The fact that someone talks because they find silence uncomfortable doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with empathy. It may be a form of self-help executed against someone who doesn't really want to talk nor feels in any way uncomfortable when not talking about crap like weather, plans for the weekend, or - better yet - doesn't want to be annoyed by politics.

Hell, I know people who tend to help themselves into dumb conversations while the other person reads a book or does something similar. No empathy here.

sigh...it's not really about the weather. get it. extroversion is not about talking, but socializing, warmth, dominance etc.

People are different. Not everyone uses weather as an entry point to other topics. Some talk about weather and just this, when in the elevator, with no intention of going forward.

This is, I believe, to cover discomfort coming from silence and such conversations, while not completely pointless, often have little value. They would talk about just anything, to combat this feeling. Weather is a good topic because most people can relate and it is rarely annoying.

I would say that both intro- and extroverts can act like this but conversations started by introverts tend to be more awkward. I think that lonely people are more likely to start valuable conversations.

I think that people are giving here genuine feedback from where they are coming from. And it looks like what you think they think is definitely not necessarily what they say they think. So unless somebody told you directly that they use the weather discussion for that reason, it could be that you value more your assumptions than their first-hand explanations...

That doesn't strike me as empathy - I'm not villifying it either, but it's more about personal psychological needs than the needs of others (which lumps it in with most behavior of course, hence not villifying it).

Sure, for their mental model of other people they're being nice (and in some cases they actually are) - but not everybody has the same mind or preferences. True empathy is built on understanding that.

I have this impression too, that extroverts are socially numb and hardly notice anything, sometimes even oblivious about people around them. Well, due to this numbness cheap talk has no chance to get through their skin. In this way extrovert is a literally precise term: lots out, little in.