My husband, Don, will talk to anyone. In line at a store, on a plane, in a parking lot; it doesn’t matter where we’re at, he’ll engage. In fact, I have my current job because he was gregarious enough to ask two strangers sitting next to us in a restaurant to join our table. One of them was Dacher Keltner, the Greater Good Science Center’s founding director.
Despite seeing how delightful and even life-changing talking to strangers can be, it isn’t something I readily do myself. Sure, I’ll smile and say hello or thank someone who helps me. And I’ll offer assistance to strangers needing help, like giving directions or picking up a spilled grocery bag. But am I eager to just converse regularly with strangers? Not really.
According to researcher Gillian Sandstrom, my hesitancy means I’m missing out on something important. In her new book, Once Upon a Stranger, she explains why talking to strangers is both good for our own well-being and helpful for society at large. The book offers ample stories of how talking to strangers can provide surprising gifts—even for introverts—with the science to back up those claims.
I spoke to her about her book and why she is such an advocate of stranger-to-stranger interactions. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
Jill Suttie: Why should we try to talk to strangers—let’s say, in comparison to other, closer people in our lives? What are the benefits of doing that?
Gillian Sandstrom: The first benefit that we’ve found consistently is just that it puts you in a good mood. When you talk to a stranger, you usually walk away feeling a bit happier and more connected, which we know is so important for humans.
Another thing from the research is that we tend to learn more than we expect to when we talk to strangers. It brings novelty into our life, makes our life richer. There’s research about how well-being can arise from not only happiness, purpose, and meaning, but this third source: psychological richness. I think talking to strangers gives you richness, because it brings novelty and learning and those kinds of things into your life.
Obviously, interactions with close others are special and important and give us all sorts of things that maybe we can’t get from some of these more minimal social interactions. But having a diverse array of conversation partners is important for well-being, as well. There’s research showing that interacting with a diversity of social partners is a good thing and associated with greater life satisfaction; it’s not just about how many social interactions we have.
We also know that weak ties—for example, acquaintances—give us access to a wider range of information. Strangers can do that, too, because weak ties and strangers are not as similar to us; they know things that the people we’re close to don’t know.
JS: Does talking to strangers have any social benefits, beyond the personal?
GS: I’ve been working recently with Taylor West and Barbara Fredrickson, and we’ve been looking at the societal benefits of talking to strangers—like how they widen your perspective. We’re starting to find that spending time and having deeper conversations with close others doesn’t make any changes in this respect. But talking to strangers regularly for three weeks changes people’s sense of intellectual humility and makes them more open to hearing alternative perspectives.
I did some work during COVID and found that, after people had just a single conversation online with a stranger, they reported feeling a greater sense of trust in other people.
In my personal experience, these tiny interactions are often nothing special, although some of them are really great. But they add up, they accumulate, and I can walk through the world and see it differently. I feel safer, more trusting, like the world is a better place.
JS: What are some of the misconceptions about connecting with strangers that keep people from doing it more?
GS: I think our biggest worry is that people don’t want to talk to us, that we could be rejected. We’ll reach out, we’ll say something, and people will just ignore us or shut us down. But, according to the research, that just doesn’t happen very often. And, even when it does happen, it probably doesn’t feel as bad as we think it will.
We also worry that we don’t know what we’re doing. Many of us walk around with a voice in our head saying, You’re no good at this. People don’t like you. We worry about talking to strangers because we feel like we don’t know what to say. Maybe we’ll have awkward silences and it’s going to go horribly wrong. But the research finds that, actually, these things we worry about don’t tend to happen. We enjoy it more than we think, and people like us more than we think.
JS: These days, many interactions with other people are happening online—especially with the younger generations. I wonder if that prevents us from feeling comfortable reaching out to strangers in person and how that affects us.
GS: I think we have fewer opportunities to talk to strangers, because we’re working at home and we can buy everything online. We’ve designed out a lot of those interactions that normally would’ve just happened, that we couldn’t really avoid. But with technology, we can choose to avoid lots of interactions, right? That means we have a lot less practice connecting with strangers.
I’m an introvert. I have not been doing this my whole life. I saw my dad doing it, and I thought he had special skills that I didn’t have and would never have. Then, in a roundabout way over many years, I’ve become a bit like my dad. That makes me think it’s not necessarily something we’re born with. It’s a skill that we can develop.
I’ve seen this in my research, too. In a study that I ran with Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney, we got people to talk to strangers every day for a week. We saw that, gradually, day by day, people were becoming less worried about rejection and feeling a bit more confident about their skills. So, it does seem like practice makes progress.
But if we’re not getting any practice, that’s a big problem. And how that plays out long-term is scary to me. How do you go on a date if you don’t know how to talk to a stranger? How much more intimidating will it be to attend a job interview? There are so many things that are going to be harder if people are uncomfortable talking to each other.
JS: Aren’t there situations where you should be cautious about reaching out to strangers or where you might feel like you shouldn’t push it because they’re closing down?
GS: Everybody’s heard the term “stranger danger,” so I don’t recommend doing it in situations where you don’t feel safe. The kind of thing that I’m talking about is done in a public place when there’s other people around.
But sometimes the conversations that have turned out the best for me have been with people who don’t look receptive. One of my favorites stories was from when I was on the tube in London, kind of buzzing, because it had been an exciting morning for me. So, I said something to the woman sitting next to me, “How’s your morning going?” And she was polite and said, “Fine, thank you.” And I thought, That’s it. She doesn’t want to talk.
But then, after a pause, she turned to me and asked, “How’s your morning going?” And I said, “Well, actually, this exciting thing has happened. I was on the radio.” And, because I opened up to her, she opened up to me and told me that she had just found out that she was pregnant and was heading back to work.
I imagined she was going to the office and not planning to tell anyone, because you usually wait to make sure everything’s OK with a pregnancy first. But she could tell me because I don’t know her, and she’s never going to see me again. It was a really moving thing to be able to share that moment with her and, hopefully, help her celebrate it.
JS: You’ve found that it’s helpful for people to just start talking to strangers repeatedly to realize how good it can feel. But, for those who are hesitant to jump in, your book has a section with tips on how to get started. Can you share some of your tips?
GS: This came from combing through a list of hundreds of conversations that I’ve had with strangers that I started collecting and putting out on social media, just to show people how easy it is and how many opportunities there are. I came up with three themes for starting a conversation, which add up to an acronym, QUICK.
The QU stands for “QUestions.” The single most common question I’ve used is, “Whatcha doing?” For example, I saw a man who looked like he was taking a picture of a fence, and I asked, “Whatcha doing?” I saw a group of people in a park huddled over a piece of equipment they were fiddling with and asked, “Whatcha doing?” Coming from a place of curiosity, right?
But you could see someone with binoculars and ask, “What are you hoping to see today?” Or ask someone if there’s a story behind their tattoo. There are all sorts of different questions you can ask.
The IC stands for “In Common.” It’s why we talk about the weather so much, because that’s something we have in common. Other than that, I might talk to people if I’m at the theater, asking why they chose to come to this show and what other things they’ve seen. You can bring people’s attention to your shared environment. I love dogs; so, I’ll say to a stranger, “Did you see those dogs? They’re having such a good time.”
K stands for “Kindness.” That could be giving someone a compliment, but it could also be offering someone directions or offering someone a seat or your company.
There are lots of different ways to do this and probably more opportunities than people realize. We’re just not noticing them as much as we could. One of the first studies I did was at a coffee shop. When you go in and you buy your coffee, there’s a certain amount of time that it’s going to take to prepare your order. And, during that little window, you can either just be on your phone, not paying attention, or you can have a little chat with the cashier or the barista. It makes a difference to have that little chat, and it doesn’t take any more time. You’re still waiting for that coffee one way or the other.
JS: Why do you think conversing with strangers is so important?
GS: I like to think that when you have a conversation with a stranger, you’re spreading kindness. You have the benefits to yourself, but the person you’re talking to enjoys all those same benefits. When you have a conversation, it puts you both in a better mood; it helps you both feel more connected; it helps you both feel seen. It helps us feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.
I was part of a big public science project at the University of Sussex called “The Kindness Test.” Sixty thousand people filled in our survey about the most recent time someone was kind to them, and about 10% said that their most recent act of kindness had come from a stranger. When we asked people what someone did for them, it included things like, “They stopped and had a chat,” or “They said hello,” or “They gave me a compliment,” or “They asked how I was doing.” Those little things are seen as acts of kindness. They can build this sense of trust in other people, this sense that other people are OK.
In a world that feels increasingly isolating, talking to strangers is a small thing that any of us can do to feel more connected and to put something positive out there.
Source: The Hidden Power of Talking to Strangers