"Someone talked about their goldfish and all sorts of crazy things. "People were talking about their hobbies, they were talking about their pets," Sgroi said. When it comes to the object of conversation for small talk, Sgroi said the research was quite surprising: people didn't just talk about the weather, as people in Britain are mocked to do. And that has to be a benefit if you're in a team-based working environment,” he said. “If someone asks you ‘How are you?’ you could ignore them or you could just say, ‘Fine’, but the more you say, the more information you reveal about your personality, the better it will be in terms of their ability to understand you. Sgroi said that we should all be making more of an effort when it comes to small talk. So it actually has a beneficial purpose.” “It produces a sort of cohesion and an ability to cooperate that you don't readily get in other ways. “A lot of managers tend to think of fraternising between colleagues, when they talk to each other about social things, as draining in terms of productivity. In Sgroi and Bose’s study, small talk proved to make quite a difference in the players' approach to the game: the pairs that had chit-chatted to each other contributed 30 per cent more money in their communal pot, showing that they were more cooperative than pairs that had not engaged in pleasantries. In a game like the public goods game, where players can either cooperate or decide to free-ride on the effort of their partner (likely making them feel foolish and deeply betrayed), the idea that players have of each other and the way they will behave is of fundamental importance. These are common games used in behavioural economics, where players often use “cheap talk”: similarly to bluffing in poker, cheap talk is basically lying to make the other person behave the way you want them to.
In one game –called the public goods game – players were given a £20 (€23) note and they were asked to contribute to a communal pot. The two groups of participants were put in front of two money-based strategy games, where they were asked to guess whether their partner will behave selfishly or cooperatively.
Those engaging in small talk had not only learned to know each other better than those who had not, Sgroi and Bose found: they also worked better together in the simulated workplace the two researchers had created. "If I'm an extroverted person, for example, I'll tend to foster a positive social environment around me, which automatically makes me find people around me extroverted as well," Bose said.
If you're curious about how you are perceived by your own colleagues, know that, according to Sgroi, "the more detail you give, the more you speak, the faster you speak, the more extrovert you seem to be."īut what the two researchers also found was that people projected a bit of their personality on the other person. "So even after a very brief exchange lasting less than four minutes, people start to build a sense of others' personalities, whether they're extroverted or introverted, do they seem bold or shy, warm or cold."
"What our research suggests is that such brief chats could shape how you work together in the future," Bose told Euronews Culture.