Embrace the mundane: small talk is more fun and important than we think
Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? A Royale with Cheese. A Big Mac’s a Big Mac. But they call it Le Big Mac.
How fast-food menus translate into French may not, on the face of it, seem like the most thrilling of conversation topics.
But just as the dialogue between Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta turned out to be one of the most memorable scenes in Pulp Fiction, engaging in small talk on a seemingly mundane matter may turn out to be the highlight of your day.
This is true even if you end up nattering about cats, diets, Pokémon or even onions, a study has found.
Researchers have cited the exchange between the characters Vincent and Jules in the Quentin Tarantino film as an example of how small talk with a colleague or friend on an apparently trivial topic may seem boring or even like a chore, but is actually much more enjoyable — and important for our mental health — than we expect.
The scene in Pulp Fiction and the “conversations about nothing in Seinfeldillustrate how ordinary topics can become unexpectedly captivating once the conversation gets under way”, researchers from the University of Michigan said.
When it comes to general chit-chat around the water cooler or coffee machine, people tend to think the most important thing in judging whether a conversation is going to be enjoyable is whether the topic being discussed is particularly exciting or compelling.
But this may be the conversational equivalent of judging a book by its cover. We should not be so quick to run away from someone who wants to ask how our weekend was, discuss the weather or tell us about their cat.
What matters most is having a pleasant moment of social interaction with another person, hearing about their life, telling them about yours, and simply enjoying a “small moment of connection”, research has shown.
The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, asked 1,800 participants to rate how enjoyable they expected a conversation to be on certain seemingly mundane topics.
“Topics were many and varied,” researchers said, “including World Wars One and Two, non-fiction books, the stock market, cats and vegan diets. In some cases, participants were asked to suggest a topic they found boring.” Responses included such topics as maths, onions and Pokémon.
The participants consistently expected conversations on such topics to be “fairly dull”. They were then encouraged to discuss them with another person. The pairs discussed topics deemed interesting by one party but not the other, as well as matters that both had told researchers they found dull.
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Their chats involved “free-flowing” conversation about the selected topic, conducted over Zoom with cameras on and limited to five minutes’ duration.
The results were surprising.
“Afterward, they reported enjoying them much more than they had predicted,” the researchers found.
“This pattern held even when both parties agreed the topic was boring.”
It suggests that the writers of great novels and television shows have perhaps been a little harsh to compulsive small-talkers such as Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma, a good-natured woman who chatters on from one mundane domestic topic to another before falling foul of Emma’s lack of patience.
Keith Bishop, the character known as “Big Keith” in The Office, was also gently mocked in the sitcom for his habit of engaging in mundane chit-chat at the Wernham Hogg paper company branch in Slough, warning one colleague before a trip to America: “You want to keep your travellers’ cheques in a bumbag. Out there they call them fanny packs.”
In the Irish sitcom Father Ted, the character Father Purcell was also mocked for his conversational ability, dubbed “the most boring priest in the world” for his propensity to prattle on without interruption.
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In Abigail’s Party, written by Mike Leigh for stage and television, Angela and Beverly engage in excruciating suburban small talk which seems agonisingly mundane on the surface, but masks a darker undercurrent of class and marital tensions between the characters.
Elizabeth Trinh, a doctoral student who led the study, said: “We tend to assume that if a topic sounds dull, the conversation will be dull too. But that’s not what people actually experience.
“We were both surprised and excited by how robust the effect was. People consistently expected conversations about seemingly boring topics to be less interesting than they turned out to be.”
It is not what you are talking about that matters — it’s who you are talking to, she suggested.
“What really drives enjoyment is engagement,” Trinh said. “Feeling heard, responding to each other and discovering unexpected details about someone’s life can make even a mundane topic meaningful.
“If we skip talking to a coworker at the coffee machine, a neighbour in the elevator or a stranger at an event, we may be missing small moments of connection. Even a brief conversation about everyday life may be more rewarding than we expect.”
A closer look at small talk “reveals that conversations about seemingly boring topics can be surprisingly enjoyable for those involved”, the study notes. “People can find themselves unexpectedly absorbed in casual exchanges about daily routines, small annoyances or trivial observations, conversations that, in hindsight, may feel more interesting than anticipated.”
