The coffee is booked. Tuesday, ten o’clock, a café you both agreed on. And somewhere between confirming and arriving, the question sneaks in: what do you actually talk about on a coffee date, or a first catch-up with a maybe-friend, or a coffee with a friend of a friend? An hour feels long enough to run out of things to say. So most of us reach for the interview. What do you do? Whereabouts do you live? Been busy? Three questions in, both of you can feel it: a polite exchange of CV facts that fills the time and reveals almost nothing.
The good news is that conversation between strangers has been studied closely for decades: what opens people up, what keeps things moving, what makes two people walk out warmer than they walked in. The findings are consistent, a little surprising, and easy to use. Here’s what they say.
Small talk is a doorway, not a destination
In 2010, psychologist Matthias Mehl and colleagues published a study in Psychological Science with a title that does most of the work: “Eavesdropping on Happiness.” They fitted 79 people with a device that recorded 30-second snippets of audio every 12½ minutes across four days: an acoustic diary of ordinary life. When they matched the recordings against well-being measures, the happiest participants had roughly twice as many substantive conversations as the unhappiest, and only about a third as much small talk.
Worth knowing: when a larger team, Mehl included, re-ran the analysis in 2018 across pooled samples, the substantive-conversation finding held up, but the case against small talk didn’t. Small talk wasn’t hurting anyone. It just wasn’t doing the lifting.
Which settles the small-talk question rather neatly. The weather, the café, what you ordered: these aren’t failures of conversation. They’re the runway. Use them for a few minutes while the coffees arrive, then take off. The mistake isn’t starting shallow. It’s staying there for an hour.
Go one level deeper than feels natural
The reason we stay shallow is that we expect depth to be awkward. It mostly isn’t. In 2022, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley published “Overly Shallow?” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: twelve experiments, more than 1,800 people, most of them paired off with a stranger and handed conversation topics. The shallow ones ran to TV shows and the weather. The deep ones asked things like what you’re most grateful for, or when you last cried in front of another person.
Before talking, people predicted the deep conversations would be uncomfortable. Afterwards, they reported the opposite: less awkwardness than they’d feared, more connection, more happiness. And having tried both, they preferred the deeper one. The barrier, the authors found, is a miscalibration. We underestimate how interested a near-stranger will be in our answers, so we never offer them.
You don’t have to open with grief and gratitude. Just swap the CV question for one with a person in it. Not “what do you do?” but “what’s been taking up most of your headspace lately?” Not “been busy?” but “what are you looking forward to at the moment?” Same territory, one level down. And one level down is where the conversation actually starts.
Ask the second question
If you take a single technique into the café, make it this one. In 2017, a Harvard team led by Karen Huang published “It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: two experiments on getting-acquainted conversations, plus a field study of real speed daters. Across all three, people who asked more questions were liked more, and the effect was carried largely by follow-up questions, the ones that respond to what the other person just said. Among the speed daters, asking more follow-up questions predicted a better chance of landing a second date.
The mechanism is ordinary and lovely: a follow-up question is proof you were listening. The researchers call it responsiveness (listening, understanding, care), and you can’t fake it with a prepared list, because a follow-up only exists in response to an answer. So when they mention the pottery class or the brother in Broome, don’t file it away and move to your next planned topic. Ask about it. “How did you get into that?” is worth ten prepared openers.
Take your turn: it’s a rally, not an interview
There’s a failure mode on the other side, too: the person who asks beautifully and reveals nothing, running the hour like a podcast host. In 2013, Susan Sprecher and colleagues tested this directly in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Pairs of strangers got acquainted over video. Some took turns disclosing, back and forth; in others, one person shared for the whole first conversation while the other just listened, then they swapped roles. The turn-takers came out ahead on every count (more liking, more closeness, more perceived similarity, more enjoyment), and the gap didn’t close even after the one-way pairs had traded places.
Reciprocity, it turns out, works best in small, alternating doses. So when your question lands and they give you something real, don’t just bank it and ask another. Answer it yourself, unprompted. You asked what they’re looking forward to; tell them yours. Ask, listen, offer: that rhythm is what makes it a conversation instead of a screening.
Borrow from the 36 questions, lightly
If you want actual prompts, the best-tested set in existence was published in 1997, when Arthur Aron and colleagues ran “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Pairs of strangers spent 45 minutes working through 36 questions, in three sets that escalate gradually from light to personal, and reported far more closeness afterwards than pairs who’d spent the same time on small-talk tasks. The list became properly famous in 2015, when Mandy Len Catron tried it with an acquaintance and wrote about it in the New York Times’ Modern Love column, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”. She later married him.
To be clear: do not bring a laminated list of 36 questions to a first coffee. The later sets are built for the lab, and 45 minutes of structured escalation is a lot to spring on someone who thought they were getting a flat white. But the early questions are calibrated almost perfectly for a first hour, and they’re free to borrow. Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest? What would make a perfect day for you? When did you last sing to yourself? What are you most grateful for? None of them require shared history, none of them corner anyone, and every one of them beats “so, what do you do?”
What it comes down to
Start shallow, briefly. Go one level deeper than feels natural, because the awkwardness you’re bracing for mostly isn’t coming. Ask the second question, about their answer. Take your turn instead of running an interview. And if you want a pocket prompt, borrow from a list that’s been turning strangers into friends since 1997. That’s the whole kit, and it fits comfortably inside an hour, which is about the right length anyway.
It’s also, quietly, why Flat White keeps the format so plain: one person, one café, one hour, arranged on purpose. The logistics are settled before you sit down, so the only thing left to bring is the second question. The research suggests that’s enough.
Meet one person. Over coffee. On purpose.
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