Small talk

Ask questions, especially follow-up questions, and go a little deeper than feels safe. People enjoy talking with you more than you expect.

• Evidence: Some
• Takes: 5 minutes
• Social

Right now

1. Start with something you can both see. The line, the venue, the food. It doesn’t need to be clever.
2. Follow it with a real question. “How do you know the host?” or “What brings you here?”
3. Listen for one detail and ask about it. That’s the whole skill.

Before

• Expect it to go better than you fear. Across seven studies with 2,304 people, those about to talk to a stranger worried that they’d lack conversation skills and that the other person wouldn’t like them. Afterwards, the conversations had gone better than they predicted [2].
• It’s worth doing even with people you’ll never see again. Commuters told to talk to a stranger had a more pleasant journey than those told to keep to themselves, while others predicted the opposite [1].
• Small contacts add up. On days when students talked to more classmates than usual, they felt happier and felt they belonged more [7]. The neighbor and the person at the coffee shop count.
• Have two or three questions ready that go beyond “what do you do?”

During

• Ask follow-up questions. In studies of live conversations, people who asked more questions were liked more, and follow-ups about what the other person had just said mattered most. Speed daters who asked more follow-ups got more second dates [3]. People in the studies didn’t expect asking questions to make them more liked.
• Share something back. A conversation where only one person asks feels like an interview. Match what they tell you with something of your own.
• Go a bit deeper than feels safe. After the warm-up, ask about something they care about. In a series of experiments, strangers expected deep conversations to be more awkward than they were, and felt more connected afterwards than after shallow ones [5].
• Don’t worry about silences. A pause is a chance to ask the next question.

After

• End while it’s still good. In a study of 932 conversations, they rarely ended when either person wanted, and people had little idea when their partner wanted to stop [8]. A warm, clear ending is a kindness, not rudeness.
• Remember the liking gap. After a conversation, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them and enjoyed it [6]. If you replay an awkward moment, the other person probably didn’t notice.
• If you want to see them again, say so: “Shall we grab a coffee sometime?” See making friends as an adult.

Why this works

The most consistent finding is that people are too pessimistic about talking to others. We expect strangers to be less interested than they are [1], we fear conversations will go worse than they do [2], and we think we’re liked less than we are [6]. Several teams have found this in different settings.

The question-asking study had a correction in 2025 after an independent audit found minor reporting errors. The audit said all the paper’s conclusions still hold [4].

Rated Some. The experiments are well designed and the main findings repeat across studies. But most were short, one-off conversations with students, online participants or commuters, and they measure how people feel afterwards rather than lasting changes.

Topics: Social, Conversation, Strangers, Questions, Small Talk

Sources checked 4 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.