If you’re avoiding small talk or casual chats because you think they’ll be boring, you may be missing out on meaningful connections, new research finds.

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People consistently underestimate how interesting and enjoyable these conversations will be, said Elizabeth Trinh, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in management and organization at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“Even boring topics can lead to surprisingly meaningful interactions,” Trinh said.

Americans are stuck in an epidemic of loneliness and ordinary conversations can help us cope, Trinh said.

“If people avoid talking to a co-worker at the coffee machine or a stranger at an event or a neighbor in the elevator because we assume it will be boring and unenjoyable, we may be depriving ourselves of small moments of connection that could improve our mood, our sense of belonging and decrease loneliness,” she said.

For the study, published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Trinh and colleagues at Cornell University’s school of industrial and labor relations and INSEAD, a business school in France, conducted nine experiments involving 1,800 participants.

Participants were asked to rate interest in 10 topics, including sports, movies, artificial intelligence, music, books and fitness. They were then randomly assigned to engage in five-minute conversations about topics that had been rated either boring or interesting. In some of the experiments, participants picked the topics.

Afterward, they were asked how much they enjoyed the conversation, whether they found it interesting and whether they desired to have another one.

Across the experiments, the pattern was the same.

It didn’t matter if the two people conversing were strangers or friends or if both or only one of the participants found the topic boring. It didn’t matter if the researchers or the participants chose the topics. All nine experiments consistently showed that people are not very good at predicting how much they would enjoy conversing about topics they thought would be boring.

On the other hand, they didn’t underestimate conversations about topics they had rated interesting.

In one of the nine experiments, participants either took part in a live conversation, read a transcript of a conversation or observed conversations. The content was always the same.

Only the live conversations turned out to be more enjoyable and interesting than people had predicted.

“Actually engaging in a conversation, being part of it, is what drives the interest and enjoyment,” Trinh said. Listening and questioning, sharing details of one another’s life, making eye contact and feeling like you are being heard are more important than whether you find the topic interesting or boring, she said.

Social connections are one of the most important predictors of both mental and physical well-being, said Stav Atir, a behavioral scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Atir, who researches conversations with strangers, had no connection to the study and praised its design.

Even conversations with strangers, colleagues and people we don’t know well can be critical to our social well-being.

Put down the phone and connect

Yet the pervasive use of cellphones in public often gets in the way of nourishing conversations, said Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex in England and the author of “Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How ‘Small’ Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life.”

People may think a random conversation couldn’t possibly be as interesting as something they can look up on their phones, Sandstrom said. Or while scrolling, they may miss cues that someone on the bus or at a coffee shop is open to having a conversation.

“If we don’t practice talking to strangers and people we don’t know well, how are we going to make friends?” Sandstrom said. “How are we going to go on dates and do well in a job interview?”

Nadav Klein, co-author of the new study and an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France, offered the following tips, informed by the research, for initiating and maintaining these casual conversations:

• Just start. Don’t focus on whether you think the topic will be interesting.
• Don’t worry about being boring yourself.
• Ask open-ended questions that invite storytelling or interesting personal details.
• Look for shared interests and experiences, no matter how small.