Importance of Responses

A follow-up study, in which participants picked their own deep questions to discuss, replicated these findings.In a fourth study, participants reported how much they thought they would care about their partner and vice versa before speaking to them on either shallow or deep topics. Participants expected to care more about their own responses than their partner would, particularly in the deep condition, though this wasn’t the case: across both conditions, conversational partners cared more about answers to both shallow and deep questions than was anticipated.