I have always had distinct dislike of small talk. I’m not naturally socially skilled; as a kid and teenager, I could not understand subtext, all sarcasm except for the most blatant went right over my head, and the strange and complex unspoken ruleset for social interactions was a complete mystery to me.
I learned (with a lot of help and patience from my family and close friends) how to interact with others, framed to me almost entirely as an academic exercise. Personality typing systems like the MBTI and Big Five personality traits gave me a language and a framework to understand how people differed, and I devoured books on body language and conversational technique and applied these rulesets whenever possible.
Now I’ve come far enough that sometimes people even tell me I’m “personable” or “fun to talk to”, which just blows my mind when I remember the shy and socially awkward kid that I used to be.
One thing that was a consistent pain point when it came to talking to new people was small talk.
I didn’t get anything from it. I found it boring. I didn’t see how it was helpful to the person I was talking to. All in all, I saw no point in small talk, except as an arbitrary step from the beginning of a conversation to talking about something more real and meaningful.
It would have been nearly 10 years ago that I was bringing this up to one of my friends who was helping me figure out how to navigate through conversations, and she suggested I make a flow chart of how to get through small talk. And so I did:
I still use something similar to this formula to this day when navigating conversations, though it’s a lot less conscious. It has been recently, however, that I’ve been able to understand what the point of small talk is at all.
Small talk has a purpose?
I’ve written before about the agreement paradox, and how it relates to corporate culture and business relationships, but this concept can apply across every human relationship and interaction.
This paradox, put simply, is: Humans need to have a certain set of shared attributes to coexist in a group (general value structures, shared language, etc.) and also need to maximize the number of differences within the group so that we can achieve things more effectively and not grow stagnant (different interests, different skillsets, different ways of viewing the world, etc.).
That’s why I call it the agreement paradox: We need to agree as much as possible to maintain cohesion, but also disagree as much as possible to achieve and adapt.
Small talk is a social tool people use unconsciously to start the conversation out on some agreements. That’s why we ask shallow versions of deep questions (“How are you?” “I’m doing good. How are you?”), we ask about the weather, we ask about whether the other person lives in the same area as us, or works nearby, or goes to school nearby: It’s all an attempt to establish a shared environment. If we start off a conversation agreeing that we’re all generally emotionally “good”, all experience the same weather, and all share similar spaces, then that’s enough to jump off into more “dangerous” topics where the conversationalists might be able to express individuality.
Even more than this establishing of a shared environment, it gives a chance for people participating in the conversation to show off enhanced relational skills: If they don’t share an environment, can you answer questions about the weather that shows a shared value about how you both interact with the weather? Or if you disagree about what optimal weather is, can you display peacekeeping and tolerance skills to allow opposing views about even the mundane to coexist in the same relational space?
This may sound like I’m overthinking, but to those of us who have trouble with intuitively navigating small talk, this is a huge revelation. It can feel like we’re being socially rejected due to an inability, dislike, or even seemingly too much ability in talking about these mundane topics. What’s really happening is that when we don’t navigate small talk optimally is that we’re failing a test (that’s being performed unconsciously) to find out whether we’re a socially compatible conversation partner. The criteria is not your interest, or whether you can bear through it, or whether you can form an opinion on weather or the latest sports game, it’s establishing a baseline of commonalities and/or cordial disagreements with which for the conversation to continue.
Why is this important?
I actually think understanding this is more important than ever. Because the social functions that small talk exists for are being made irrelevant and more and more difficult to uphold. As pop culture becomes broader, more fractured, and more customizable, and online forms of communication become more normative than in person ones, we’re losing our natural abilities to establish and maintain these baseline agreements within shared environments. I used to think social media was superior, because there was no necessity for small talk- but that’s also it’s great weakness. We don’t have a necessity in the day to day to find some sort of mode of agreement with semi-random people, and that’s causing a loss in this as a natural social skill.
A society that lacks the ability to find even the most basic of agreements cannot function- so in lieu of a natural proclivity towards developing this skill through things like small talk, we will have to be more conscious and train ourselves to do it: through first principles, practical frameworks, and yes, things like flow charts.
Tobias Lansberry 