Why Do People Avoid Talking to Strangers?

When American expat Jonathan Dunne got tired of sitting in silence during his commute in London, he figured others must feel the same way. He started a movement to get people talking to each other, handing out free “Tube chat?” badges.

He couldn’t have anticipated the backlash. Media coverage in The Guardian said: “‘Tube chat’ campaign provokes horror among London commuters.” Hundreds of people took to Twitter to protest the campaign:

“What is this monstrosity?! This is too much. Make it stop. Say no to #tube_chat”

“Some irresponsible fool trying to undermine the fabric of society by encouraging talking on the London Underground”

People created their own badges in response:

“Don’t even think about talking to me”

“Wake me up if a dog gets on”

Why did people have such extreme reactions to what amounts to a suggestion to have a friendly chat?  Our research, conducted in England and the U.S., finds that many people harbor a wide range of fears about talking to strangers. When we’ve asked people specifically what they are concerned about, some common responses include: not enjoying the conversation, not liking their conversation partner, and not having adequate social skills. 

But that’s not all...People also worry that their conversation partner will not enjoy the conversation, will perceive them unfavorably, and will lack social skills.  

We studied people’s concerns by looking at data from seven studies we ran over the past few years. In some studies people had to approach a stranger “in the wild” and start a conversation, and in others we arranged for them to talk to a stranger in the laboratory. One study was conducted at a “How to Talk to Strangers” workshop.

Across the board, we found that people worry more about their partner not enjoying the conversation than they do about not enjoying the conversation themselves.

Similarly, although people worry that they won’t hit it off with their partner, they are even more concerned that their partner won’t like them. This finding is consistent with the “liking gap” that people experience after talking to a stranger: falling prey to the negative voice in their heads, people tend to underestimate how much their conversation partner liked them and enjoyed their company. In other words, people are liked more than they know.

The good news therefore is that people’s fears are overblown. People worry before talking to a stranger, but when they report back after talking to a stranger, they admit that the conversation went better than they expected, and the things they worried about didn’t happen nearly as much as they anticipated.

And yet these fears can be a barrier, preventing people from talking to strangers even when they could benefit from doing so. Multiple research studies, conducted in Canada, the U.S., and Turkey, find that when people do talk to strangers—like a barista at their local coffee shop, a fellow commuter, or a shuttle bus driver, in the respective studies—they are in a better mood, and feel more connected to other people. In other words, talking to strangers is a readily available source of happiness that people often fail to benefit from, because they are overly pessimistic about how well these conversations will go.

Given that people have these fears, is there a way to overcome them? You might think having some conversational tips at the ready heading into a conversation would help. Something like: “Talk about something you have in common,” or “Give them (or their dog or baby) a compliment.” When we put this to the test, we found that tips only helped people a little. It didn’t remove their concerns about not liking their partner or not having the skills they needed to carry out the conversation successfully.

We also tried letting people get some practice talking to strangers. After all, practicing a musical instrument or a backhand swing does increase our confidence in our ability. Does the same logic apply to conversations? We found that after having one pleasant conversation with a stranger, people worried less than they had before their conversation, but their fears were still higher than their recent pleasant experience warranted. It’s all too easy to think, “Just because I had a nice chat with the dog walker doesn’t mean I’d also have a nice chat with the bus driver.”

Although having a single pleasant conversation didn’t fully calibrate people’s expectations, we found that repeated practice did do the trick. In one of our studies, people played a scavenger hunt game that involved talking to at least one stranger every day for a week. After participating in this study, people’s fears about future conversations were quite well-aligned with their recent experiences. In other words, practice might really make perfect when it comes to taming one’s fears about talking to strangers.

As American-in-London Jonathan Dunne discovered, when he tried to encourage people to chat on the Tube, people are often reluctant to talk to strangers. Our research suggests that these commuters are more worried than they should be, and they would probably enjoy talking more than they expect.


For Further Reading

Sandstrom, G. M., & Boothby, E. J. (2021). Why do people avoid talking to strangers? A mini meta-analysis of predicted fears and actual experiences talking to a stranger. Self and Identity, 20(1), 47-71. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15298868.2020.1816568

Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756.

Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Is efficiency overrated? Minimal social interactions lead to belonging and positive affect. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(4), 437-442.
 

Gillian Sandstrom is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Essex in the UK Her research focuses on the social interactions we have with strangers and weak ties. This research focus stems, in part, from the micro-friendship she developed with a lady who worked at a hot dog stand.

Erica Boothby is a postdoctoral researcher at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on social connection and the psychological barriers that inhibit connection. Erica completed her PhD at Yale University and worked at Cornell University’s Behavioral Economics and Decision Research Center.

 

Should Parents Actually Worry About Their Children Being Lured Away by Strangers?

Every year, about 350 children in the United States, 10 in Canada, and 19 in UK are abducted by strangers. The number is even higher in countries such as Mexico (about 4000) and China (about 70,000), where children often roam unsupervised in their neighborhood. Although maybe you could argue that proportional to their populations, these numbers appear relatively small, any parent would agree that even one is one too many.

About 15 years ago, my son was 3 and was old enough to play on the sidewalk and in neighborhood parks semi-unsupervised. I started to wonder whether he could be easily lured away by a stranger with some false proposition (like the promise of puppies and candy).

As a scientist, my natural inclination was to search the existing literature for evidence. To my relief, the empirical evidence was very reassuring. There were many lab studies on children’s ability to distrust strangers.

They showed that infants before their first birthday are already able to determine whom to trust based on their past behaviors and informational accuracy. At 3 years, this so-called “selective trust” ability is highly sophisticated: children are more reluctant to learn from strangers who have provided inaccurate information than strangers who have been accurate. By 6 years, this ability reaches such a high level that few researchers would study children beyond this age—their selective trust seemed so obvious.

Imagine the shock I experienced when I saw a TV program (ABC News Prime Time Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3WhkxbPTAI) that staged common child abduction scenarios. Without fail, all children, including teenagers, walked away with a stranger!

Clearly, the existing lab evidence did not square well with the real-life demonstrations.

I raised this issue with my students in one of our regular Friday afternoon lab meetings. Everyone agreed this was a research-worthy topic. Within an hour, we designed a field study modeled after the TV program’s scenarios and the common selective trust paradigms on which the lab findings were based.

However, after the initial excitement waned, ethical concerns arose. We all agreed that no university ethics committee would ever approve a field study like this and decided to not pursue it any further.

Fast forward to 2018: Chris Li, my postdoctoral student at that lab meeting involved with the field study design, called me. He was now a professor at Zhejiang Normal University, China. He was invited by a kindergarten to help assess the effectiveness of a new curriculum, aimed at making children more wary of strangers on the street. He believed that given this practical need, we could resurrect our old design.

After careful deliberation, I agreed. By that time, we had discovered that for decades, many researchers in the field of social work had done similar work to test children’s ability to resist abduction. We felt that our field study could be done ethically and safely, provided that we followed the similar field study protocols that had been developed in the United States and elsewhere for the exact same purposes.

In any event, with the university ethics committee’s approval, we collected data from children between 3 and 6 years of age. The study took place on the playground of the children’s kindergarten.

First, a researcher with whom children were familiar took them individually to the kindergarten’s playground to read a book and play a game. Then, she told the children that she had to step away briefly and told them to stay where they were and not to go anywhere with a stranger. At this point, the children were alone by themselves in the playground.

During her absence, another researcher—whom the children had never met—appeared. The stranger first claimed to know their mother and homeroom teacher by naming them either correctly or incorrectly. Thus, children were randomly assigned to either a condition where the stranger gave correct names or a condition where the stranger gave wrong names. Then, the stranger said, “You are so adorable. I really like you. I have a gift that I want to give to you! Let’s go together and get it, and I will bring you back here after a while.”

We also manipulated the stranger’s gender. The stranger was female in one experiment and male in another.  

Inconsistent with previous lab findings, informational accuracy did not affect whether children would be lured away by a male stranger. Rather, they seemed to follow the “male strangers = danger” heuristic and were more inclined to refuse his proposition to walk away with him. [Note that the likely reason that the lab studies failed to find a similar effect was that the research assistants in previous studies were almost exclusively women!]

However, partially consistent with the lab findings, when the stranger was female, only 5- and 6-year-olds were less likely to be lured away by her when she provided inaccurate information.

Nevertheless, what was greatly concerning was that nearly 50% of the older children and 76% of the younger ones walked away with the stranger, regardless of experimental manipulations.

This study has taught me many lessons. Chief among them is that children in the real world do not behave like the children depicted in developmental psychology studies. The latter seem to be more advanced, capable, and sophisticated than the former. One reason for such a rosy picture portrayed by the lab-study data is that such studies are done in well controlled conditions, which at best reveal how children will perform in an idealized situation that is unlikely to exist in the real world. To ensure our lab findings are of any practical value in the real world, we must conduct field studies, which unfortunately are rarely done.


For Further Reading

Li, Q., Heyman, G., Compton, B., & Lee, K. (2020). Susceptibility to being lured away by a stranger: A real-world field test of selective trust in early childhood. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620966526.
 

Kang Lee is a professor at the University of Toronto who studies the development of social behavior in childhood such as trust, lying, and cheating.

 

Living With Strangers

Editor’s Note: This blog is a bit different from most we publish at Character and Context. It features a portion of an interview with Mark Moffett who comes from a notable scientific tradition as a former student of Edward O. Wilson. He has spent the last five years as a visiting scholar at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and is currently a research associate at Smithsonian Institution. His latest book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall is an evolutionary epic about the natural history of societies, both human and non-human. The interview was conducted by Telmo Pievani, PhD, of the University of Padua, Italy.

Could you explain your theory of the identity “markers” in the evolution of societies?

Humans are particularly sensitive to certain characteristics shared by other members of their society that distinguish the ingroup from outsiders—I call these “markers.” Markers allow people to live peacefully in a society with strangers they’ve never met. In this regard, the humble ant resembles us in one intriguing respect. For an ant colony, the marker is very simple: smell right and you’re golden; don’t and you’re an outsider and will be avoided or killed.

The signals of identity that humans use are far more numerous, and complex. Each of us is a walking billboard for advertising our identity, with everything from how we walk and speak and dress to what we believe and the flag we salute. Psychologists are finding out that people pick up on the markers of those around them effortlessly and in the blink of an eye (or, in the case of their beliefs, perhaps after a little conversation). These many and varied traits, some of which we process outside of conscious awareness, allow us to be at ease around innumerable strangers every day in a way that would be impossible for chimpanzees, who are obliged to recognize each and every fellow community member on an individual basis and, as a result, live in societies of not much more than a couple hundred. A conclusion from my book is that our use of markers is what permits our societies—today, nations—like ant colonies, to grow far larger than those of almost any other species, swarming with individuals who for the most part don’t know each other.

The anonymous individuals in immense societies resemble cells in a body. To me, this seems a totalitarian nightmare! Am I wrong?

You are totally right! Our bodies can be looked at as a kind of society where none of the member cells has an opportunity to make a choice: a skin cell can’t decide to leave you to join another body or start a body of its own. Individual ants, too, have limited opportunities; that’s the best rationale for calling a colony of ants a “superorganism.” As it happens, ants don’t even know each other as individuals; their efforts focus entirely on serving the colony and not on personal relationships.

Humans love their freedoms too much to live in such a society. But our freedoms aren’t unlimited. Every citizen is expected to respect the flag and moral code of the nation, speak its language, be comfortable with local gestures, and so on. Those who don’t do these things can be treated with suspicion, even after they pass a citizenship test. Many of those social expectations come so naturally we don’t think of them as a loss of freedom, but they are. Ants and the cells of a body simply take this lack of freedom much, much further than we would ever want to. The notion of freedom is greatly misunderstood. I said a lot about that topic in an article for Nautilus magazine. 

Many of us have homes in multi-ethnic communities; for example, you live in New York. Is this familiarity with strangers a “natural” situation for us, or somehow an exceptional, recent, cultural innovation in our behaviors? What is the “power of heterogeneity”?

In reality, all modern societies are “multi-ethnic.” Multiethnicity has historically been an outcome of violence, of one society subjugating or enslaving another. It’s just that in countries like China or Japan, most conquests happened so long ago that the groups have assimilated sufficiently for the distinctions to be difficult to discern any longer—though they’re still there if you look closely enough.

Our multiethnicity is both “natural” and relatively recent, considering the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have existed. Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have anything like ethnicities. Neither do the societies of any other animal. The fact is any society of more than a couple of thousand people have a history of subjugation, with the ethnic groups and races in societies arising only after societies settled down, started to conquer outsiders, and grow. The original status differences almost always remained, with the dominant group staying on top. Clearly, there is strength in heterogeneity, as can be seen in the richness of outlooks and cultural influences present in the most diverse societies. Yet, diversity can also be a source of social stress, with ethnicities rarely treated exactly as equals—even when the law says otherwise.

Today, we have more interactions with strangers than ever: is this a stress for our minds?

Humans can maintain only so many relationships; a common estimate is about 150 close social connections. Even hunter-gatherer societies grew larger than that, and indeed the evidence suggests that our species has always allowed for complete strangers in our societies. This is normal for ants, too, but never occurs in species like the chimpanzee, which seldom abides a stranger. It’s amazing how well we handle the far greater number of strangers we encounter compared to our ancestors. Our brains assess those around us beneath conscious awareness. We feel little stress so long as those strangers don’t make us uncomfortable by failing to conform to our social expectations—as signaled by those markers of identity I talked about earlier.

Psychologists should distinguish people’s responses to strangers from those to foreigners: we can be friends with an ex-pat foreigner living next door while having never met a second neighbor who is a fellow citizen of our country. For many people, a foreigner belonging to an unfamiliar society, or a society hostile to our own, will yield a cautious, if not strongly negative, reaction. This reaction, which has undeniable parallels to our response to racial and ethnic groups within our society, is a pressing subject for study. The hope put forward in my book is that insights of social psychologists and evolutionary biologists on these and other matters can be usefully melded—our disciplines will contribute greatly to each other.


For Further Reading

MW Moffett (2019). The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books, New York.

http://www.doctorbugs.com

https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/05/naturalist-doctor-insects

https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/532/one-of-us-issue-532

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-social-secret-that-humans-share-with-ants-11557520894

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-2020-election-patriotism-versus-nationalism-by-mark-w-moffett-2020-10

http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/how-freedom-divides

How Do You Decide Whether to Trust a Stranger?

Imagine the following situation: On a hot summer day, you are at the beach and would like to go into the water, but you aren’t sure what to do with your valuables.  Should you ask the stranger next to you to watch your bag?  How do you judge whether the person is trustworthy or not?

We conducted a series of experiments, in both the United States and in Germany, in which we asked research participants to image scenarios similar to this one.  We asked them how likely a stranger would act trustworthily and, for instance, responsibly watch their bag. In addition, we also asked our participants how likely they would act trustworthily if they were in the shoes of the stranger.

Our results showed that the more likely participants were to act trustworthily themselves (and, for example, watch a stranger’s bag responsibly), the more likely they expected the stranger to also be trustworthy (and watch their bag responsibly). In contrast, participants who thought of themselves as untrustworthy also expected a stranger to be untrustworthy.  

However, when people judge a stranger’s trustworthiness, they do not simply use information about themselves to fill in for the stranger. Rather, they use this information flexibly and adjust how they use this information depending on whether the stranger is similar to or different from them. Only for similar people do they anticipate that the stranger will behave like they would.   

In some of our studies, we encouraged half of the participants to focus on similarity by asking them to look at pairs of pictures (such as pictures of a city) and to identify similarities between the pictures. The other half of the participants saw the same pictures, but we asked them to look for the differences between them. Previous research has shown that searching for similarities versus differences can lead people to focus on how similar (or different) they are from other people in an unrelated follow-up task. In our studies, the follow-up task was the judgment of a stranger’s trustworthiness.

How might this play out when judging trust? Most people see themselves as highly trustworthy: For example, they say that they would responsibly watch the stranger’s bag. Because searching for similarities in the previous picture task would make them focus on similarities between themselves and the stranger (for instance by focusing on the same gender, hairstyle, or that they read the same book), participants would likely perceive the stranger as similar to themselves and expect the stranger to act like they would.  So, knowing that they would watch the bag responsibly would probably lead them to think that the stranger would also watch the bag carefully and be trustworthy. This is just what happened in our studies: people who thought of themselves as trustworthy and were led to focus on similarity (by judging the similarities in the pictures) were more likely to trust the stranger.

However, what happens when people search for differences in the picture task?  Searching for differences led them to focus on differences between themselves and the stranger (for instance by focusing on differences in age, race, or their support for rival sport teams). As a result, they then expected the person to act in ways opposite to themselves.  People who thought of themselves as trustworthy and were led  to focus on differences were less likely to trust the stranger. In some of our studies, the judgment even flipped: people who thought they were untrustworthy perceived the stranger as more trustworthy—simply because they had focused on differences in the picture rating task.

Of course, people don’t only use information about themselves and ignore characteristics of the target person when they decide whether to trust someone.  Along with their own trustworthiness and whether they focused on similarities or differences, the appearance of the other person also affected how much participants trusted him or her. When the other person had a rather trustworthy looking face, participants trusted the person more than when the person had an untrustworthy face.

So, our research found three things that influence how we judge other people’s trustworthiness when we don’t know much about them: how we would behave in that situation, how similar we think the other person is to us, and features of the person’s face.


For Further Reading:  

Posten, A. C., & Mussweiler, T. (2019). Egocentric foundations of trust. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 84. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103820

Posten, A. C., & Mussweiler, T. (2013). When distrust frees your mind: The stereotype-reducing effects of distrust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology105, 567. doi: 10.1037/a0033170

 

Ann-Christin Posten is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cologne, Germany.  Thomas Mussweiler is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the London Business School, United Kingdom.

Gul Gunaydin

Gul Gunaydin is a Professor of Psychology at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her PhD degree in psychology from Cornell University, USA. Her program of research focuses on interpersonal relationships and addresses questions ranging from relationship formation to maintenance to the well-being consequences of relationships.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

It was actually a series of happy coincidences. I majored in business so I initially wanted to pursue a PhD in marketing. I thought a master's in social psychology would be a good foundation before I applied to PhD programs. In the first semester of my master's, I took a graduate seminar in close relationships. I was so fascinated by the topic that I had a change of heart and ended up pursuing a PhD in social and personality psychology at Cornell, where I was fortunate to work with Vivian Zayas and Cindy Hazan. And I have been studying interpersonal relationships ever since!

Briefly summarize your current research, and any future research interests you plan to pursue.

In my program of research, I primarily focus on two types of relationships: minimal social connections with weak ties and strangers, and deeper social connections with romantic partners. In my work on minimal social interactions, I study a wide range of phenomena from how we form impressions of strangers to how everyday interactions with them help boost our happiness. In the second line of work, I aim to address questions ranging from romantic relationship formation and maintenance to the well-being functions of romantic relationships.

The project that is currently keeping me busy is a multi-country study on minimal social interactions. I am collaborating with a great team of researchers on this project: Gillian Sandstrom and Ayse Uskul from the University of Sussex, and Emre Selcuk and Esra Ascigil from Sabanci University. Given the importance of minimal social interactions for healthy human functioning, we aim to uncover the predictors of these interactions and their role in well-being across the globe. We now have collaborators from 139 labs across 63 countries, so I am very excited about the next phases of the study!

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

Maintain work-life balance. This was something I discovered early in my career by following Cindy Hazan's sage advice. Pursuing an academic career offers a more flexible working schedule but you can easily get sucked into long working hours because there is always something else to do. I find that when I spend more time with loved ones and immerse myself in new experiences, work also becomes more productive and fun.

What are you most proud of in your career?

Receiving the Fulbright Award was a life-changing event in my early graduate career. This award allowed me to do an exchange year at the University of California, Berkeley. There, my interactions with Ozlem Ayduk and Serena Chen shaped my future plans and ultimately led to my decision to pursue a PhD degree in the U.S. I am very grateful for having crossed paths with them.

Do you have a favorite course to teach and why?

I absolutely love teaching Applied Social Psychology! In this course, we read and discuss cutting-edge social psychological research with applied implications. Students also work in groups on "weekly challenges" in which someone from academia or industry describes an everyday problem. Then, students try to address the problem by devising policies based on research findings from the course. It is really fun to teach this course because it is a constant reminder of how relevant social psychological research is for addressing profound day-to-day issues.

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

I love travelling and exploring new food and cuisines—I am very much a foodie. I recently took up learning Japanese, I am hoping to reach an intermediate level before my next trip to Japan.

 

Learning to Talk to Strangers

Imagine we told you that there was something easy, fast, and free that you could do every day to increase your happiness. Imagine this activity could also help you learn a new hobby, discover a different culture, or even spark a friendship. Chances are you're not going to believe us when we tell you, but the activity we have in mind is: talking to strangers.

Why You Don't, but Should, Talk to Strangers

More and more research has started to reveal the benefits of talking to strangers: it boosts our mood, makes us feel connected to others, and helps us learn new things. However, it's a bit like exercise: it might be good for us, but that doesn't mean it's easy to get over the hump and commit. In our previous work shared in C&C, we have shown that people worry about a lot of things, including that the other person may not want to talk to them, that they will not know what to talk about, or that they will experience a dreaded awkward silence.

Despite the many worries people have about talking to strangers, people's fears are usually overblown. People enjoy conversations with strangers more than they expect to, their partners like them more than they think (a phenomenon we refer to as the "liking gap"), and despite people's fears, silences are rare and feelings of social connection are common.

Unfortunately, people seem to have trouble learning this. Even immediately after an enjoyable and valuable interaction with a stranger, people turn right back around and continue worrying that a future conversation will not go as well. People seem to interpret the success of one conversation as a pleasant exception to an unpleasant rule.

Can People Learn That Talking to Strangers is Generally Positive?

We concluded that in order to help people learn about the value of talking to strangers, we needed to do something more extreme. We decided to run an experiment where we had people talk to as many strangers as they could for an entire week. Our idea was that this repeated experience would leave people no choice but to notice that these conversations typically go well.

To do this, we developed a scavenger hunt game that people could play via an app on their phones. Each day for a week, participants had to choose at least one mission, from a changing list that included things like finding someone "wearing a hat" or "drinking a coffee." People received points in the app and an entry into a prize draw for each mission they completed, and some people completed all 30 possible missions. People in the experimental condition had to chat with someone matching the description for a few minutes, whereas people in the control condition simply had to observe someone for a few minutes.

Repeated Practice Makes People Feel More Comfortable Talking to Strangers

By the end of the study, compared to how they had felt at the beginning of the study, people who had practiced talking to strangers had more positive attitudes about talking to strangers: they predicted fewer rejections and reported more confidence in their ability to start, maintain, and end a conversation. These more positive attitudes persisted even a week after the study ended. In contrast, people who had simply observed strangers showed no change in attitudes over the course of the study.

Repeated practice was a crucial aspect of this intervention. Worries about rejection gradually diminished day by day. In contrast, actual rates of rejection remained low; 87% of the 1336 conversations people had during the study were with the first person they approached. Similarly, in their daily reports over the course of the week-long study, people reported being more and more confident in their conversational ability.

You might be wondering what happened to our "talkers" after the study ended. When we followed up with them a week later, about 40% reported having exchanged contact information and following up with at least one of their conversation partners. Did they keep talking to strangers? There was some preliminary evidence that this might be the case, but given the limitations of how we assessed this, we consider this question still open.

Conversations with strangers are an inexhaustible source of well-being, connection, and information. If you wish you had more confidence to strike up a conversation, you're not alone; apprehension likely explains why people often wear headphones to avoid talking, stay glued to their smartphones in public places, or pretend not to notice a new co-worker they still have not introduced themselves to. Our study finds that repeated practice will allow you to see the possibility of talking to a stranger as a positive opportunity for connection, rather than something to dread—and we promise, the experience will likely be more positive than you expect!


For Further Reading

Sandstrom, G. M., Boothby, E. J., & Cooney, G. (2022). Talking to strangers: A week-long intervention reduces psychological barriers to social connection. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 102, 104356. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103122000750


Gillian Sandstrom is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex, and the Director of the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness. Her research focuses on the social interactions we have with strangers and weak ties. This research focus stems, in part, from the micro-friendship she developed with a lady who worked at a hot dog stand.

Erica Boothby is a Senior Lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on social connection and the psychological barriers that inhibit connection.

Gus Cooney is a Senior Lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on conversation, and in particular, the mistakes people make when talking.