Social failure I notice in myself: there’ll be people at a party I don’t know very well. My default assumption is “talk to them with ‘feeler-outer-questions’ to figure out what what they are interested in talking about”. (i.e. “what do you do?”/”what’s your thing?”/”what have you been thinking about lately?”/”what’s something you value about as much as your right pinky?”/”What excites you?”).
But this usually produces awkward, stilted conversation. (of the above, I think “what have you been thinking about lately?” produces the best outcomes most of the time)
Recently, I was having that experience, and ended up talking to a nearby person I knew better about a shared interested (videogames in this case). And then the people nearby who I didn’t know as well were able to join in the conversation and it felt much more natural.
Part of the problem is that if there is no person-I-know nearby, I have to take a random guess at a thing to talk about that the person is interested in talking about.
In this case, I had various social cues that suggested video games would be a plausible discussion prompt, but not enough context to guess which sorts of games were interesting, and not enough shared background knowledge to launch into a discussion of a game I thought was interesting without worrying a bunch about “is this too much / wrong sort of conversation for them.”
Not sure what lesson to learn, but seemed noteworthy.
I really dislike the pinky question for strangers (I think it’s fine for people you know, but not ideal). It’s an awkward, stilted question and it’s not surprising that it produces awkward, stilted responses. Aimed at a stranger it is very clearly “I am trying to start a reasonably interesting conversation” in a way that is not at all targeted to the stranger; that is, it doesn’t require you to have seen and understood the stranger at all to say it, which they correctly perceive as alienating.
It works on a very specific kind of person, which is the kind of person who gets so nerdsniped wondering about the question that they ignore the social dynamic, which is sometimes what you want to filter for but presumably not always.
A noteworthy thing from the FB version of this thread was that people radically varied in which question seemed awkward to them. (My FB friends list is sharply distorted by ‘the sort of friends Ray is likely to have’, so I’m not sure how much conclusion can be drawn from this, but at the very least it seemed that typical minding abounds all around re: this class of question)
Sure, I think all of these questions would be awkward addressed to various kinds of strangers, which is part of my point: it’s important to do actual work to figure out what kind of question a person would like to be asked, if any.
So a reframing of this question is “what do you say/do/act to gain information about what a person would like to be asked without resorting to one of these sorts of questions?”
(With a side-note of “the hard mode for all of this is when you actually do kinda know the person, or have seen them around, so it is in fact ‘legitimately’ awkward’ that you haven’t managed to get to know them well enough to know what sorts of conversations to have with them.)
I have no idea how (a)typical this is, but I find it difficult to give quick answers for “global summary” type questions. What’s the best book you’ve ever read? What do you spend most of your time doing? What are your two most important values? Etc. Those “feeler-outer questions” have that sort of quality to them, and if the people at those parties are like me I’m not surprised if conversation is sometimes slow to get started.
Social failure I notice in myself: there’ll be people at a party I don’t know very well. My default assumption is “talk to them with ‘feeler-outer-questions’ to figure out what what they are interested in talking about”. (i.e. “what do you do?”/”what’s your thing?”/”what have you been thinking about lately?”/”what’s something you value about as much as your right pinky?”/”What excites you?”).
But this usually produces awkward, stilted conversation. (of the above, I think “what have you been thinking about lately?” produces the best outcomes most of the time)
Recently, I was having that experience, and ended up talking to a nearby person I knew better about a shared interested (videogames in this case). And then the people nearby who I didn’t know as well were able to join in the conversation and it felt much more natural.
Part of the problem is that if there is no person-I-know nearby, I have to take a random guess at a thing to talk about that the person is interested in talking about.
In this case, I had various social cues that suggested video games would be a plausible discussion prompt, but not enough context to guess which sorts of games were interesting, and not enough shared background knowledge to launch into a discussion of a game I thought was interesting without worrying a bunch about “is this too much / wrong sort of conversation for them.”
Not sure what lesson to learn, but seemed noteworthy.
I really dislike the pinky question for strangers (I think it’s fine for people you know, but not ideal). It’s an awkward, stilted question and it’s not surprising that it produces awkward, stilted responses. Aimed at a stranger it is very clearly “I am trying to start a reasonably interesting conversation” in a way that is not at all targeted to the stranger; that is, it doesn’t require you to have seen and understood the stranger at all to say it, which they correctly perceive as alienating.
It works on a very specific kind of person, which is the kind of person who gets so nerdsniped wondering about the question that they ignore the social dynamic, which is sometimes what you want to filter for but presumably not always.
A noteworthy thing from the FB version of this thread was that people radically varied in which question seemed awkward to them. (My FB friends list is sharply distorted by ‘the sort of friends Ray is likely to have’, so I’m not sure how much conclusion can be drawn from this, but at the very least it seemed that typical minding abounds all around re: this class of question)
Sure, I think all of these questions would be awkward addressed to various kinds of strangers, which is part of my point: it’s important to do actual work to figure out what kind of question a person would like to be asked, if any.
So a reframing of this question is “what do you say/do/act to gain information about what a person would like to be asked without resorting to one of these sorts of questions?”
(With a side-note of “the hard mode for all of this is when you actually do kinda know the person, or have seen them around, so it is in fact ‘legitimately’ awkward’ that you haven’t managed to get to know them well enough to know what sorts of conversations to have with them.)
I have no idea how (a)typical this is, but I find it difficult to give quick answers for “global summary” type questions. What’s the best book you’ve ever read? What do you spend most of your time doing? What are your two most important values? Etc. Those “feeler-outer questions” have that sort of quality to them, and if the people at those parties are like me I’m not surprised if conversation is sometimes slow to get started.