I've studied thousands of people who are good at making small talk—here's what they do differently

Imagine you've just met someone. You've barely introduced yourselves when there's a pause. What should you say next? 

In my experience studying what makes some people supercommunicators, I learned that if you want to be good at making small talk and forging deeper connections, ask people to describe how they feel about their life rather than the facts of their life, and then ask lots of follow-ups.

Ditch shallow questions for deeper ones

Questions about facts ("Where do you live?" "What college did you attend?") are often conversational dead-ends. They don't draw out values or experiences. They don't invite vulnerability.

However, those same inquiries, recast slightly ("What do you like about where you live?" "What was your favorite part of college?"), invite others to share their preferences, beliefs, and values, and to describe experiences that caused them to grow or change. 

Those questions make emotional replies easier, and they practically beg the questioner to reciprocate — to divulge, in return, why they live in this neighborhood, what they enjoyed about college — until everyone is drawn in, asking and answering back and forth.

Craft your questions to hit these three notes

Nearly any question can be remade into a deep question. The key is understanding three characteristics:

1. A deep question asks about someone's values, beliefs, judgments, or experiences — rather than just facts. Don't ask "Where do you work?" Instead, draw out feelings or experiences: "What's the best part of your job?" One forthcoming study found a simple approach to generating deep questions: Before speaking, imagine you're talking to a close friend. What question would you ask?
2. A deep question asks people to talk about how they feel. Sometimes this is easy: "How do you feel about…?" Or we can prompt people to describe specific emotions: "Did it make you happy when…?" Or ask someone to analyze a situation's emotions: "Why do you think he got angry?" Or empathize: "How would you feel if that happened to you?" 
3. Asking a deep question should feel like sharing. It should feel, a bit, like we're revealing something about ourselves when we ask a deep question. This feeling might give us pause. But studies show people are nearly always happy to have been asked, and to have answered, a deep question.

Practice reframing your questions

"It might seem hard to reframe questions in a way that's vulnerable," Nicholas Epley,  psychology professor from the University of Chicago, told me. "But it's actually pretty easy once you start looking for it."

Here are a few more examples to help you turn shallow questions into deeper ones: 

• Instead of "Are you married?" try, "Tell me about your family."
• Instead of "Do you have any hobbies?" ask, "If you could learn anything, what would it be?"
• Instead of "Where did you go to high school?" ask, "What advice would you give a high schooler?"
• Instead of "Where are you from?" ask, "What's the best thing about where you grew up?"

Ask follow-up questions

Don't stop with just one question. "When I'm on a train, talking with people commuting to work, I might ask them, 'What do you do for a living?'" Epley says. "And then I might say, 'Do you love that job?' or 'Do you have something else you dream of doing?' And right there, you're two questions in, and you've gotten to somebody's dreams."

A 2016 study by Harvard scientists who looked at speed-dating conversations found that follow-up questions are particularly powerful.  

"Follow-ups are a signal that you're listening, that you want to know more," one of the researchers, Michael Yeomans, told me. 

"They allow self-disclosure without it seeming like self-obsession. It makes a conversation flow."

Charles Duhigg is the bestselling author of "The Power of Habit" and "Smarter Faster Better." He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and was previously a reporter at The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He studied history at Yale and received an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is also the author of "Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection."

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From the book "Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection" by Charles Duhigg. Copyright © 2024 by Charles Duhigg. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.