Robert Kohlenberg is cited in this UW Daily article about going beyond small talk to create social connection.
Small talk: A window into something deeper
By Hannah Turlove Contributing writer,Updated
It’s the first day of a new quarter. You walk into your noisy lecture hall and plop down next to someone you’ve never laid eyes on before. Generally, one of two things will happen. You’ll either both sit in a painfully aware silence for five minutes, waiting for class to begin. Or your classmate will turn and talk to you. Likely, these are the first three questions they’ll ask you:
“What’s your name?"
“What’s your major?”“Where are you from?”
As soon as I stepped foot on the UW campus, I hated this scripted narrative. But I also hated sitting mere inches away from another human being in complete silence. I decided to ask students in Red Square what they thought about small talk.
“I think that building a human connection, especially in a big lecture hall, is really important,” UW freshman Selina said. “But I kind of dread the start of the next quarter because I know that when I first meet people, small talk is all I’m going to be doing. Like, ‘Hi, I’m Selina, I’m doing engineering, I’m from Portland, Oregon’ over and over and over.”
Gabby, a UW student originally from California echoed this idea. “I wish people asked more what you’re interested in, or what your hobbies are,” she said. “It would be better for people to form actual relationships through class.”
“Small talk is usually pretty awkward and then you turn back around and don’t talk again,” UW student Arturo said. “But if it’s a class I’m taking by myself, it could be helpful to have a friend in there.”
What students wanted in their classes wasn’t silence or simply small talk. It was meaningful connection. I went to the UW Center for the Science of Social Connection (CSSC) to figure out how that could be created.
Professor Robert Kohlenberg and Dr. Mavis Tsai are associate directors of the CSSC. In the 1980s, they created functional analytic psychotherapy, a therapy style that focuses on the connection between the therapist and the client.
They described the three necessary components for this connection in the acronym ACL: awareness, courage, and love. In an interaction, courage can be the open-hearted disclosure of what feels vulnerable and outside of one's comfort zone. Love can be the act of being received with acceptance and the expressed appreciation of one’s impact. Awareness can be knowing the feelings and history of both yourself and the person you are speaking with.
Kohlenberg and Tsai soon realized that these values of ACL could extend to any interaction.
“What we are doing in our lab is bypassing the therapist-client relationship and moving our concepts out to the general public,” Tsai said. “You don’t have to be in therapy to experience the power of the interaction.”
Kohlenberg and Tsai’s research on deep social interaction has had extremely impactful results.
Read the entire article here .