THE CONVERSATION: Small talk acts like social glue – here’s how to get better at it

Predictable small talk is a human technology that opens interactions. Here are practical suggestions for how brief comments or specific compliments can turn polite pleasantries into genuine connection.

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.

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.

Small talk is almost certainly not declining, but doing what it has always done: changing shape to accommodate our changing lives. A call to a mobile, with the caller already named on screen, no longer needs the old ritual of working out who’s speaking as part of the greeting.

Now we even have AIs (artificial intelligences) that do small talk. And since AIs are so good at convention, they can probably do it better than the average person. Those who excel at small talk probably feel it’s yet another human territory the AI are taking over.