And now, the science-backed trick to winning anybody over instantly
You want to know how to be the most popular person at your next networking party? It’s quite simple. Just ask questions. According to research, one of the easiest ways to make a bad impression is to focus the conversation on yourself the whole time. “[M]ost people spend the majority of their conversations sharing their own views rather than focusing on the other person,” the authors of a new paper wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology as reported by The Science of Us.
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In the study people were assigned to ask a lot of questions to each other (at least nine) or only a few (four tops.) Then they were asked to rate the conversations. The subjects liked being asked more questions and their favorite kind of questions were follow-ups as it indicated that their talking partner was really paying attention to them. Responsiveness is a very winning trait. See even though you may think everything you have to say is fascinating, other people don’t as much.
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This is great to know for our next networking event, but not sure if we needed an entire scientific experiment to figure this out. If you had just watched Amy Schumer’s comedy routine where she talks about the time she thought Bradley Cooper asked her out then you know that asking questions is really the key to winning a woman’s heart. Of course, Schumer wasn’t displaying the best responsiveness as she wasn’t really paying attention to what he was saying.
