Science reveals the kind of conversation that makes us happy…
Sunday, July 23, 2023.
Is there a kind of human conversation which benefits just about all personality types?
Yup. Having deeper, more meaningful conversations makes humans measurably happier, according to research from 2018.
It didn’t matter if you were an introvert, or an extrovert.
Humans in discourse they deemed meaningful, whether it was political, spiritual, relational, etc. The key idea was that it was a conversation infused with the gravitas of a meaningful exchange of information.
Researchers noticed that desultory discussions about trivial matters were completely uncorrelated to any measurable increase in happiness.
Research Director Dr. Matthias Mehl, said:
“We do not think anymore that there is an inherent tension between having small talk and having substantive conversations. Small didn’t positively contribute to happiness, and it didn’t negatively contribute to it.
With this study, we wanted to find out whether it is primarily the quantity or the quality of our social encounters that matter for one’s well-being.”
How the study was conducted:
The researchers ingeniously employed small recording devices which captured snippets of daily conversations from nearly 500 (486 to be exact) volunteers.
The Research Director explained the detectable differences between small talk and a meaningful conversation in their study volunteers:
“We define small talk as a conversation where the two conversation partners walk away still knowing equally as much — or little — about each other and nothing else. In substantive conversation, there is real, meaningful information exchanged. Importantly, it could be about any topic — politics, relationships, the weather — it just needs to be at a more than trivial level of depth.”
Personality differences had no measurable effect on how much of a happiness boost people got from deeper, more meaningful discussions conversations.
Professor Mehl took pains to explain the surprising finding about personality:
“We expected that personality might make a difference, for example that extroverts might benefit more from social interactions than introverts or that substantive conversations might be more closely linked to well-being for introverts than for extroverts, and were very surprised that this does not seem to be the case.”
Although small talk was not linked to happiness, it is still necessary, said Professor Mehl:
“I think of it like this: In every pill, there’s an inactive ingredient, and it’s a nice metaphor, because you cannot have the pill without the inactive ingredient. We all understand that small talk is a necessary component to our social lives.You cannot usually walk up to a stranger and jump right into a deep, existential conversation because of social norms.”
Have a deep conversation about the Red Sox and call me in the morning…
Perhaps, someday, humans could be prescribed a deep conversation as a part of a mental health treatment plan:
“I would like to experimentally ‘prescribe’ people a few more substantive conversations and see whether that does something to their happiness.” Dr. Mehl
RESEARCH:
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Milek et al., 2018).
“Eavesdropping on Happiness” Revisited: A Pooled, Multisample Replication of the Association Between Life Satisfaction and Observed Daily Conversation Quantity and Quality
Anne Milek anne.milek@uzh.ch, Emily A. Butler, […], and Matthias R. Mehl+5View all authors and affiliations
