Nick Epley was commuting to work at the University of Chicago when he looked across the train and wondered: Why are all these people sitting elbow to elbow ignoring each other?
Epley, a professor of behavioral science, thought about how very lonely people are, and he challenged himself to strike up a conversation with the woman sitting next to him. It changed his life — and led him to write the book “A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health and Connection.”
After reading it, I decided to try the experiment myself.
For the past month, on my commute to work, at kids’ birthday parties with my daughter, in the elevator at the office and on the street while walking my dog, I’ve been challenging myself to talk to strangers. Would it actually feel good, or just awkward?
I’ve always been a fairly outgoing person, but the idea of talking to strangers and befriending acquaintances still made me feel anxious. As I contemplated opening my mouth to talk to the stranger sitting next to me on a nearly-silent bus, I felt as if my jaw was sealed shut by fear. What if she didn’t want to talk to me? What if I said the wrong thing, or she felt like I was bothering her?
I asked Epley whether he ever felt that fear, too.
“I still do sometimes, but it dulls a lot,” Epley said.
Of course, it isn’t always advisable to talk to strangers. Epley said you should never do so if you feel unsafe.
But in dozens of studies involving more than 30,000 people, he and other researchers have found that people are happier when they are more social. Even if they consider themselves introverts. Even if they fear that reaching out to another person will be embarrassing.
In one study, Epley found that after having a conversation with a stranger, people predict that a future conversation with another stranger will be more enjoyable. But that effect fades pretty quickly.
“It’s not like you go out and have a nice conversation with somebody in the elevator and [the anxiety] disappears,” Epley said.
The main reason people feel uneasy about socializing, he said, is that we focus on the wrong thing. We worry about what we’ll say rather than how we’ll say it. This was certainly true for me.
I worried more about whether I would remember a neighbor’s name than I did about whether I would seem kind. But it turns out, the research shows that if I’m warm and outgoing, it doesn’t really matter that much what I say.
If you’re friendly first, that will probably be reciprocated.
This applies to introverts, too
One of the most surprising findings in the research on happiness is that introverts and extroverts alike feel better when they act like extroverts. This was so perplexing to social scientists that for years they looked for some cost to pretending to be more outgoing than we feel.
Maybe introverts would be more exhausted after acting extroverted? It turns out that everyone gets tired after being social, the same way everyone gets tired after going for a run.
“Introverts and extroverts differ in their expectations, their beliefs about what’s going to happen,” Epley said. “And, therefore, the habits they get into.”
Because when introverts think they won’t enjoy a conversation with a stranger, they often don’t strike one up — so they miss out on the opportunity to be proved wrong, he said.
Talk, don’t text
For many people, the ability to text rather than call has relieved a lot of social anxiety. But texting doesn’t make us feel as connected as talking.
Epley said this is for two reasons: One, texting is asynchronous, meaning you aren’t getting immediate feedback from the other person, and they aren’t getting it from you.
If someone is smiling and nodding as you talk, you feel reassured that they’re enjoying the conversation as much as you are, and vice versa.
The other factor is the human voice.
“Typing is just the words,” Epley said. “Your voice, though, contains intonation and variability, it’s dynamic. That dynamism increases understanding of what I’m saying so I can communicate sincerity versus sarcasm, for instance. I can signal my intent through the sound of my voice.”
In Epley’s research, he and his colleagues asked people to reach out to an old friend either by text or a phone call. While people predicted that the phone call would be more awkward, they reported enjoying it more than texting.
“Most people, we found in our experiments, said they would prefer to reach out and type to their old friend. But in fact, when we randomly assigned them, the people who had the best conversations and felt the most connected were those who actually talked,” Epley said.
Social connection is an everyday choice
My biggest takeaway from the research and my own experiment is that being social is a habit, not a trait. So I’ve been trying to resist the urge to keep to myself, even when I fear a conversation.
Nothing particularly revelatory has come out of any one interaction I’ve had since I started doing this (except a tip I got about where to park near the office.) I facilitated a game of peek-a-boo between my toddler and a kind stranger on the Metro. I bonded with another parent over how our kids repeat everything we say — even the words we really shouldn’t say.
The thing that has been most surprising is how good these tiny moments of connection have made me feel.
On my bus commute one morning, I interrupted a woman next to me who was reading a book and asked her whether she was enjoying it. As much as I worried I would bother her, I saw her light up at the question. She told me about the series she was reading and how it was much better than the TV show.
It never feels completely comfortable to strike up a conversation with a stranger, but for me, the payoff has been worth it. And the research says it will be for you, too.
The post The mental health benefit of striking up conversations with strangers appeared first on Washington Post.
