👥 How Conversations Sculpt Your Sense of Self
New research suggests people's identities converge after brief discussions
Occasionally, you’ll meet someone who just seems to get you. Even your first conversation with them will flow effortlessly, and you’ll feel like the social connection builds itself. Last week, I wrote about how we often feel safer among people who are similar rather than different to us, and today’s post has a similar theme. Since we prefer to interact with people who are similar to us, we’ll actively seek out those people to develop relationships with.
But what if our sense of similarity to our friends isn’t just about pre-selection? Rather than choosing to hang out with people who are similar to us, what if we instead mold our sense of self to be more like the person we are talking to?
One new research project tested this exact idea, and the results offer a new perspective on one of the most ancient and important priorities in human life: social bonding.
🖇️ How identities converge after conversations
In a 2024 study published in PNAS, researchers recruited 104 participants at Dartmouth College and asked them to have 10-min one-on-one conversations with each other in small groups. When people paired up for a chat, researchers gave them either a shallow or a deep conversational prompt, but the content of the conversation was otherwise up to the participants.
Before starting conversations, participants rated themselves on 60 descriptive dimensions including traits such as “funny”, “loyal”, and “cranky” on 100-point response scales. They repeated these self-ratings after each conversation, and they also reported back on how much they enjoyed the conversation itself.
The researchers found that a pair’s self-ratings were significantly closer together after a conversation compared to before a conversation. Ratings were 7 points better aligned on average after chatting, and this was equally true for deep and shallow conversations.
People had relatively stable ratings of their personal characteristics overall, but small fluctuations in their self-reflections systematically moved in the direction of their conversational partners. As an added bonus, the closer people’s self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversations. This enjoyment effect was specific to when both conversational partners aligned with each other, not necessarily when one person tended to align individually with each person they talked to.
An interesting twist is that rather than self-views converging in a very specific way according to each pair of people, self-views instead were converging toward a community norm. When the researchers created random pairs of people in their analysis—i.e. pairs of people who didn’t speak to each other—and recalculated alignments in personal characteristics, they found a similar effect of inter-self convergence in post-conversation self-ratings.
So when it comes to convergence between self-views, it doesn’t particularly matter who we’re talking to. In fact, we’re naturally limited in how much we can learn about a person’s characteristics from a 10-min conversation anyway. Instead, conversations in general tend to nudge us into aligning our personal traits more closely to the average person in our community. Ultimately, this contributes to converging everyone’s self-views, not just the two people within the conversation.
The traits that tended to converge most toward community norms were those traits that were furthest away from the norm when conversations began. For example, if somebody felt their least normative trait was their tendency to be less funny than the average person, then conversations were most likely to boost how funny they saw themselves.
In other words, people’s most unique or non-normative traits were also the traits that tended to blend in most with the crowd after a conversation. When it comes to our deepest insecurities, this might be a good thing if it helps us feel a little less unusual. But the blending could also make us feel less unique and special when it comes to our biggest talents or most valued personal characteristics.
These results offer an interesting new perspective on social bonding. We don’t just enjoy people’s company or appreciate them more following a good chat— we quite literally start to feel like them. This social alignment tendency could explain how social networks become more homogenous over time and how our sense of self evolves in line with the people that surround us.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Choose your friends wisely
What is your most non-normative personal characteristic? Is it being highly introverted? More anxious than most? More jealous than the average person? Whatever it is, consider how it’s affected by your social connections. I tend to be highly introverted, but I feel noticeably more outgoing right after talking to friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. My characteristics also evolve based on who I’m with. One group of friends brings the extrovert out of me while another group tends to bring out the family man. You’ll often hear the argument that you should “be your true self”, but we don’t really have a single static self. Our characteristics transform in subtle ways depending on the community norms we’re exposed to. All the more reason to choose your friends carefully.
#2. Conversations help you feel more connected to your community
You don’t need to talk to every person in a community to feel like you belong. Our brains are effective statistical learners, and they have a particular knack for picking up on social norms through our general daily interactions. When you’re feeling lonely or disconnected, talking to individual people can activate your social impulses while also reconnecting your sense of self to your community. As the data from the study showed, it doesn’t always have to be a deep or transformative conversation. Passing chats with a friend on the phone, a barista at the coffee shop, or a fellow parent at the playground can all serve a positive purpose.
#3. Engage with diverse connections and communities
We develop a broader sense of self and identity when we engage with different types of people. Limiting your social interactions to very specific and restricted communities means that you never get the chance to self-align with new personalities, cultures, or viewpoints. You don’t need to consciously shape-shift to fit every social circle you find yourself in, but experiencing different ways of living helps you to better understand your place in the world while giving you opportunities to discover new preferences.
“The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small consequence, but in enlarging, improving, and correcting the information you possess, by the authority of others.”
~ Walter Scott