The psychology behind why you dread small talk

Do you avoid small talk in the office, or with your neighbor in the elevator? If so, you might want to give it a chance. According to a study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000521.pdf, even when participants were primed that a conversation would be boring, it turned out to be more interesting than they anticipated. Today on the show, we get into that, plus why scientists gave lobsters painkillers, and a clue about the formation of the Grand Canyon. Interested in more science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with my co-host Emily Kwong.

• 0:26Emily Kwong?

  Hi, Gina.

• 0:27Regina Barber?

  Hey, Em. And we also have Elsa Chang, our beloved colleague out in L.A. who hosts All Things Considered in her downtime from talking to us.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  So much downtime.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 0:39Regina Barber?

  We're all here for the latest installment of our, like, news roundup, an episode pulling together some of the most interesting studies we found in scientific journals lately.

• 0:47Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, something that's trending on social media, that we can do a little truth squatting around.

• 0:51Regina Barber?

  Yep, and this time, we've got a whole range of topics.

• 0:54Emily Kwong?

  To start with, Elsa, what is your relationship to small talk?

• 0:58Speaker 03

  I actually love small talk because I am amazing at small talk.

• 1:01Regina Barber?

  Oh, I also like small talk.

• 1:03Emily Kwong?

  I do like running into you when I visit California. Our first topic is about the worthiness of small talk. Should we do it? Like, how boring is it, really?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  It's not boring. You have to make it not boring.

• 1:14Emily Kwong?

  True, true. Speaking of which, like, how much are you looking forward to a conversation about lobsters?

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Ooh, well, I love to eat lobsters.

• 1:21Emily Kwong?

  Will you, though, after listening to this science? No, no, no.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  I don't know. Please, don't take another good thing away from me.

• 1:27Emily Kwong?

  We'll hold your claw through it, don't worry. And we're rounding all of this cool science out with a look at how the Colorado River came to carve the Grand Canyon.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Ooh, cool.

• 1:38Regina Barber?

  Today on the show, scientific research knows no bounds.

• 1:42Emily Kwong?

  From small talk to aquatic emotions and ancient history, we'll leave you with no shortage of cutting-edge dinner party conversation.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Small talk.

• 1:50Regina Barber?

  Yeah, grab some popcorn for this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:11Speaker 00

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• 3:24Regina Barber?

  OK, Em, Elsa, I'm thinking three hosts sitting around yapping were basically contractually obligated to talk to each other about small talk first. Yeah, let's small talk about small talk, because I love small talk. You have to make it not boring. That is up to you. We'll do it. But honestly, though, it's never boring with the two of you. Oh, I have a study, though, talking about small talk and what people think of small talk. And I'm going to start with a Seinfeld reference. So there's this famous episode where George and Jerry are sitting in front of like a bunch of TV executives, and they're pitching this idea that basically is the concept behind Seinfeld. So here's George pitching it.

• 4:00Speaker 07

  I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: nothing.

• 4:07Speaker 07

  Nothing?

• 4:08Emily Kwong?

  Nothing.

• 4:09Regina Barber?

  You can hear the skepticism, right? This is how a lot of people think about small talk. But we know how funny the show Seinfeld turned out to be.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 4:17Regina Barber?

  And in a new study about a similar phenomenon, there was a similar surprise. People think conversations about a boring topic will be boring, but oftentimes, they are wrong.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  I agree, because this happens all the time on my job. Like, I'm constantly surprised at how not boring some topics end up being. You just have to keep an open mind and stay curious.

• 4:36Regina Barber?

  Yeah, totally. I totally agree. And these researchers, they looked into this. They asked a total of 1,800 participants to have conversations that the participants rated as boring. So onions, Pokemon, math. And every time, the participants came out of their short conversations thinking these conversations were more interesting and more enjoyable than they had expected. And this was all published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And Elsa, this held true, whether conversations were online or in person with a friend or a stranger. Some participants even said they would be interested in having more conversations about that specific boring topic.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Supposedly boring topic. Okay. So what is the takeaway here? Like, I should just lean in and try to enjoy every conversation coming up when someone's talking to me about something that seems boring at first?

• 5:24Regina Barber?

  Maybe.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Welcome to my job.

• 5:30Regina Barber?

  So I spoke to Elizabeth Trin, the lead author of the study, and she mentioned the report put out by the U.S. Surgeon General in 2023 that outlined the loneliness epidemic in our country. And she feels that this could be one of the reasons people seem to enjoy these seemingly dull conversations. And she has some advice for all of this.

• 5:49Speaker 08

  So if we avoid talking to someone because we assume it will be boring, like we avoid talking to that coworker at the coffee machine or a neighbor in the elevator, then we may be unnecessarily depriving ourselves of small moments of connection that could improve our mood and sense of belonging.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Everybody is potentially interesting.

• 6:08Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right. Well, next topic, lobsters and painkillers. I'm already bracing myself for this one. Like, do I need to give up eating lobsters because they have feelings?

• 6:20Emily Kwong?

  It's a little more complicated than that, but if you've ever seen a lobster boiled alive before a dinner, it doesn't look great for them. And that practice has actually been banned in a few places, including Switzerland, Norway, and New Zealand, where lobsters have to be stunned before they're boiled with things like an electric shock or mechanical destruction of the brain with like a sharp knife. And this is just because some scientists argue that lobsters and other crustaceans may feel pain when boiled alive.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I don't want that. Is that where these painkillers come in?

• 6:50Emily Kwong?

  Yes. This study in Scientific Reports wanted to know how painkillers affected lobsters, things like aspirin. And they wanted to know how these lobsters responded to an electric shock. But before we get into what the team found, one thing to note, there's a difference between pain and nociception. Nociception, that's the process that happens in the brain when there's a negative stimulus, like a shock.

• 7:11Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and pain is more subjective. It involves the emotional component of discomfort, like how you feel about a sensation.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Right, but can you actually ask a lobster how it feels when it's getting boiled? My guess is no.

• 7:25Emily Kwong?

  No.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  So what kind of reactions do they look to?

• 7:27Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so in this case, they weren't boiling any lobsters, actually. So instead, they gave some of them painkillers, including aspirin, lidocaine, and then other lobsters didn't get those medications. And then they gave the lobsters an electric shock.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  And how did the lobsters react to that shock?

• 7:42Regina Barber?

  Yeah, one thing was that they flipped their tails, which is something lobsters do to swim away from a dangerous thing, like a shock. But the lobsters that got the aspirin or the lidocaine flipped their tails less, which indicates that the painkillers seem to reduce any pain-like sensations the lobsters experienced, and ultimately suggests the lobsters likely do experience something.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Okay, then what does all of this mean for people like me who love to eat lobsters? Like, am I supposed to be giving lobsters painkillers when I cook them at home?

• 8:13Emily Kwong?

  You could stun them using some of the methods used in other countries, but Lynn Sneddon, one of the study authors, says do not give them medicine. The painkillers were only a way to see if the lobsters can feel something like pain.

• 8:23Speaker 09

  Certainly do not, under any circumstances, give the crustaceans any painkillers, because if you eat these animals, there's lots of side effects and you shouldn't do that.

• 8:34Emily Kwong?

  However, Lynn does hope this work could lead to more humane ways to kill invertebrates like lobsters in the future.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  All right, think of those lobsters, everybody.

• 8:42Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Now for our last story, which I hear invites us to think about the Grand Canyon. That place just takes my breath away.

• 8:50Emily Kwong?

  It is so stunning out there. And one of the most enduring controversies among geologists is just how. Like, how did the Colorado River, you know, travel from western Colorado through Arizona to create this 277-mile-long canyon that we know and love? And one big piece of the puzzle may be lakes.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 9:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah, big old lakes that filled up, spilled over millions of years ago, creating a continuous river system, possibly contributing to the modern-day course of the Colorado River. This new evidence is published in the journal Science.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Wait, but how do you gather evidence from ancient lakes? I presume that these are lakes that no longer exist, right?

• 9:29Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, geology, it's a lot like cold case forensics. You're piecing together what happened a very long time ago. And one of the lead detectives on this case was John Hu at the University of California, Los Angeles. He and his collaborators gathered sediment a little over 100 miles from the Grand Canyon in a place called the Bitterhochi Formation.

• 9:47Speaker 10

  Imagine you go out to a riverbank and then you scoop up a handful of sand. And in that handful, there's probably also a couple hundred or even thousands of microscopic grains of zircon, each of which is like a vault of information about where it came from.

• 10:01Regina Barber?

  John and his team used uranium-led dating to trace the history of these zircon crystals. And they found that the pattern of crystal ages from the Bitterhochi Formation was a very close match to the early deposits of, you guessed it, the Colorado River.

• 10:16Emily Kwong?

  Which essentially filled in a missing piece of the Colorado River's ancestral path, a moment in time from 6.6 million years ago that would have eventually helped carve the Grand Canyon.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  That is so cool.

• 10:28Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Regina Barber?

  Elsa, it is always a party when we have you.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 10:34Regina Barber?

  It's awesome.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 10:35Emily Kwong?

  Yes, thank you for considering the lobster with us from the edge of the Grand Canyon.

• 10:40Regina Barber?

  Thank you.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Thank you to both of you.

• 10:43Regina Barber?

  You can hear more of Elsa on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 10:48Emily Kwong?

  You can also hang out with us on the NPR app. That's the best way to catch every episode of Short Wave. And if you turn on notifications, we'll let you know the second a new conversation drops. Download the NPR app and let's keep talking.

• 11:01Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Jeff Pierre. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.

• 11:07Emily Kwong?

  Ted Mebane and Maggie Luthar were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 11:11Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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