“Good weekend?”
“Bit hot today, isn’t it!”
“Back in the office again…”
We rely on small talk like this, and being good at it is even seen as a mark of conversational competence. Yet its content can feel superficial. Once you notice formulaic expressions such as “how are you” aren’t asking the question genuinely, this sort of talk can seem like empty pleasantries or even inauthentic.
So should we be seeking to abandon small talk, or is it fundamental to our social lives?
Maybe think of small talk as a technology: a human invention for accomplishing social goals, as much as a telephone or email is. Like any technology, it has been continuously redesigned – shaped by culture, adapted to institutions, imitated in fiction, performed in media, imported into phone calls and adjusted in inboxes. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that persists because it does something for us.
Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski called this kind of talk “phatic communion” in the early 20th century. Communion, outside church, names a sense of connection, and that is what small talk is for. Far from meaningless, it is how we open, maintain and signal our relationships.
Its predictability is a feature, not a bug. Generic, low-effort phrases can carry us through stages of interaction such as the greeting before we order a coffee, or laying the groundwork for flirting.
A valuable skill
Small talk is exactly the skill needed to deal with ordinary face-to-face conversations. It’s how people get on in public encounters and start getting to know one another better. After the COVID-19 pandemic and alongside increasing screen time, some worry that people, especially young people, don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Whether this is true or a moral panic, we may be at a turning point of recognising what value small talk has for us.
Continues…
For the full article by Dr Jessica Robles visit the Conversation.
ENDS