Deeper conversations with friends go better than you expect: 7 questions to try on a walk

Picture a table where someone asks what the last thing was that changed everyone’s mind. Two seconds of silence, a few glances, and then three people talking at once. The questioner expected a flat reply and braced for it.

Deep conversation with a friend tends to go better than people predict. In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (online 2021), Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that conversations felt less awkward, and created more connectedness and happiness, than participants had expected. The authors’ abstract, in the APA’s open copy, reports this across experiments labelled 1a to 5, with the deep-versus-shallow comparison in Experiments 2 to 5.

What did the experiments actually test?

Mostly strangers. Participants were paired, predicted how a conversation would feel, then had it, either a shallow one about everyday topics or a deeper one. They guessed it would be more awkward than it was, and the deep version took the largest overestimate. After having both kinds in Experiments 6a and 6b, they felt closer to the deep partner.

The explanation the authors give is plain: people expected the other person to care less about what they disclosed than the other person did. Your mind runs the scene from the speaker’s chair, where every confession feels exposed, and forgets that the listener is sitting in a different chair, mostly interested.

Does it hold for friends you already have?

Partly. Experiment 5 recruited 204 pairs in public parks (400 individuals after exclusions) and split them between strangers and people who knew each other: friends, spouses, dating partners and family. The paper reports that people predicted outcomes more accurately with those close others, whose care is more clearly known. So with a friend the surprise is smaller. It is probably not zero, because most friendships run mostly on logistics and banter. The paper also cites Mehl and colleagues (2010) for the finding that fewer than half of everyday conversations are substantive.

The study cannot tell you how your own friend will react to a given question, and it cannot say whether a conversation that felt close in a park keeps its effect a month later. It measured how people felt right afterward.

Seven questions to carry on a walk

Walking side by side helps: nobody has to hold eye contact while thinking. For a longer, structured set, Arthur Aron’s closeness questions are laid out in this friends-night timetable. The seven below are my own, ordered from light to heavier.

1. What is something you changed your mind about in the last year?
2. Which small habit of yours would surprise most people who know you?
3. When did you last feel proud of something nobody saw?
4. What do you miss from five years ago, and what are you glad is gone?
5. Is there a conversation you keep rehearsing but haven’t had?
6. What would you try if you knew it would not embarrass you?
7. What have I done, even by accident, that made a difference to you?

Answer the first one yourself before you wait for theirs. Disclosure that goes both ways takes the spotlight off the person you asked. Question seven is the heaviest, so save it for someone you trust and a quiet stretch of path. Two of the same authors, Kumar and Epley, reported a similar underestimate in gratitude letters, covered in this post on the thank-you message people skip.

When to ask

The exchange needs about an hour that is not stolen from something else, which is why a long, unhurried route works better than a coffee with one eye on the clock. If the week is full, a slow walk with no destination leaves room for a question to land and for a pause after it. Putting the walk on the calendar the night before takes care of most of the dithering.

If you try one question and it falls flat, you have lost thirty seconds and gained a funnier story. The research suggests the larger risk lies the other way: weeks of perfectly pleasant talk about nothing in particular, with the question you meant to ask still sitting in your pocket.

For what a long study of adult life says about how much close ties matter to health, see the Harvard Grant Study findings on relationships.