“Where are you from?”
“What do you do?”
We’ve all experienced the ritualized exchange of personal facts when getting to know someone. We present curated versions of ourselves: job titles, hometowns, badges of busy-ness.
The thing is, most small talk feels like a polite but boring game of ping-pong. You serve a fact about yourself, they return with one of theirs, and you go back and forth without forming a real connection.
As social scientists studying what makes people click with each other, we’ve found that meaningful bonds form not simply through trading facts or even discovering that you have similar backgrounds, but by treating conversations as an opportunity to co-create.
