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Everyone loved or hated this question
The networking experiment
A research team gave six conversation starters to 500 speed networkers across three events and had them rate the quality of each conversation. Some starters rose to the top and some sank. 'What's your story?' got fives from people who thought it was the best conversation they ever had, and ones from people who hated it.
Who loves the question
The split follows personality. Introverts and ambiverts hate the question because it feels like a therapy session. Extroverts love it, since they are thrilled to start with childhood or the college years. An ambivert sits between an introvert and an extrovert, dials up extroversion when needed, and needs a lot of recharge time afterward.
Safer starters
The highest-rated starters were safer ones: 'What personal passion project are you working on?' and 'What was the highlight of your week?' 'Have any fun plans coming up?' also counts as safe when meeting someone new or catching up.
Do ambiverts really sell better?
In a 2013 paper in Psychological Science, Adam Grant studied 340 call-center sales representatives. Those in the middle of the extraversion scale earned more revenue per hour than people at either end. Grant attributed the result to a flexible balance of talking and listening.
Do follow-up questions make people more liked?
Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, and colleagues examined this in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In online chats and speed-dating events, people who asked more questions, and especially follow-up questions, were better liked by their partners. In the speed-dating sample, they were also more likely to get second dates.
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