A while back, I was at a party in London where a friend introduced me to an actress who had just been in a big theater production. I was excited to talk with her. Throughout our conversation, she asked brilliant questions, and I enjoyed answering them. She was great at making people feel seen and important. But whenever I asked her something back, with real curiosity about her life, she gave a brief, polite answer and turned the spotlight back on me: “But enough about me, tell me more about you.”
You’re probably expecting me to say this made me like her even more. As the conversation went on, though, I started to feel uneasy. She listened well, yet I felt like I was giving a monologue to a great interviewer. By the end, she knew a lot about me, and I knew barely anything about her.
On the way home, I kept replaying the conversation, and I realized I might have been doing the exact same thing to other people. I had always been someone who listened more, talked less, and asked a lot of questions. My conversations often felt slightly unbalanced, but I thought I was doing the right thing. I had grown up reading books like How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the main advice in all of them was to listen more than you speak and make the other person feel important.
Somewhere along the way, “be a good listener” turned into “don't say too much.”
Think about it: If your goal was to get someone to like you, how much of the conversation would you spend speaking? When researchers asked people this question, most said less than half the time, around 41% to 45%. When the goal changed to seeming interesting, the answers flipped to more than half. Most of us seem to believe we’re facing a trade-off: You can be liked, or you can be interesting. It’s the logic behind the popular advice, “It is better to be interested than interesting.” Somewhere along the way, “be a good listener” turned into “don’t say too much.”
In a 2022 study, Quinn Hirschi and her colleagues put the trade-off to the test by randomly assigning people to talk for anywhere from 30% to 70% of a conversation with a stranger. Contrary to what people had predicted, the researchers reported that the more participants spoke, the more their conversation partners liked them. The trade-off didn’t show up: The people they liked were also the people they found interesting.
An earlier study by Susan Sprecher and her colleagues may help explain why. When one stranger did the talking and the other only listened, the listener ended up liking the talker more than the talker liked them back. Once they swapped roles and both people had shared, the gap disappeared, and liking went up overall.
The simplest explanation is that when you talk, you give the other person more to connect to. Sprecher’s listeners felt closer to the talker, and the more the talker had shared, the more similar the listener felt to them. And decades of research show that feeling similar to someone is one of the most reliable routes to liking them. As someone opens up, they become more familiar, you start noticing what you have in common, and liking follows.
We clearly like people who talk more, but Hirschi and her colleagues point out that we don’t apply the same logic to ourselves. When it’s our turn to speak, we assume the opposite — that if we want to be liked, we should listen more and let the other person do most of the talking. We find other people’s openness appealing and assume our own will be a burden. The researchers called this the “reticence bias,” and they attribute it to a lack of confidence in our own conversational skills.
It turns out that most of us are oddly insecure about this skill. In a 2023 study, Christopher Welker and his colleagues asked people to compare themselves with the average person on 20 everyday activities. People rated themselves above average on almost all of them, including reading, cooking, and walking. Holding a good conversation at a dinner party was the only one where they didn’t.
When we underrate ourselves as conversationalists, keeping a low profile feels like the safest way to be liked. That’s why “just focus on listening” is such comforting advice: Listening feels a lot safer than putting ourselves out there.
None of this is an encouragement to become a conversational narcissist. Taking over with no real listening is a big turn-off for most people. The sweet spot, as Hirschi and her colleagues suggest, is doing both: Great conversationalists talk more and listen well. Talking more gives the other person material to connect with, and good listening makes them feel safe enough to open up.
3 things great conversationalists do
1. Be the first one to go deeper. As Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks points out, small talk is a perfectly good place to start. The mistake is staying there too long. Research by Michael Kardas and colleagues found that we consistently overestimate how awkward a deeper conversation with a stranger will be and underestimate how much people care about what we share, which creates what the researchers call “a psychological barrier to deeper conversations.” In reality, those conversations felt less awkward than people expected and left them feeling more connected and happier.
When you share something real first, you give the other person permission to do the same. You don’t have to reveal your deepest insecurity to be “real”; it can be as simple as bringing up something you’re genuinely excited about.
2. Listen out loud. When we think about listening, we usually picture something passive: staying quiet and letting the other person talk. But good listening involves much more than simply nodding along. Guy Itzchakov and his colleagues define high-quality listening as “empathic, attentive, and nonjudgmental.” In their experiments, people who talked to this kind of listener felt less socially anxious.
One way to do this is to ask follow-up questions that build on what the other person just said, which research shows makes people more likable. For example, if someone mentions their grandmother’s cooking, you might ask which of her recipes is their favorite. Researchers also recommend showing you’ve heard someone by reflecting back what they said or returning to something they mentioned earlier — small things like this show people they’ve genuinely been heard.
3. Prepare conversation topics in advance. Most of us go into social events or meetings with a blank mind and hope the conversation will take care of itself. In studies Brooks describes in her 2025 book Talk, 27% of people spent five minutes or more picking an outfit before going somewhere where they expect to have a conversation, but only 18% gave any thought to what they’d talk about. Half expected that thinking up topics in advance would make the conversation less enjoyable, and some worried it would feel forced or scripted. Brooks’s research suggests otherwise: Spending as little as 30 seconds thinking of a few possible topics led to smoother conversations, with fewer awkward gaps and verbal stumbles, and people came away feeling calmer and more self-assured. A few things from your life you’d like to bring up, and a couple of questions you’d love to ask are enough.
Both halves of a great conversation
Looking back, the actress did everything the classic advice tells us to do. She was curious, she asked brilliant questions, and she made me feel important. But she didn’t quite let me get to know her, and that turned what could have been a real connection into a very polished interview.
Listening well is one of the warmest things we can offer someone. But a conversation becomes a connection when both people share something of themselves, and when we hold back, we leave the other person with very little to connect to, however good our questions are.
Great conversationalists make people feel heard and let themselves be known.
This article How to become a great conversationalist is featured on Big Think.