Michael Kardas
Michael Kardas is a researcher at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, as stated on his 2022 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper, written with Kumar and Epley, asked why people stick to small talk with strangers when deeper conversation might serve them better.
Who they are
Kardas studies judgement and social behaviour. This site draws on the 2022 paper only.
This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.
Key papers
Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation (2022), with Kumar and Epley. Across experiments, conversations with strangers felt less awkward and created more connection and happiness than participants expected. People especially overestimated how awkward deep conversations would be, and expected others to care less about their disclosures than the others actually did.
Key ideas
The central idea is that the fear of oversharing can run ahead of the real risk. People hold back from personal conversation because they predict it will go badly, and the prediction is often wrong. That sits alongside Nancy Collins and Lynn Carol Miller's finding that disclosure can count against a person in the wrong setting: the risk is real in some contexts, and smaller than people think in ordinary conversation.
Sources
- Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367-398. doi:10.1037/pspa0000281