sense of the tension and excitement involved in starting a relationship, but their accounts lack the “he said, she said” detail necessary to explicate the process delineated by Davis. The follo
I wonder how universal these verbal social grooming norms are. Do they vary from country to country, from culture to culture, from language to language?
If you get a chance to see the Russian film Brat 2, you can see them mocking Americans for asking people "How are you" in cases where we aren't actually interested in how the listener is doing.
I occasionally encounter a related situation in the office, where for example I'll be making soup and someone will say something like "soup?" and I'm not sure what to reply beyond "yes".
I could give a brief reason why I'm making soup, or why I make soup frequently, but this seems like escalating too much, and it's more effort than I want to put in.
Has this model obtained good experimental results so far?
By the way, excellent post. I appreciate the large number of illustrative examples.
“Hey.” “Hey.” “How are you?” The end.
In that example you are expecting that someone gives you a significant answer after you wrote 4 words without any substance. You are requesting that they invest more energy into the conversation than you even through you started it.
If you contact me online, I usually have a choice between continue doing what I'm doing or switching my attention to the conversation.
Most of my online conversation happens for a purpose. I might contact someone to arrange a face to face meeting. I might contact someone to ask them for inf...
This seems interesting and mostly correct. I will think about this more and write something about it when I have thought enough.
This is an attempt to explicitly model what's going on in some small talk conversations. My hope is that at least one of these things will happen:
I had some recent conversational failures online, that went roughly like this:
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
The end.
At first I got upset at the implicit rudeness of my conversation partner walking away and ignoring the question. But then I decided to get curious instead and posted a sample exchange (names omitted) on Facebook with a request for feedback. Unsurprisingly I learned more this way.
Some kind friends helped me troubleshoot the exchange, and in the process of figuring out how online conversation differs from in-person conversation, I realized what these things do in live conversation. They act as a kind of implicit communication protocol by which two parties negotiate how much interaction they’re willing to have.
Consider this live conversation:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The end.
No mystery here. Two people acknowledged one another’s physical presence, and then the interaction ended. This is bare-bones maintenance of your status as persons who can relate to one another socially. There is no intimacy, but at least there is acknowledgement of someone else’s existence. A day with “Hi” alone is less lonely than a day without it.
“Hi.”
“Hi, how’s it going?”
“Can’t complain. And you?”
“Life.”
This exchange establishes the parties as mutually sympathetic – the kind of people who would ask about each other’s emotional state – but still doesn’t get to real intimacy. It is basically just a drawn-out version of the example with just “Hi”. The exact character of the third and fourth line don’t matter much, as there is no real content. For this reason, it isn’t particularly rude to leave the question totally unanswered if you’re already rounding a corner – but if you’re in each other’s company for a longer period of time, you’re supposed to give at least a pro forma answer.
This kind of thing drives crazy the kind of people who actually want to know how someone is, because people often assume that the question is meant insincerely. I’m one of the people driven crazy. But this kind of mutual “bidding up” is important because sometimes people don’t want to have a conversation, and if you just launch into your complaint or story or whatever it is you may end up inadvertently cornering someone who doesn’t feel like listening to it.
You could ask them explicitly, but people sometimes feel uncomfortable turning down that kind of request. So the way to open a substantive topic of conversation is to leave a hint and let the other person decide whether to pick it up. So here are some examples of leaving a hint:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Anything interesting this weekend?”
“Oh, did a few errands, caught up on some reading. See you later.”
This is a way to indicate interest in more than just a “Fine, how are you?” response. What happened here is that one party asked about the weekend, hoping to elicit specific information to generate a conversation. The other politely technically answered the question without any real information, declining the opportunity to talk about their life.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Anything interesting happen over the weekend?”
“Oh, did a few errands, caught up on some reading.”
“Ugh, I was going to go to a game, but my basement flooded and I had to take care of that instead.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah.”
“See you around.”
Here, the person who first asked about the weekend didn’t get an engaged response, but got enough of a pro forma response to provide cover for an otherwise out of context complaint and bid for sympathy. The other person offered perfunctory sympathy, and ended the conversation.
Here’s a way for the recipient of a “How are you?” to make a bid for more conversation:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, my basement flooded over the weekend.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah.”
“See you around.”
So the person with the flooded basement provided a socially-appropriate snippet of information – enough to be a recognizable bid for sympathy, but little enough not to force the other person to choose between listening to a long complaint or rudely cutting off the conversation.
Here’s what it looks like if the other person accepts the bid:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, my basement flooded over the weekend.”
“Wow, that’s tough. Is the upstairs okay?”
“Yeah, but it’s a finished basement so I’m going to have to get a bunch of it redone because of water damage.”
“Ooh, that’s tough. Hey, if you need a contractor, I had a good experience with mine when I had my kitchen done.”
“Thanks, that would be a big help, can you email me their contact info?”
By asking a specific follow-up question the other person indicated that they wanted to hear more about the problem – which gave the person with the flooded basement permission not just to answer the question directly, but to volunteer additional information / complaints.
You can do the same thing with happy events, of course:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I’m getting excited for my big California vacation.”
“Oh really, where are you going?”
“We’re flying out to Los Angeles, and then we’re going to spend a few days there but then drive up to San Francisco, spend a day or two in town, then go hiking in the area.“
“Cool. I used to live in LA, let me know if you need any recommendations.”
“Thanks, I’ll come by after lunch?”
So what went wrong online? Here’s the conversation again so you don’t have to scroll back up:
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
The end.
Online, there are no external circumstances that demand a “Hi,” such as passing someone (especially someone you know) in the hallway or getting into an elevator.
If you import in-person conversational norms, the “Hi” is redundant – but instead online it can function as a query as to whether the other person is actually “present” and available for conversation. (You don’t want to start launching into a conversation just because someone’s status reads “available” only to find out they’re in the middle of something else and don’t have time to read what you wrote.)
Let’s say you’ve mutually said “Hi.” If you were conversing in person, the next thing to do would be to query for a basic status update, asking something like, “How are you?”. But “Hi” already did the work of “How are you?”. Somehow the norm of “How are you?” being a mostly insincere query doesn’t get erased, even though “Hi” does its work – so some people think you’re being bizarrely redundant. Others might actually tell you how they are.
To be safe, it’s best to open with a short question apropos to what you want to talk about – or, since it’s costless online and serves the same function as “Hi”, just start with “How are you?” as your opener.
I recently had occasion to explain to someone how to respond when someone asks “what’s new?”, and in the process, ended up explaining some stuff I hadn’t realized until the moment I tried to explain it. So I figured this might be a high-value thing to explain to others here on the blog.
Of course, sometimes “what’s new?” is just part of a passing handshake with no content – I covered that in the first section. But if you’re already in a context where you know you’re going to be having a conversation, you’re supposed to answer the question, otherwise you get conversations like this:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“What’s new?”
“Not much. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
Awkward silence.
So I’m talking about cases where you actually have to answer the question.
The problem is that some people, when asked “What’s New?”, will try to think about when they last met the person asking, and all the events in their life since then, sorted from most to least momentous. This is understandably an overwhelming task.
The trick to responding correctly is to think of your conversational partner’s likely motives for asking. They are very unlikely to want a complete list. Nor do they necessarily want to know the thing in your life that happened that’s objectively most notable. Think about it – when’s the last time you wanted to know those things?
Instead, what’s most likely the case is that they want to have a conversation about a topic you are comfortable with, are interested in, and have something to say about. “What’s New?” is an offer they are making, to let you pick the life event you most feel like discussing at that time. So for example, if the dog is sick but you’d rather talk about a new book you’re reading, you get to talk about the book and you can completely fail to mention the dog. You’re not lying, you’re answering the question as intended.
Cross-posted on my personal blog.