Participants who were asked to talk with another person expected to learn significantly less from the conversation than they actually reported learning afterward, regardless of whether they had conversation prompts and whether they had the goal to learn (experiments 1 and 2). Undervaluing conversation does not stem from having systematically poor opinions of how much others know (experiment 3) but is instead related to the inherent uncertainty involved in conversation itself.

… miscalibrated expectations about how much can be learned from other people may keep people from learning more in everyday life, frustrating their desire to know by keeping them from approaching a surprisingly informative source of knowledge.