When Dr. Gillian Sandstrom returned to university to study psychology, after giving up a career in computers, she felt older compared to the other students on campus and decidedly out of place. But there was one thing that made her feel more like she did: the bond she formed with the hot dog vendor. She developed with her A relationship that rested on small talk, and even on days when they didn’t exchange a word, they would at least wave goodbye to each other and smile. “On my lonelier days on campus, the hot dog woman was the one who lifted my spirits, being the one person in the place who knew who I was, and if I Waving at the hot dog woman of the campus, I probably belong too.”
When Sandström was accepted for a PhD in Prof. Elizabeth Dunn’s “Joy Lab” at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Dunn asked her “What makes you happy?”. Sandstrom remembered the sausage woman and decided to make this topic her research: the hidden benefits of talking to strangers.
Does the hot dog lady know she was the inspiration for your research?
“Unfortunately, no. I’ve already left that campus and I don’t know her name. Maybe one day she’ll read an article about my research and recognize herself.”
Today, Sandstrom is a senior lecturer in the psychology of niceness at the University of Sussex, England, and heads the Center for Niceness Research at the university.
Dr. Gillian Sandström / photo: private photo
Happier than you think
Sandström’s research revealed that most of us underestimate the benefit that interaction with strangers can give us, and the fears of all the ways in which such interaction could go wrong cause us in advance to give up a possible wellspring of joy and excitement in life.
In the first study conducted by Sandström on this topic, she asked subjects to buy a cup of coffee. Some of the subjects were instructed to talk to the barista, and some were instructed to make the purchase in the most efficient way possible (and they did not actually develop conversations). The subjects who started a conversation felt significantly better, even if the conversations were short. Questionnaires filled out by the subjects after the interaction with the barista showed a slightly higher rating in measures related to belonging.
She also found the same results in a follow-up study, conducted in a class of psychology students. In this case there was no intervention, but the students were asked to write a journal documenting their social interactions. The comparison was between different days for the same person, in order to neutralize interpersonal differences in the degree of communicativeness and joy of life. On days when students had even minimal communication with other students, they reported a greater sense of belonging and also more enjoyment of the class that took place after such social interaction.
Further studies by Sandström showed that the subjects did not appreciate that talking to strangers would have such a good effect on their experience. Some don’t think that talking to a stranger will do them any good. They even fear that it will have a negative effect – embarrassment, unpleasantness, waste of time.
Even those who think it’s worth talking to strangers underestimate the impact of any specific interaction. We are much happier after such an interaction than we estimate we will be.
Fill the lack of daily excitement
Where do the great benefits of talking to strangers come from?
“The feeling of belonging to the world and to humanity is probably the biggest advantage. In addition, there is something about talking to strangers that produces excitement, a novelty to our day. This is the reason why we also shy away from talking to strangers – the uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen. But some of us will say that they are interested A little diversity and novelty in their lives? A conversation with a stranger, when it’s good, can give that feeling that something special happened in my normal everyday life.”
Sandstrom says that one day she saw a woman on the subway holding a beautiful cake and she asked her about it. “By the end of the conversation she told me she rode an ostrich! Did you know people can ride an ostrich? It just made my day. Sometimes I hear cool jokes, interesting ideas, tips for interesting pastimes in a foreign city or in my own city. I joined a reading club thanks to a conversation with Strangers. People give me vegetables from their garden. I even got good ideas on how to research interactions with strangers from strangers.”
“I’m also a bit of an introvert,” admits Sandstrom. “My parents, on the other hand, always talked to strangers, and it embarrassed me because I wasn’t always sure that strangers were so interested in all these conversations. But I noticed that when my parents were networked in the community, networked in every new room they entered, they would also get things from it. Suddenly there is no problem getting another chair in the restaurant.”
Too afraid of bad judgment
After Sandström established the claim that we talk to strangers, in general, less than we should, she tried to crack what the barriers are and if they can be broken, and whether it actually improves the quality of life.
Some of Sandström’s subjects claimed that they were afraid that a stranger would judge them negatively, see them as sleepy, and themselves not enjoy the conversation. But another study she led showed that people also underestimate the joy that such a conversation brings to the other side of the conversation. The subjects in the study were asked to rate after a conversation with a stranger how much the former stranger liked them. It turns out that the strangers liked the subjects much more than the subjects believed.
“I really don’t know why in a world where people usually think they are better than others – smarter, behave better, more moral than average – precisely in the social sphere they usually underestimate their status. People tend to think that everyone has more friends than they do, and also to think that they are gossiped about, that they are judged negatively, much more than is actually the case. It also works like this between strangers.”
Sandstrom calls it The Liking Gap. It was observed between colleagues in the laboratory, between students in the same class in the first year of college, between people who participated together in a life skills workshop. All in all, Sandstrom says, you are liked more than you think (and if you now thought “yes, on average, but not me”, ask yourself why not actually).
Not every conversation has to be amazing
But there are also other concerns. “In the beginning, I thought I would find one or two concerns, then disprove them and be able to open the door for a lot of people to communicate with strangers, but in reality the list of concerns just keeps getting longer. In addition to the question of whether the person they are talking to will like them, people fear that they will feel embarrassed, or that they will get bored of the conversation. They fear Let the conversation get stuck and let there be an awkward silence.
“I think that in the end, precisely because we don’t talk to strangers a lot, we don’t refute our fears in our everyday life. Even if here and there we talked to a stranger, and we had a nice time, for some reason we think it was a private case, and next time it will be Otherwise. I believe that when you get used to talking to strangers, the barriers come down, and we repeatedly experience the benefits of this.”
What about the feeling that multiple conversations with strangers will drain us of energy that we need to deal with everyday duties?
“This is actually the description of an introvert, a person from whom social interaction requires more energy than it immediately fills him with energy. Interaction with the world is also important for introverts, but it is more demanding.
“It’s true that not all the conversations we have with strangers will be amazing, just like not all the books we read will be our favorite and not all the movies will be in the top ten we’ve seen, but most of the conversations will be better than not okay, and one of them will be worth the investment in the others “.
Indeed, one of the keys to reducing conversation anxiety is to lower expectations, says Sandstrom. “When people already enter into a conversation with a stranger, they sometimes have some expectation that it will continue or that ‘something will come out of it’, especially when it comes to a conversation at an official or social mingling event, and not just on the street.
“But one of the most significant things I learned from my research is that even conversations with strangers that have no follow-up, that lead nowhere, that have no ‘result’ except for a small interaction, also have a lot of benefit for our mood and our quality of life. Since I learned this, It’s easier for me to start these conversations, because if my expectations are not high, the conversation can hardly ‘fail’. It does its job by being a pleasant conversation with a stranger.”
You don’t have to lie to say goodbye politely
People fear that they might not know how to end the conversation, or that they will now be obliged to have a conversation with the same stranger every time they run into him by chance, in the neighborhood or on the bus.
“The issue of ending the conversation is very significant. Personally, I’m not that good at ending conversations. I have to remind myself that I can end the conversation if I want to, that it’s legitimate, that I’m in control. There is also an inherent gap regarding ending conversations – people think that others They already want to end the conversation, sometimes before they really want to, and then they end the conversation too early. There are also those who drag out the conversation until, from the point of view of the other person, it is too late. It is very difficult to hit the end time, which is accurate for both parties.
“The common ending to a conversation is a lie. People just say they need to do something else. But every time I bring this up to participants in the Encouraging Communication with Strangers workshops I hold on campus, there’s someone who doesn’t understand why you can’t just take a direct approach, and say something like ‘I really enjoyed talking to you, but now it’s time to finish’, or ‘Let’s Mingle’ (meaning, I’ve exhausted you and I want to meet other people). Then in the workshop everyone is surprised and asks, ‘Is it allowed to do this?’. I try to do it more, And I think it works.”
Are there people, maybe not neurotypical, for whom a world where everyone appeals to everyone else might be stressful and disturbing?
“I have not researched people on the autistic spectrum in the context of conversations with strangers, but people on the spectrum and their therapists approached me, and expressed interest in my workshops, because they said that a short conversation with a stranger can be a good opportunity to practice social skills, in a safe environment. Especially if we talk With poetry people, whose job is to be polite. The chance that a person with autism will experience rejection in this case is low, and when he is equipped with a sense of belonging and joy from this conversation, he may be able to initiate deeper interactions, and even if not – it’s still something.”
Sandstrom did conduct an experiment on patients with social anxiety. “We think we can use a short interaction with a stranger as a sort of intermediate step in exposure to strangers, in order to reduce social anxiety, which behaves like a phobia and reacts like it to exposure treatments. You can first just smile, then just look in the eyes, then just say hello, and so on” .
The difference between strangers online and strangers in reality
Can interacting with strangers on social networks give the same benefits?
“This is a question that I get asked a lot, and I still don’t have answers from my research. We know that people feel more protected online, so they will respond more easily to a stranger’s words online than face to face, but because they feel more protected, sometimes that answer will actually be no Nice, and that’s one of the things that can make the internet a terrible place. There’s also documentation for every mistake, and people you didn’t even have that conversation with can come and spin what you said. So there are real risks here.
“However, when the intentions of both parties are good, some of the concerns decrease when it comes to interacting on the networks. We are not so afraid of silence. It is easier for us to end a conversation. We do know that when people like a post you wrote, your sense of belonging and connection to the community increases, so we do see The same kind of benefits, although maybe not as powerful. It’s possible that connecting with strangers on social networks can be a springboard to connecting in real life.”
During the Corona period, Sandstrom conducted a study in which she connected strangers to a Zoom call. “They estimated that they would talk to each other for about fifteen minutes. In the end, the average conversation time was about 40 minutes! And they left this conversation much happier and more satisfied than they had previously estimated.”
To initiate a conversation, also for the sake of the others
These days, Sandstrom is expanding her research to show that those who initiate conversations actually contribute to their interlocutors, so this is a way to improve the society in which we live. A study she conducted at the Tate Museum in London, in which volunteers were asked to approach the visitors and offer them an explanation or a conversation about the items on display, showed that the visitors are generally happy to have been approached, and this is in contrast to the instructions these volunteers received from the museum, to only approach those who specifically request it, so as not to disturb the visitors.
“Sometimes in the sociology literature they talk about the ’emotional labor’ of service people, like my hot dog lady or the baristas in my experiment at Starbucks, and say, ‘Okay, for you it’s a nice interaction with an available stranger, and for them it’s ’emotional labor,’ the need to be repeatedly nice to strangers , regardless of their mood at the time. But on an anecdotal level, when I asked service people if they liked communicating with their customers, they said they were happy to have a small conversation with the customers. According to them, it makes the shift go by faster.”
Sandstrom, who today makes sure to talk to strangers, found herself a few months ago with a couple at the theater. “The woman felt unwell and she wanted to sit in the aisle, but by mistake they gave her a ticket for an inside seat and she was very stressed. I found myself asking the people in the aisle for them if they were ready to get up, and of course they agreed, people are usually nice. The husband told me, ‘ I wouldn’t have been able to do what you did,’ and I thought, ‘Really, I couldn’t do it either, until recently,’ but here I did it and I benefited this couple, and I gave the other couple an opportunity to help them, and it was a positive experience as well To them. I think that conversations with strangers are basically a compassionate act, a socially positive act.”
Sandstrom also believes that talking to people who are different from us can help reduce stereotypes. “Until you talk to a person, you don’t always know that he makes wigs and writes children’s songs. I think random conversations help us feel that people are just fine. All kinds of people.”
One of the biggest concerns of recent years about conversations with strangers is the thought that a conversation will be interpreted as a romantic proposal, even harassment. “Men are afraid that women will find them disturbing and women are afraid that responding to small talk will be interpreted as an opening for a romantic proposal. We need to think of signs that can be sharpened to make it clear that it is just a conversation.”
What did the research reveal?
the affection gap
It turns out that people underestimate the degree of affection that strangers have for them when they just meet them
sense of belonging
In an experiment at Starbucks, subjects who were asked to have a conversation with the barista subsequently reported a higher sense of belonging
A welcome initiative
Contrary to popular belief at the Tate Museum in London, it turned out that visitors were generally happy when local volunteers approached them to talk about the items on display
Dr. Gillian Sandstrom
personal: British computer scientist who worked for a decade in programming and returned to academia to study psychology, following exposure to the field of positive psychology
professional: PhD in the psychology of niceness at the University of Sussex, UK. She did her doctorate in Canada, under the guidance of Elizabeth Dan, one of the leaders in the field of happiness research. Focuses on social giving, weak social ties and intergenerational ties
Something else: Facilitates workshops to remove barriers and improve the ability to talk with strangers