Conversation Pieces

People need people: they need people to talk to just for a moment—on a coffee break at work or at a party—and they need friends, people with whom they connect with more deeply (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). People invest time and effort in trying to create these short and long term relationships, but previous research has not examined how they may strategically enlist products to help them to create new social connections. This paper attempts to examine this behavior through examining conversation pieces, or products that produce questions and interest from others, literally ones that start conversations. Previous research has found indirect ways that products can be used to achieve social goals. For example, excluded individuals may substitute products for people (Mead, et al., 2011) or use products to signal social status (Holt, 1998) or identity (Berger and Heath, 2007) to others. However, these articles have only looked at people using products for one-way communication rather than how products may facilitate interaction with another person. Given that conversation is a key way that people connect with each other, to study relationship development it is necessary to examine people talking about products, not just displaying them.