Less small talk makes for a happy life

A new research has found that people who engage in more substantive conversations are likely to be happier than those indulging in small talk.

The researchers in U.S. examined whether happy and unhappy people had different types of conversations - is a happy life filled with trivial chatter or reflective and profound conversations? For the study, participants were asked to wear an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over four days. This device periodically records snippets of sounds as participants go about their lives. For this experiment, the EAR sampled 30 seconds of sounds every 12.5 minutes yielding a total of more than 20,000 recordings. The researchers then listened to the recordings and identified the conversations as trivial small talk or substantive discussions. Also, the volunteers completed personality and well-being assessments.

The analysis of the recordings revealed that greater well-being was associated with spending less time alone and more time talking to others. It was found that the happiest participants spent 25 per cent less time alone and 70 per cent more time talking than the unhappiest participants. Furthermore, the happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants.

The researchers suggest that the happy life is social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial. They concluded that deep conversations may have the potential to make people happier. The findings were attributed to the fact that just as self-disclosure can instill a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a sense of meaning in the interaction partners.