People systematically underestimate how interesting and enjoyable conversations about “boring” topics will be. Across nine preregistered experiments with 1,800 participants, conversations about dull-seeming topics turned out better than expected across friends/strangers, online/in-person, and self-chosen/assigned topics.

Before talking, people overweight the static topic (“this sounds boring”) and underweight the dynamic parts of conversation — attention, responsiveness, listening, turn-taking, and the small discoveries that emerge once two people are actually engaged.