A recent study suggests that speaking more during a conversation with strangers makes the speaker better liked.
The study titled “Speak Up! Mistaken Beliefs About How Much to Talk in Conversations” published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin showed that the popular belief that people should speak less to be likable is not true.
The study, carried out with 116 participants, found that most people think they should speak about 45% of the time to be likable in a one-on-one conversation with someone new, according to The Conversation.
It also discovered that speaking up a bit more is actually a better strategy.
The researchers randomly assigned people to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% or 70% of the time in a conversation with someone new.
It was discovered that the more participants spoke, the more they were liked by their new conversation partners.
The researchers termed the mistaken belief that being quieter makes you more likable a “reticence bias.”
Even though the participant pool was significantly small, the outcome aligns with other researchers’ prior findings.
In a previous study carried out, researchers randomly assigned one participant pair to take on the role of speaker and listener.
After a 12-minute interaction, listeners liked speakers more than speakers liked listeners. It is because listeners felt more similar to speakers than speakers did to listeners.
The outcome suggests that one of the reasons, people prefer those who speak up is because learning more about a new conversation partner can make you feel like you have more in common with them.
Moreover, people are unlikely to walk away from a chat with someone new thinking that their interaction partner was quite interesting but not very likable. Rather, they are likely to form a global impression – for example, a generally positive impression, in which they view their partner as both interesting and likable, The Conversation reported.
The research suggests that people should speak up more in conversations with new people in order to make a good first impression.