Small talk may seem trivial and mundane at times, but researchers from the University of Warwick found that it can help people get to know others and improve their future interaction with each other.
The team gathered 338 participants to complete cognitive and personality tests before participating in games with a partner, Aumag reported. Half of them were given an opportunity to engage in small talk before the activity, while the other half did not talk at all.
They found that even with only four minutes of small talk, subjects developed impressions of their partner's personality, particularly extraversion, that influenced their behavior in future interactions.
Small Talk Changed Perceptions of Participants From Each Other
People make assumptions about other people's personalities when interacting with them face-to-face. But there are not many studies on how people assess others without seeing them, MailOnline reported.
So, researchers asked 168 participants to engage in a four-minute conversation via instant messenger. Each participant was tasked to note impressions of their partner's personalities with a focus on extraversion and neuroticism. Then they were asked to play two strategic games with the person they interacted with.
On the other hand, another set of participants with 170 members did not engage in small talk before playing the games. Based on the results, researchers reveal that those in the group where participants had prior interactions with each other have formed impressions with their partners that appeared to influence their strategy during the games.
For example, some participants decided to behave more cooperatively if their partner was more extroverted during a game with both competitive and cooperative elements. More so, some participants find it harder to out-guess their opponent if they felt they shared similar personalities during a competitive game of predicting their opponent's behavior.
Researchers noted in the press release that their findings highlight the importance of small talk no matter how irrelevant it may seem. They added that short and seemingly trivial communications with other people, help improve the prediction of personalities of those that people usually talk to, especially in future interactions.
Forming Impressions
it is human nature to form impressions of people and objects as it helps classify them as good, bad, strong, weak, helpful, unhelpful, and many other categories.
According to an article in Psychology Discussion, the Gestalt theory suggests that people perceive things by looking for meanings to close gaps. This perceptual mechanism often underlies the process of impression formation in which a well-dressed person with a skill of communication and good manners often creates a very good impression.
That means people could form impressions on the basis of limited experience or even without experience. That is why people tend to form impressions based on occupations, wherein some are deemed noble and some are not, and many other things.
The process of impression is often subtle and even unconscious that is influenced by several factors. In that sense, an impression formation is a form of person perception.
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