The Power of Riffing to Spark Human Connection
Have you ever had a conversation that feels magical, playful, emergent, and spontaneous? No awkward pauses, no annoying small talk… just, natural. Like you are building your own shared world with the person you’re talking to? It’s such a special feeling that doesn’t come around every conversation.
New research from behavioral scientists Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby shows that there’s a name for that feeling—it’s called riffing, and it can lead to much stronger bonds and connection than the far less effective advice to “find commonalities” we often receive when it comes to meeting new friends or making small talk.
Small talk is the usual: “Oh, I also love the Mets,” or “My dog is a lab, not a pit,” or “I used to work in tech, too.”
Riffing is where you build a shared reality with the person you are talking to. You essentially create a new world, full of inside jokes, characters, ideas, possibilities. Your minds merge together.
Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby share this example of how riffing works:
“How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.” “That’s hilarious! We could organize a tiny food potluck — and fit the entire spread on this coaster!” “Ha! And we’d need tiny furniture, too. Should we ask that guy over there wearing Carhartt to build it?”
As they write in a recent op-ed in the New York Times:
Riffing doesn’t require being naturally funny or witty, just being attentive and embracing spontaneity. Like any conversational skill, it takes practice. When riffing, speakers resist the urge to counter every observation with their own example, instead building bridges to new ideas (“That reminds me of …”) or tossing in a “Can you imagine if …?” They refer to earlier parts of the conversation to create inside jokes (“Looking forward to our miniature potluck committee!”).”
I loved this invitation from Maya and Erica to go deeper than our default setting to find surface-level similarities, and instead try to build something new with the person we are speaking to. It also reminded me that the art of riffing, like the art of human connection, is something AI is never fully going to be able to replicate.
Sure, GenAI creates the illusion of riffing. ChatGPT riffs on each of our prompts, always giving us more; more bullet points, more information, more research, more ideas, more encouragement. “Great idea, Smiley! Would you like me to…?”
But it can’t offer the sensation one gets from riffing with another person—that’s that special feeling of a new world being created by multiple people. That’s what human connection really is. It’s that sense that anything is possible, that anything can happen, that you can make anything or go anywhere together.
Perhaps that’s why AI tools are so powerful. It kinda sorta seems like our mind has merged with ChatGPT. “ChatGPT just gets me.”
But it’s nothing like the full body sensation you get when your mind merges with another person or a group of people.
I remember feeling this way the first time I met Ali many years ago, who is now my fiancée. We were at Camp Grounded, a digital detox summer camp for adults in Mendocino, California. She was standing under an enormous redwood tree. I made a joke that she better take cover since I had been farting uncontrollably all night long after eating camp food in the dining hall, and soon we were singing a Dave Matthews Band song, and running around the redwood tree… Riffing is a hell of a drug.
Photo of Late Nite Art, credit: The Culture Conference.
