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Ways to Be a Better Conversationalist
只会“尬聊”？别错过这些实用聊天技巧

"Hey!How are you?It’s been such a long time since we last spoke.What have you been up to?"Many conversations start like this, but once that first sentence is out of your mouth, the rest often doesn’t flow as easily.

It doesn’t matter if you’re speaking with a stranger or a long-lost friend, the conversation can quickly turn awkward, annoying, boring, embarrassing… or all those things at once.

Although communication is at the core of the human experience, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and shy away from it, dismissing it as too hard, says Adam Mastroianni, a researcher who studies how people perceive each other.But having good conversations really isn’t that complicated.There are just a couple of things you’ll want to keep in mind.

Don’t skip the small talk

A lot of people boast about their hate for small talk, but it exists for a reason, Mastroianni says.“You need to have some kind of baseline of a relationship with someone before you can get to the next step,” he explains.

Conversations, in fact, are not just about information extraction — they also help us show that we care and are listening and attending to each other, even if we’re just talking about how our day went.

“Other primates do this by picking bugs out of their [community members’] hair.We do it using our words,” says Mastroianni.“Someone who doesn’t get that, to me, feels a little suspect.It’s like they want something instrumental out of this conversation, rather than doing it for the
sake of drawing closer with someone.”

So don’t worry that questions like, "How was your day?"and “How was your meal?” are too basic.Small talk can help ease into more meaningful conversations, gradually increasing reciprocal intimacy.

Please, please, put your phone away

Constantly checking your phone while talking with somebody is rude, vexing, and makes you a worse conversation partner no matter how well you think you can multitask.

You don’t have to take our word for it, either: research published by a psychology journal in 2018 showed that people who used their phones during a conversation felt more distracted and experienced less overall enjoyment.

Even if you think you’re exceptionally skilled at using your phone while chatting, you’re probably not.Another study published in the same journal four years later showed that people fail to recognize how negatively their phone use is affecting a social interaction, even though they can easily see how others’ phone use is affecting it.

That’s because we all think we’re using our phones for a good reason, while others aren’t.So, seriously, keep your phone out of sight, and both you and the person you’re talking with will enjoy the conversation more.

Ask questions, preferably open-ended ones

When you ask questions, especially follow-up ones, your conversation partner is more likely to have a positive impression of you, according to Harvard University research published in 2017.That’s because people who asked more questions were perceived as better at listening, understanding, validating, and caring, the study found.

One part of the investigation also showed that speed-daters who asked more follow-up questions were more likely to get asked on a second date.

In practice, you want to ask a good question that’s fairly easy to answer, says Mastroianni.“An example of a bad question is, 'Do you have any siblings?'Because the answer is yes or no, and it doesn’t allow the person to actually elaborate,” he explains.“A better question is, ‘How do you feel about’ something, or ‘What do you think about’ something.”

Give your partner a path through the conversation

Just because you’ll be listening and asking insightful questions doesn’t mean you’ll never have to talk yourself.In fact, many people assume that talking a lot during a conversation is bad when it’s actually not.

What really matters, Mastroianni says, is how you’re talking about yourself and whether what you’re saying is facilitating a conversation where somebody can say something else next.“I think good conversations have a lot of doorknobs,” he says.

A doorknob is, basically, a conversational element that allows your speaking partner to grab onto a topic and keep the discussion moving.Mastroianni refers to them this way because grasping a real-world doorknob helps you move into another space.