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- We tend to think we should spend more time listening than talking during a conversation if we want to be liked.
- But research suggests the opposite — people tend to like it when the other person spends a bit more time talking than listening.
- Francesca Tighinean, a psychology educator and author of How to Be Magnetic, explains why and shares three tips for becoming a better conversationalist.
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.
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.
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Credit: Franco Dupuy / Death to Stock
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