Deep conversations: asking informative questions to learn about others' personalities

In this project, we investigate how the questions people ask during conversation with a stranger shape what they learn about their partner's personality. We run two studies in which online participants are paired with a stranger and chat for 10 minutes. In both studies, participants complete the 44-item Big Five personality inventory (John & Srivastava, 1999) about themselves before the chat, and then complete the same inventory about their partner after the chat concludes. We manipulate questions provided during the chat to guide the conversation. We test whether "deep" questions judged to be informative (Brockbank et al., 2025) allow for more accurate predictions about a partner's personality than "small talk" questions or questions participants ask without any guidance.