According to new research conducted by my colleagues Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert, people think it's more important to be interesting than to be likable in conversations with strangers.
This intuition is not right.
The paper sheds light on the prevalence of these beliefs and how they are mistaken in two different ways.
People think they should speak about 45 percent of the time to be likable in a one-on-one conversation. It looks like speaking up a bit more is a better strategy.
We randomly assigned people to speak for 30, 40, 50, 60, or 70% of the time in a conversation with someone new.
The more people spoke, the more they liked each other. The mistaken belief is that being quiet makes you more likable.
The outcome of this study is in line with previous findings. A previous study randomly assigned one person to speak and another to listen in a pair.
Listeners liked speakers more than they liked speakers because they felt more like speakers than speakers did.
People prefer those who speak up because they feel like they have more in common with them.
People fail to recognize that their new conversation partners will form global impressions of them that are not very nuanced.
People are not likely to walk away from a chat with someone new if they think they were not very personable.
They are likely to form a global impression in which they see their partner as both interesting and likable.
In order to make a good first impression, you should speak up more than you normally would, according to our new research.
The popularity of self-help books shows how many people want to know how to make a first impression.
The advice "Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves than they are in you" from How to Win Friends and Influence People can lead people astray.
Research like ours can help people gain a more scientifically grounded understanding of social interactions with new people and eventually become more confident and knowledgeable about how to make a good first impression
Participants were told to speak for a specific amount of time in their conversations. The benefit of this approach is that we can manipulate speaking time.
It doesn't reflect more natural conversations in which people choose how long to talk to one another. Our findings should be investigated to see if they generalize to more interactions.
People were assigned to speak for up to 70% of the time. It is possible that talking 90 percent of the time is not an optimal strategy.
Our research doesn't suggest that people should steamroll a partner, but rather that they should speak up more.
The Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago has a principal researcher.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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