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Ask 'What's good?' instead
Autopilot talk
Conversations go stilted when both people are on autopilot: 'Busy, good.' 'Yeah, busy but good.' 'How are the kids?' 'Good.' Well-meaning people ask safe questions and get the same stock answers everyone has given a million times.
Better questions
'What do you do?' quietly asks what someone is worth and puts them in a box. 'Working on anything exciting these days?' gives permission to talk about whatever excites them, whether that's school applications, training for something, or raising kids. The brain has to search for excitement, which hands the person a bit of optimism. 'What's been the highlight of your week?' does the same job as 'How are you?'
The one to avoid
'Been busy?' is the question to avoid. It makes people think about how busy they are and spend the conversation on it, which starts a loop of only talking about bad things.
Why do stock greetings come so automatically?
The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski coined the term phatic communion in 1923 for talk that builds social bonds instead of passing on information. Greetings like how are you are textbook examples, because both people expect a stock reply. The word phatic comes from the Greek for spoken. Linguists have documented routine openings of this kind in many languages.
Why do people dread talking to strangers?
In 2014 Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters on Chicago trains and buses to either talk with a stranger, keep to themselves, or travel as usual. Beforehand, commuters predicted that solitude would be the more pleasant option. Those assigned to talk reported the most positive commute. The researchers published the work in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General under the title Mistakenly Seeking Solitude.
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