Pessimistic assessments of ability in informal conversation

Abstract

Conversation is one of the most common ways of establishing social connection and satisfying the need to belong. But despite spending considerable time talking to others, many people report that engaging in informal conversation with anyone other than close friends and family makes them anxious. In this research, we explored people's assessments of their conversational ability. In Studies 1a–1c, we found that people are relatively pessimistic about their skills in conversation when compared to other common activities. We also provide support for the hypothesis that this pessimism is driven by a tendency to not engage in the usual pattern of self-serving attributions when it comes to the positive and negative moments of conversations. Instead, people attribute the low points of a conversation more to themselves than to the other person (Studies 2 and 3). We discuss the origins of this attributional pattern, as well as other potential mechanisms underlying conversational pessimism, in the General Discussion.