How to Encourage Conversation at a Party

Science makes it clear that there are some hard and fast rules about spaces where people have great conversations—you can apply them throughout your home, creating multiple conversation zones—even if you don’t have any neighbours (or you’ve invited all your neighbours to your party so you can turn the music as loud as you’d like) and plan to turn the music at your soiree to speaker stressing levels—people will still try to have conversations and to a great extent will succeed because almost all of us are excellent lip readers.

Places where people will have positive, pleasant conversations:

• Will allow everyone who wants to to make eye contact at any time they feel like it. Parties require the sorts of everyone sits in a ring facing towards the middle of that ring, sort of like how you sat in kindergarten during story hour.  People who can’t make easy eye contact can’t talk to each other, unless one of the conversants has, like your mother, eyes in the back of their head.  Circular tables encourage more collegial conversations while having people sit at the short ends of rectangular tables results in more “leader-lead” situations.  Whenever possible arrange seats so that people sitting in them will be at right angles to each other, this allows them to easily make eye contact or not, as desired, and also has been tied to the development of more positive relationships.
• Too much eye contact can be the end of even the best conversation. People whose eyes bore unrelenting into ours seem creepy, and we flee from them.  So, give people at your party something to look at besides each other.  Not a dancing bear in the garden but things such as plants or cut flowers or pieces of art of something scattered about on tabletops, etc. (another reason not to create a sleek, empty home).  Whenever needed, and we all need an eye break every so often, guests at your party can gracefully look away from the face of whomever they’re talking to and at that plant, etc., without seeming rude.
• If some of the chairs in your home where you think party goers will hang out, for example, the ones in your kitchen, don’t have cushions on them, add them.The new cushions don’t need to be plush or more than an inch or so thick, just there.  We are much more cordial with others when we’re sitting on something padded than we are when the surface under our butt is devoid of cushioning.  If you have wooden benches or something similar that people will sit on, give them the cushion treatment also.
• So, you’ve arranged seats in a circle, given people eye contact “relief stations,” how else can your furniture improve your party? By keeping everyone’s head roughly the same height above the floor.  When people are looking up at someone that person being seen from below seems more adult-like, more competent and experienced, for example, than someone who is being physically looked down upon (the person being looked down on seems childlike, less skilled, and experienced, for example, even if they’re a hundred years old).  In any of the conversation zones you put together make sure that everyone is sitting on chairs or stools or sofas or loveseats with the seating surface at the same height above the floor (generally, but not always, because furniture legs are the same length) or they’re all sitting on cushions on the floor.  If some people in a group are treated differently than others, perhaps because comments they make are accepted unchallenged even if they’re phony-baloney, conversations are distorted and end before they’ve had a chance to brighten anyone’s day.
• When people are reclining, they’re more relaxed, but fitting too many reclined seats into a party space can be difficult and allowing some to recline and others not, can lead to inter-attendee “tension.”
• You probably aren’t going to paint before your party, but if you do, make the walls warm colours, people seen in front of warm walls seem friendly than people in front of cool coloured walls. Warm colours also boost our appetite, so use them with abandon if your party will feature oodles of fine-tasting treats and more sparingly if it likely won’t (cool colours could also save you a lot of party money, people won’t feel like eating snacks, but encouraging people not to eat seems decidedly un-welcoming.  Cool colours on table clothes and napkins will have the same influences on how much people want to eat as it does when it’s painted on walls.  (There’s more on designing to create encourage people to eat later in this article.) Light bulbs are easier to change than wall colours and they can also influence party goers’ psychological state.  Put some warmer bulbs in tabletop and floor lamps and turn off the overhead fixtures; the warmer, dimmer lighting will increase the friendly vibe and keep conversations purring along.

 

• Make sure the light at your party is NOT uniform (but do make sure that there are not spaces that are so dark that people will have some sort of accident in them). Lighter spots will become territories of particular groups at your party, they’ll colonize them and as a result they’ll have a better time with each other and at your party in general.  If creating zones for people at your party with light doesn’t work for some reason, arrange furniture to create nooks and eddies that people will find themselves in where they can spend a while comfortably.  It’s great if some of these spaces have views out over the rest of the party from places where people don’t feel like they’ll be surprised by people outside the group; this all relates to creating spaces with prospect and refuge, discussed here.   Remember the 70’s conversation pit?  Party goers (and psychologists) think they’re great.
• If you’re worried that the people at your party won’t behave, add a mirror (if you’re worried, they WILL follow established social protocols, take them down). We’re more apt to follow social norms (even to sort our recycling properly) when we can see ourselves in a mirror.

 

Sometimes you may anticipate having guests with non-standard sensory systems—maybe they’re blind or have ADHD, for example—if you do, read these articles to see how to best welcome them to your home.