Nobody wants to talk about onions. Or Pokemon, or the stock market, or any of the other topics that 1,800 people across nine experiments flagged as genuinely, bone-crushingly dull. And yet when researchers at the University of Michigan paired strangers and friends together and made them do exactly that, something odd happened. The conversations were, by almost every measure, far more enjoyable than anyone had predicted.
Key Takeaways
- Research shows that conversations about boring topics are often more enjoyable than anticipated, with participants rating their enjoyment significantly higher.
- The static-dynamic distinction explains why we predict boring conversations to be dull; before talking, we focus on the topic, while enjoyment comes from engagement during the exchange.
- Engagement in conversations leads to unexpected enjoyment, as active participation makes even mundane topics feel worthwhile.
- Missing out on seemingly dull conversations may reduce social connections, which can negatively impact mental and physical well-being.
- Researchers suggest lowering expectations for what makes a conversation worthwhile, as anticipation of boredom can prevent valuable social interactions.
The gap between expectation and reality was not small. In some experiments, the effect sizes were enormous, with participants rating their enjoyment of “boring” conversations nearly two full points higher (on a seven-point scale) than they’d guessed beforehand. The mismatch showed up whether people talked face to face or over Zoom, whether they chatted with close friends or total strangers, and whether the topic had been assigned by an experimenter or chosen by the participants themselves.
Elizabeth Trinh, a doctoral student at Michigan’s Ross School of Business who led the research, thinks she knows why we get it so wrong. Before a conversation starts, the only thing you really have to go on is the topic. It sits there, inert and assessable, like a menu item you can inspect before ordering. And so you judge the whole meal by the description. “We tend to assume that if a topic sounds dull, the conversation will be dull too,” Trinh said. “But that’s not what people actually experience.”
The trouble is that conversations aren’t static objects. They’re processes, and the bit that actually determines whether you enjoy one, the back-and-forth of listening and responding and being sort of compelled to pay attention to another human being, only kicks in once you’ve started talking.
Trinh and her colleagues, Nicole Thio at Cornell and Nadav Klein at INSEAD in France, call this the static-dynamic distinction. Topics are static; engagement is dynamic. We overweight the first and barely consider the second. In a preliminary survey, roughly 52 percent of people cited the topic as the single most important factor in whether a conversation would be interesting or boring. Almost nobody mentioned engagement.
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, included a rather clever experiment to nail down the mechanism. Three hundred participants in Singapore were split into three groups. One group had live conversations about boring topics. Another read transcripts of those same conversations. A third watched video recordings. Same content, different levels of engagement. The prediction-experience gap, that yawning chasm between how boring people expected the conversation to be and how much they actually enjoyed it, appeared only in the live conversation group. People who merely read or watched the exchange didn’t experience the same surprise. It was the act of participating, of being cognitively grabbed by another person in real time, that made the difference.
“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.”
One potential objection is obvious enough: maybe people just drift off-topic. You sit down to discuss the stock market and within 90 seconds you’re swapping holiday stories. But a fifth experiment tested this directly, instructing some pairs to stick rigidly to their assigned topic while letting others wander freely. Made no difference. The prediction-experience gap was just as large when people couldn’t escape the boring topic, which suggests the enjoyment isn’t really about finding a better subject to discuss. It’s about the conversation itself, the weird alchemy of two minds paying attention to each other simultaneously. Mediation analyses confirmed that the gap in engagement (people underestimated how engaged they’d feel) accounted for most of the gap in enjoyment and interest, while positive reinterpretation of the topic played a much smaller role.
There were limits, of course. The conversations in these studies lasted between two and five minutes, which is more or less the length of a decent chat in the elevator or at the coffee machine but hardly an endurance test. The researchers are careful to note that the benefits probably don’t scale indefinitely. At some point, presumably, a boring topic really does become boring, engagement or not.
And it’s worth noting the asymmetry in the data. Predictions about interesting topics were largely accurate; people knew they’d enjoy those conversations and they did. The miscalibration was specific to boring topics, which suggests we’re not uniformly bad at forecasting social pleasure. We’re selectively bad, and the selectivity points in exactly the direction that costs us the most social contact.
That cost matters more than it might seem. A growing body of evidence links even brief, seemingly trivial social interactions, the kind researchers sometimes call “weak ties,” to measurable improvements in well-being. Loneliness, meanwhile, has been associated with health risks comparable to smoking. If people routinely avoid conversations they’d actually enjoy, they may be cutting themselves off from one of the easiest available sources of connection. “If we skip talking to a coworker at the coffee machine, a neighbor in the elevator, or a stranger at an event, we may be missing small moments of connection,” Trinh said.
The researchers suggest that one practical takeaway might be to simply lower the bar for what counts as a conversation “worth having.” Not every exchange needs a thrilling topic to be rewarding. Boring, it turns out, is a prediction problem; the anticipation of tedium, not the experience of it.
DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000521
According to a large study involving 1,800 people across nine experiments, yes. Participants consistently rated conversations about topics they’d identified as boring significantly higher in enjoyment and interest than they’d predicted beforehand. The effect held whether people talked with friends or strangers, in person or online, and even when both participants found the topic dull. The key seems to be that the act of engaging with another person is inherently rewarding in ways we fail to anticipate.
Researchers propose a static-dynamic framework to explain it. Before a conversation, the topic is the most accessible piece of information, so we lean on it heavily when predicting how the exchange will go. But once the conversation starts, a dynamic element, genuine cognitive engagement with another person, takes over and drives most of the enjoyment. Because engagement only emerges in real time, we can’t easily factor it into our predictions.
It could contribute to missed opportunities for social connection, which research has linked to both mental and physical well-being. Even brief, seemingly trivial exchanges (what researchers call “weak ties”) appear to boost mood and reduce feelings of isolation. If we routinely skip conversations because we expect them to be dull, we may be opting out of one of the simplest available ways to maintain social health.
In one experiment, participants who had live conversations about boring topics found them far more enjoyable than predicted, but people who read transcripts or watched recordings of those exact same conversations did not. The difference was active participation: listening, responding, and paying attention to another person in real time creates a level of cognitive absorption that makes even mundane content feel worthwhile. Mediation analyses showed engagement accounted for most of the gap between predicted and actual enjoyment.
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