The Power of Preparation: The Surprising Benefits of Planning Possible Topics Before Conversing

Conversations are ubiquitous, and can be difficult. One source of difficulty is that people tend to hold complex, dynamic, overlapping, and at times conflicting goals in their conversations, including enjoyment, information exchange, social connection, impression management, conflict management, prosocially helping others achieve their conversational goals, and so on. Extant research tells us little about how to best achieve (and trade off) these goals. In this paper, we propose and test a simple intervention to help people achieve many common conversational goals: brainstorming possible conversation topics ahead of time. Across three studies of face-to-face conversations, we demonstrate a robust effect showing that brainstorming topics before conversations leads to greater conversational enjoyment. In Study 1, we show that participants who recalled planned conversations with their partners reported enjoying them significantly more than unplanned conversations. In Study 2, we recruited participants in close pairs (friends, roommates, romantic partners), and showed that participants who were instructed to prepare for these conversations by brainstorming a few possible topics enjoyed the conversations more than those who did not prepare. Study 3 was a pre-registered replication of this finding and suggests some potential mechanisms: participants who prepared topics were significantly less anxious and more confident, and felt more engaged in the conversation. We are currently analyzing the transcribed text data from these studies to identify additional linguistic and prosodic cues, as this content may differ in important ways between the planned and unplanned conversations in close pairs.