How can I learn to be interested in people?

October 12, 2015 3:42 AM

I'm a strongly expressed introvert with hardly any natural interest in other people. But I have to live and work with others. Can I learn to be interested in other people? How?

I've noticed I rarely start conversations and only infrequently ask people about themselves. I think that's because I'm not terribly interested in other people. But for financial reasons I have to get along at work (in a team) and also live with a flatmate. I find asking questions without any interest on my part feels mechanical, but I feel I will be seen as standoffish or even rude if I continue not to ask.
What should I do?

posted by EatMyHat to Human Relations (16 answers total)

Ask their opinions on topics that you are interested in. For example, if you are a reader, ask what sort of books they like, or if they have any recommendations.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:54 AM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm guessing that people don't seem interesting to you because they don't seem very real to you. Asking questions when you don't care what the answers are gets you nowhere.

Instead, I suggest you try offering something about yourself, with an attached question that gives the other person a chance to respond without putting them on the spot. Nothing deep, just something you're at least mildly interested in. "I read (something amazing) about bees. I used to be terrified of them, but now I'm curious. Are there bees in your yard?" or "I have to buy a present for my 10 year old nephew. I'm thinking a book, but I don't know if the books I read as a kid would be interesting to him. Do you have any suggestions?" or "I love beets and bought 25 pounds them online. I'm a little overwhelmed. Got any favorite things to do with beets?"

Most people will not be any more interested in bees, your nephew or your beets than you are about them, but it gives you an opportunity for a little interaction so you won't seem "rude." And you might occasionally be surprised by finding yourself mildly interested in another person and their ideas.

Good for you for being willing to try something beyond your comfort zone.
posted by kestralwing at 4:11 AM on October 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Here is a way of reframing the problem that was helpful to me:

I can't make small talk and get badly tripped up just trying to do it. I love talking about books and media, though, and most folks are at least a little interested in those things, so when I am forced to make small talk, I ask questions like, "hey, read anything interesting lately? Watch anything on TV?"

I assumed for years that this was difficult because I am just not that interested in other people and find them boring. But at some point I realized that I actually like hearing my best friends talk about their day, what their kids were doing at school, how their shopping trip went, etc. I even enjoy reading in detail about the minor social dilemmas of people I don't know. So I don't actually think people are boring at all!

The source of the conversational awkwardness, then, is something else, probably anxiety and not being fully invested in the interaction. I get nervous about how to respond and that self-consciousness interrupts the flow of the conversation. I restore the flow by redirecting it to a subject I am comfortable with, becoming less self-conscious and more present by doing so.

So that's what works for me. If a conversation stalls out, just give it a nudge in a direction you can talk easily and comfortably about. Then, when people get to talking more fluidly, try to get equally invested in listening, the way you might read a personal essay in a magazine or an AskMe. It's just like getting involved in a novel: you have to put some work into paying attention to the exposition on the front end, but the reward of getting absorbed in the narrative is worthwhile.
posted by thetortoise at 4:34 AM on October 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Cardinal rule about conversation at work/or with strangers is to avoid topics concerning sex, religion, politics and money - these can create heated arguments. You could learn the gift of gab by watching dialogue driven films by Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, David Mamet, Jill Sprecher, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Woody Allen. Another idea is to start listening to podcasts that feature a group of people. Or read an autobiography written by a socially inept person - Felicia Day.
posted by plokent at 5:26 AM on October 12, 2015

"Fake it 'til you make it" can often seem like dumb advice but I think in this situation it may be your best course of action. It's what most everyone else is doing, believe me. If you power through the weird embarassment/annoyance you feel while making small talk it will eventually get replaced by the pleasant realization that it can generate a non-zero amount of goodwill between people, which can build over time. It can be exhausting I know but it gets easier.
posted by STFUDonnie at 5:26 AM on October 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Hardcore introvert here. I've struggled with this too, finding myself falling asleep in conversations as someone drones on, not knowing how to get them talking about things I want to hear about. The two lessons that made me better at this are:

1. Don't be afraid to interrupt people. If you're asking a question, people take more kindly to being stopped in the middle of a monologue. Take any pause as an invitation to get them talking about something you're interested in. You can preface it with an apology, a la 'sorry, before I forget, how did your date go last night?'

2. Don't worry about asking 'weird' questions. I have a pretty limited range of interests too, and I used to think people would be weirded out if I asked something geeky and specific ('Oh you used to live in Germany? why do you think Germans are so much more directly grappling with their past than other European countries?'), but in my experience people tend to take my questions at face value and answer earnestly. Sometimes I say 'sorry, I know that's an essay question, I'm just super interested'.

3. People are as bored talking about themselves as you are asking them. So skip it! I hate answering 'where are you from' and 'how was your weekend' too. It's boring to hear myself talk. There's no reason you can't start a conversation with something you've genuinely been thinking about all day: 'do you think Trump is going to win the nomination?' 'Have you been watching How to Get Away with Murder?' With people I know well, I try to skip the small talk and go right into stuff I'm interested in talking about, even if that means skipping the 'catch up' part of the conversation
posted by Tenzing_Norgay at 6:07 AM on October 12, 2015

What are you interested in? I find it difficult to believe that everything you're interested in doesn't concern human beings in one way or another. Do you read books? Are there characters in those books that are human people? Then you're probably interested a bit in the human condition. Are you interested in video games? If so, then you may be interested in strategy or game theory or other things that people do for entertainment. Do you watch movies or TV? Great! Other people do too!

I think "I'm not interested in people" tends to be more, "I don't know what to talk about with people I don't know well" or "I find everyday subjects like work talk or small talk boring." So avoid the generic, bland stuff and talk to people about what interests you and find out what interests them on a deeper level.
posted by xingcat at 6:25 AM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm not as introverted as you but found I learned a great deal about talking to people, especially strangers, from reading a couple of Studs Terkel's books. He does oral histories and manages to elicit really interesting conversations - this may not help you find the conversations interesting yourself, but since your goal does involve making the people around you more comfortable, it does address a facet of your difficulty.

The book that helped me with this was Working. And after reading it, I had a few really excellent train rides in which I met people and asked questions about their jobs and lives and really enjoyed the conversation without feeling awkward.
posted by sciencegeek at 7:01 AM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I work in a non-sales role at a sales-oriented company, and they're always doing sales training us on how to start and continue conversations. There's one thing in particular that I found helpful called Seven Good Minutes. You pair up with someone else, and then you spend seven minutes asking the other person questions. Everything you say has to be a question relating to the other person's previous answer; you can't comment on their answers or change the subject. Seven minutes is longer than a normal small talk conversation, which is kind of the point. You quickly exhaust all the "where are you from?"/"what do you do for a living?" questions and have to come up with something deeper, which is usually more interesting. I'm naturally pretty introverted, and while I wouldn't say I *like* talking to people after doing this, I'm at least better at faking it.

A shorter tactic would be to ask the person, "if you were in Jeopardy!, what story would you want Alex Trebek to ask you about after the first commercial break?" Assuming your interlocutor understands the Jeopardy! format, this will reveal what they find most interesting about themselves.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:08 AM on October 12, 2015

I have a lot of trouble asking people about themselves without reminders. I'm not disinterested, just profoundly self-absorbed and really like to make people laugh. And that's something to remember: often, people care more about talking than they do about your listening. So, what I do is after a coworker and I talk about something they're looking forward too - a baby shower on Sunday - I'll make an Outlook reminder for 9:37am on Monday to ask her about it. I don't do this with everyone all the time, but I try to for one person a day.

Also a good trick: they ask you how your weekend/evening was and you just say, "great, how was yours?" If they have something they are excited to talk about then yay, well done. If they say, "Great, thanks," then that's all they want to say. Next step: if Lisa has mentioned golfing a few times over the course of a month: "Neat, sounds like you like golf. How'd you get into that?"
posted by good lorneing at 7:19 AM on October 12, 2015

I have a game I like to play with myself to help me with small talk. I try to see how long I can keep a conversation going by digging into whatever the other person is saying.

“What did you do this weekend?”
“Oh yeah? What movie?”
“How did you like it?”
“Do you like horror as a genre?”
“What’s your favorite horror movie?” and so on.

I see how many questions I can chain together (C-C-C-Combo!). It feels like a video game and can be pretty entertaining. Plus it makes me sound interested in other people (sometimes I even fool myself). An added bonus, it prompted me to look into various ways to keep the combo going and read advice about unpacking fat words, looking for common interests and ways to gently steer the conversation to common ground, where I’ll have more/better questions.
posted by Garm at 7:48 AM on October 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm an enormous introvert and I'm fascinated by other people, to the point where I decided to become a therapist. Most of the other therapists I know are also introverts. I find interacting with others tiring, especially people I don't know well or large groups of people (or large groups of people I don't know well!), but that's not the same as not being interested in other people. It may help you if you separate out "not wanting to interact with everyone" (which is totally an introvert tendency) and "not being interested in people"(which doesn't have to be) a bit in your mind. Finding interactions tiring may not be something you can particularly change, but finding interesting things about people certainly is, and I think you may be doing yourself a disservice to assume otherwise.
posted by jaguar at 8:13 AM on October 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think you can do a combination of things

- learn to make some small talk on topics that you care about
- be very friendly, polite and somewhat unavailable
- be able to respond to small talk-ish stuff effectively enough that you don't feel awkward or weird about it.

So for me, I am not good at small talk but I like people. Usually they have something interesting about them but may not know how to surface that sort of thing or are even more awkward than I am. I figure since I have a clue (since I know this is an issue, not everyone does) I can be graceful and try to help out if I am in an enforced-interaction situation (like at work, a small party, whatever). I usually have some go to topics that I'm nominally interested in like food, public transportation or what people do with their recycling (if I am traveling). If I'm away from home I'll also just ask people about things that are specific to their location that are not specific to mine. I thought it was really easy to get people in the UK to explain council housing to me because I legitimately didn't know anything about it and they knew a lot and. If it got sticky in a "this is like talking about politics" way I changed the topic to something else.

The next thing is not feeling like you have to talk all the time. If you're genuinely friendly and open when you encounter people and even make small talk for 30 seconds but then scoot off to something else, people will (usually) not think you are weird, strange, awkward or avoiding them. So making it seem like you really like to talk but just can't, is often the more politic and polite move. My father was one of the most awkward people I know and really couldn't make small talk with anybody, but very few people knew this because he could be friendly enough in the short term but then would just have something he needed to wonder often do. He called it the "air of mystery" it's possible that would work for you.

And then some of it is just having a few things you can say if somebody starts talking to you. A couple anecdotes about the last couple weeks, something interesting about your day or your home life or a holiday or something that's a pretty tame conversational angle but can lead to some back-and-forth interaction. I'll often prepare two or three things to talk about before I go into a big social situation so that I don't freeze up when someone starts talking to me.

And lastly, realizing that if you do get stuck in a situation that you feel is awkward, you always have the freedom to just walk away and not engage. I think for a while I was concerned that in conversations I would get stuck with someone wanted to control them, and talk about things I didn't want to talk about like money or politics or whatever, but I gave myself the freedom to just not have those conversations if they came up and I felt much more comfortable in general conversational situations. Best of luck.
posted by jessamyn at 8:20 AM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'd like to second Jaguar's suggestion to separate introversion from disinterest. I'm on the extreme end of introversion and am very interested in other people.

Is there something else, such as distrust, low empathy, or social anxiety, getting in your way?

I think it would help to cultivate a general attitude of openness and desire to learn new things. If you already have that in some other arena of your life, try to direct it also toward people. You can learn so much about - and from - any one person or any one interaction. It might involve some concrete piece of information about them or the world, or some way they have of handling themselves in a particular situation.

Do you like stories? Everybody is full of stories, is part of a story.
posted by moira at 7:15 PM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I learned this phrase from Malcolm in the Middle and have, to my surprise, found it successful:

"I don't know very much about that. Tell me more."
posted by jander03 at 12:55 AM on October 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

To me, people are an extension of whatever I find fascinating about life. I agree with moira - if you like stories then it's hard to not be interested in others. Do you watch TV? See movies? You must be curious about 'finding things out' especially since you're here discovering other people's perspectives on life.

Maybe you are not good at getting past the banal first stages and therefore think that is what conversation is? I am awful at it:

- oh yoghurt! I love yoghurt!
- yeh me too... nice weather.

I find it is also much easier to talk to people when sitting down and working than when by the water cooler because the pressure is off and the expectation of 'having an amazing conversation with no silences' is not there. It's the second-in-line activity (work being the first). The water cooler makes me freeze up and takes the joy out of all conversation. 'Fetching water' is not enough of a strong primary activity to make conversation secondary.

In terms of being interested - a conversation helps me find things out about life (how others live, how they see things, how come they are so joyously fascinated by something I have no interest in like rugby when it's just holding a ball and running like a madman). It's like an investigation into their thinking processes and what you can take from that and apply to your own thinking processes (but not as clinically creepy as i've made it sound). From then on it's like watching a soap and you become invested. You also start to want to do it more because you see the joy they experience from opening up and expressing themselves. It's sort of like travelling and experiencing another culture but like someone who is going to stay for a while, not like a distant tourist. It's much better with people you have nothing in common with. The novelty of 'OMG me too' conversation wears off very quickly.
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 3:16 AM on October 13, 2015 [1 favorite]