Conversations About Boring Topics Are More Interesting Than We Think

Conversations enhance social connection and well-being, but the kinds of conversations that come to mind when thinking of these benefits are ones about interesting topics. Everyday life, however, does not spare people from conversations about boring topics. The authors examine the extent to which people’s expectations of conversations about boring topics are calibrated with their actual experiences. Nine preregistered experiments (five in the main text, four in the Supplemental Material; total N = 1,800) reveal that participants consistently underestimated how enjoyable and interesting conversations about boring topics were. Expectations were relatively more calibrated for conversations about interesting topics. This pattern held across virtual and in-person settings, conversations with friends and strangers, and self-generated and experimenter-assigned topics. This occurs partly due to the relative ease of assessing the static elements of conversations and the difficulty of assessing their dynamic elements. The topic is a static element that is easy to assess prior to a conversation, and so people overweight it in their forecasts. The level of engagement conversations command—the need to respond, listen, and pay attention to another person—makes them enjoyable, but is harder to assess because it dynamically emerges only once a conversation begins. Expectations about enjoyment guide decisions to enter conversations, suggesting that miscalibration between predicted and actual enjoyment can lead people to avoid conversations they would, in fact, enjoy.