Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Ask yourself what makes you happy. Many people would say, "Spending time with close friends," "Quality moments with family," "Playing with a pet." Most of us can agree relationships are at the heart of a life well lived. Social science research bears this out. Countless studies suggest that our emotional ties to others shape our well-being. Long-running analyses that track people over time show that social connections are not just about our emotional well-being, they're important determinants of our physical health. But it's one thing to say that relationships are important, it's another to go about getting them or preserving them. Lifelong friends move away to other towns and countries. Romantic relationships come undone, relatives pass away. Especially as people get older, many find it difficult to form new relationships even as they yearn to feel close to others.

New psychological research suggests a solution to this problem, or at least a partial solution, and it's one that's easily accessible to everyone. Last week, we kicked off our Relationships 2.0 series with a look at how to make conflicts less stressful and more productive. This week on Hidden Brain, a user's manual on how to boost your social connections and your happiness. Rigorous studies suggest that the problem of loneliness is growing around the world. Many people feel they don't have others in whom they can confide. Making friends can be hard, especially if you're someone who is naturally shy. At the University of Sussex, psychologist Gillian Sandstrom studies what we can do to combat the growing challenge of social isolation. Gillian Sandstrom, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian, I understand that you were somewhat introverted and shy as a child. Can you describe the younger version of yourself to me?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I was definitely a shy kid, very bookish. So I remember anytime we went to my grandma's house for Christmas and all the cousins and aunts and uncles were there, I would be off in a room somewhere with a book, just finding the quietest place in the house, just sitting there reading. My dream when I was a kid was that I would grow up and I would live on an island. I don't mean like a tropical island, I mean an island that was just me, my own island where I had a big library, and that was my dream.

Shankar Vedantam:

As a teenager, Gillian's shyness intensified. It got to the point she found it difficult to even have routine phone conversations.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Oh gosh, that was the worst. I felt like every time I did it, I would get off the phone as quickly as possible and then my mom would say, "Well, did you ask this? Did you say that?" Of course, I never did any of those things, and so it just felt really stressful and anxious about talking to someone on the phone.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand this must have been especially hard for you because you had one member of your family who was the polar opposite of you. Tell me about your dad.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah. Actually, I feel like my whole family was the opposite of me, but especially my dad. So my dad is just, I think he's a king of talking to people. He had this knack for approaching people and figuring out how to connect with them and start a conversation, and so anywhere we went would take a really long time. Going to the grocery store would take three hours because he would stop and talk to everybody, especially kids. He loves talking to kids. He'd always tease them and get them talking. But he would ask a kid who looked like they were about five or six-years-old, "He'd say, how old are you, 12, 13?" Just something ridiculous. That would make them feel like they had to disagree with what he'd said, or he'd ask them if they had any pets at home and ask if they had a pet alligator or a pet hippopotamus. Just ridiculous things that would make them respond.

Shankar Vedantam:

Did you really feel like you were embarrassed when he did these things? Did you try and prevent him from doing it?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I definitely would say, "Dad, why are you ... ?" I couldn't understand the compulsion that he had. "Why are you doing this, dad? They don't want to talk to you. They're doing their grocery shopping. Why would someone want to stop and talk to a complete stranger?"

Shankar Vedantam:

What would he say in response?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I think he would just ignore me and enjoy his conversation 'cause he was having such a good time. He likes to say, "Everybody has a story." So he just loves meeting people and having a chat.

Shankar Vedantam:

As an adult, Gillian's desire to fade into the wallpaper began to have real consequences.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I think about 25, and I was on the plane on my own on this business trip, which seemed quite exciting. I'd just recently gotten married and I'd taken on my husband's surname. They were making an announcement about a bunch of different people's names being called out, something to do with baggage. I didn't know what was going on, but at some point they said, "Would passenger Sandstrom please identify themselves?" I thought, "Well, they couldn't mean me because that's not my name anymore." I knew I should have checked, but I was too anxious and embarrassed to push that button and call over the flight attendant. So I didn't say anything. So of course, what happened is I got to the other end, got off the plane, went to the belt to collect my luggage, and of course, it wasn't there. So I had to go and buy a tourist tee-shirt, which is what I wore on the first day on this business trip.

Shankar Vedantam:

Several years after the luggage incident, Gillian signed up for a graduate program in Toronto. She had been working as a computer programmer for a decade, but wanted to try something new. She decided to get a master's degree in psychology. Gillian was in her 30s. As she looked around at her graduate school cohort, she worried she wasn't smart enough.

Gillian Sandstrom:

But on top of all that, I had the feeling I'd given up this other career that had been going really well, "Did I make the right decision? Should I be here? All these people are so much younger than me." So it's just this feeling, kind of imposter syndrome feeling of, "Did I make the right decision? Should I be here?"

Shankar Vedantam:

Soon enough, however, Gillian settled into a routine. It gave her more than structure, it gave her an insight.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I would go to the research lab to do my studies, but then my supervisor had an office in a different building. So when I walked between those two buildings, I would pass on the street corner, there was a hot dog stand because I was at a university right downtown Toronto. I started to develop, just accidentally develop a relationship with a lady who worked at the hot dog stand that I would pass by. Seeing her there and knowing that she recognized me, we'd smile, we'd wave, I don't even know if we talked to each other, but we just had this relationship built on these little minimal signs.

Shankar Vedantam:

On some days as Gillian crossed the street, she noticed something curious. The hot dog lady was not at her usual spot. That wasn't what was curious. The thing that struck Gillian was her own emotional reaction.

Gillian Sandstrom:

So on a day when I didn't see the hot dog lady, I would feel disappointed and not lonely, but unmoored, 'cause I came think it that the hot dog lady and people like her, we have lots of relationships like that, these little tiny relationships that maybe don't seem particularly important, but I feel like you're woven into the social fabric. So I felt a bit unmoored and uncentered when she was missing.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian, when you think about these relationships that you're talking about like your relationship with the hot dog lady, they're different than the kind of relationships you would have with a spouse or a child or even a colleague at work. Sociologists have come up with names for these kinds of relationships. Can you talk about the different terms they use for these kinds of relationships?

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yes. A sociologist in the '70s named Mark Granovetter coined these kinds of relationships as “weak ties” and as opposed to “strong ties,” which are the ones with close friends and family. It's tricky to come up with a definition because one of the original thoughts was they're people that we see less often, but I don't think that's necessarily true because people like the hot dog lady I would see here on a very regular basis or you might run into someone at the school drop-off every day. So I don't think frequency is necessarily a factor here, but definitely close friends and family are the people that you feel the most comfortable with and you'd be most willing to share your deepest, darkest secrets with. But weak ties, you can feel fondly towards them positively, but you're probably less likely to feel like you'd want to confide in them and share something that feels very personal.

Shankar Vedantam:

So a little while later, you were starting a PhD, and I believe this was in the lab of Elizabeth Dunn, who we've previously had on Hidden Brain as a guest. Liz Dunn asked you what you wanted to study, and how did you respond?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I said I wanted to study the hot dog lady. She said, "What makes you happy?" Her lab is the happy lab, "What makes you happy?" I said, "Well, the hot dog lady makes me happy." Having these little interactions throughout my day with people that I'm not really close to and would never invite over for a drink or anything, but having this familiarity and feeling of connection with those people just really feels good to me. I wanted to know, is it just me or is this a more general thing? Do people generally feel good from having these kinds of relationships?

Shankar Vedantam:

When we return, how the people we least expect to matter in our lives can have a profound impact on the way we experience the world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you think about the most important people in your life, you'll probably think about a spouse or a best friend, your children, maybe even a beloved pet. Chances are you don't give much thought to the people on the periphery, the woman selling hot dogs on your way to work, the person sitting across from you on a train. Even when we encounter these people every day, we often ignore them. If our lives were a movie, they wouldn't even be supporting characters, they're the extras. Gillian Sandstrom is a psychologist at the University of Sussex. She studies these relationships and why they are much richer than most of us think. Gillian, some time ago you ran an interesting experiment involving a little tool called the Clicker. Tell me about that study.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I wanted to know, does the number of interactions that people have with weak ties relate to their happiness? So my hypothesis was, given my personal experience, maybe on the days that you have more interactions with weak ties, you feel a little bit happier. So I got students at first and then later just members of the community to carry around two clickers in their pocket, two different colors, and every time that they talked to someone throughout the day, they were supposed to click. So one of the clickers was to count their interactions with strong ties, that would be people like you just mentioned, a close friend or a family member. then the other clicker was to count the number of interactions they had with weak ties.

Shankar Vedantam:

If a volunteer smiled at someone they didn't know very well on their way to class, click, weak tie. If they had a conversation over lunch with their best friend, click, strong tie.

Gillian Sandstrom:

As you'd expect the number of interactions you had with your close others, your strong ties predicted happiness and feelings of belonging; but also, independently the number of interactions that people had with weak ties also mattered. So on average, people who tended to have more interactions on a given day with weak ties tend to be a little happier than people who have fewer interactions with weak ties; but then also, regardless of what your personal average is on a day when you talk to a few more weak ties than you usually do, you tend to be a little happier than you usually are.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian, we talked earlier about the sociologist, Mark Granovetter and his work on weak ties. If I recall correctly, he had a famous paper called The Strength of Weak Ties, looking at how in some ways our connections to people who are peripheral in our lives are actually very important to us. This has been born out in lots of studies looking at how if you're searching for a new job, for example, you're much more likely to find that job through a network of weak ties of people who are slightly compared to the network of people who are very close to you. So Granovetter and others have looked primarily at the power of weak ties in the context of professional relationships. But in some ways what you were realizing from the clicker study was that the strength of weak ties might also affect our social lives and our emotional well-being.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah, I was looking at weak ties as having other advantages that maybe hadn't been looked at before, so these well-being benefits and emotional benefits.

Shankar Vedantam:

So the biggest source of weak ties comes from the world of strangers or people we don't know. Can we talk a moment about whether there's a difference between strangers and weak ties? What's the difference between someone who we would call a stranger and someone we would call a weak tie?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I think the difference is actually pretty small. So I think a weak tie, my definition is just someone with whom you have mutual familiarity, so the hot dog lady was a weak tie. The first time I talked to her, she was a stranger. But when we saw each other again and she recognized me and I recognized her, I think at that point she's no longer a stranger. She is a weak tie.

Shankar Vedantam:

You started to conduct other studies besides the clicker study looking at the power of weak ties. Can you talk about some of that work? One of your studies I understand took place in a coffee shop.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Right. Inspired by the hot dog lady. I thought the closest thing I could think of, I really wanted to study that phenomenon. I was aware that lots of people have their favorite barista at the coffee shop. People go into the coffee shop and the person knows their name and knows what their regular order is and it makes you feel really good, and so I really wanted to study that phenomenon. So I recruited people walking past a Starbucks in Vancouver, gave them a gift card. I said, "The only catch is that when you go in to buy your coffee, you have to follow some instructions." some people, the instructions were, "When you go in to buy your coffee, just be as efficient as possible." I tried to tell people, this would be a good thing, "The barista's busy and just wants to get through their day and you'd be helping them out, so have your money ready and avoid unnecessary conversation. You have to talk to place your order."

Then the other group of people, I said, "Okay, when you go in, try to turn it into a real genuine social interaction, so smile, make eye contact, and have a little chat." Plenty of people said they do this anyway, and I said, "Well, just amp it up. Do it even more than you usually do." So people bought their coffee, followed the instructions, and then when they came out I asked them to fill out a short survey. what we found was that people who'd had this just tiny little social interaction, had treated the barista as if they would treat one who knew their name and knew their order, if they had that social interaction, they were in a better mood and they felt more satisfied with their Starbucks experience and they felt a greater sense of connection to other people.

Shankar Vedantam:

In Gillian's study, people had an incentive to talk to strangers in the real world, talking to people you don't know can be awkward. We worry our small talk won't be well received. We fear that people will think we're obnoxious, silly or unlikeable. We've talked about this trepidation on the show before. In our episode featuring the psychologist Erica Boothby, she called it the liking gap. It's the gap between how we believe others see us and what they actually see. Gillian has found evidence of the liking gap phenomenon in her own research.

Gillian Sandstrom:

What we find is that after two people talk for the first time, they each tend to think that the other person liked them less than they actually did. So we have this negative voice in our head that says, "Oh, why did I say that? Why did I not say that? Did they understand me? Did I embarrass myself?" We tend to listen to that negative voice and think that everything went horribly wrong. But our partner, they're probably doing the same thing. So they don't even notice the thing that you think went horribly wrong because they're stuck in their own head thinking about what they did wrong. I read the abstract that Erica was part of where she was talking about the liking gap and I thought, "Oh, I have data, we should talk." I reached out to her via email and we've been collaborating ever since, so it's a great example of reaching out to a stranger.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering, Gillian, if you can talk a moment about how our intuitions and forecasting errors are sometimes compounded by the messages we receive from society. I want to play you an old public service announcement about how children should think about strangers.

Speaker 3:

Most people love a little child. Some grownups, though, are bad. The bad ones look like good ones like any mom or dad, so that is why you must not talk to strangers that you meet. Don't let them give you any toys or anything to eat. If someone that you do not know should offer you a treat, remember how he looks and talks, but run fast out the street.

Shankar Vedantam:

Run fast. So it's not just our internal messaging that gets it wrong, Gillian, sometimes the external messaging is also saying, "Keep to yourself."

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yes, absolutely. I think norms and those kinds of cultural messages make a huge difference to what we do. I think it's really hard, isn't it? Because it's a very nuanced message that we want to convey because we don't want to make people scared to talk to others, but we do need to be aware of our personal safety. I'm not suggesting that people go down a dark alley and start talking to people, but in most situations, if you're in a public place surrounded by other people, there's so many benefits to talking to strangers.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'd like to talk about some of those benefits that you yourself have realized in your own life. You've actually tried to walk the talk of your research and practice what you've preached. Tell me about a time that you had an interesting conversation on the train with a woman who was carrying a very fancy cupcake.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yes. This was one of the first conversations that I can remember deliberately starting with a stranger. If I think about it, I've definitely had conversations before then, but this is one that was really memorable to me, I think because I felt like I'd deliberately done it rather than it just happening accidentally. So I was on the train in Toronto and it was during the time when all these very fancy cupcake shops were coming out. This woman on the train had this beautiful, just delicious-looking, decadent cupcake, and so I couldn't help but ask her about it.

Basically, I just wanted to comment on how beautiful this cupcake was. We started talking and I think maybe it was her birthday or something and she was reminiscing about other birthdays. She told me that in the past she had gone on a trip to South Africa and when she was there she had ridden an ostrich. You think about it, "How did we get from cupcakes to ostriches? I don't know," and so I was really hooked. I just thought, "This is amazing. I would never have known this if I hadn't talked to a complete stranger."

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian, being a psychologist, went a step further. She realized that weak ties are a source of novelty in our lives. Once she had this insight, it started to pop up all the time.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah, I've learned all sorts of things that I found interesting. I remember talking to someone on a plane who was from Slovenia who told me that Slovenia is 70% forest. I thought, "Okay, someday I need to go to Slovenia, because that sounds awesome." Forests are a great place for an introvert, right? I remember talking to someone on the bus out at the university who told me that there was a region in China where the majority of people, or there was a huge number of people who have red hair like me. Then I went home and googled it right away and found that indeed it was true. I have had free vegetables from people.

I got a ride from a couple once that saved me from having to ... The train wasn't running, and so they gave me a ride so that I didn't have to take the bus instead of the train late at night. I was with my husband and I felt very safe about it. Again, I'm not suggesting people get in a stranger's car, but I felt comfortable having talked to them for ages first. I joined a book club after talking to a stranger. I've talked to all sorts of different interesting kinds of people. I've talked to Freemasons. I talked to someone who made theatrical wigs. I've talked to children's book authors and a poet and I don't know, I've just met all sorts of really interesting people and just had some really interesting conversations and also, a lot of just average, meh conversations.

Shankar Vedantam:

We often fail to see the benefits of talking to strangers because of our own biases. We worry that people won't like us. We assume that small talk is empty talk. In reality, these interactions have a subtle but significant effect on our happiness. Weak days, it turns out, offered tremendous value in our lives. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have experienced a catastrophic loss of these connections.

Gillian Sandstrom:

During the pandemic, people generally found ways to stay in touch with the people they were closest to. But with acquaintances, sometimes we don't even know how to reach them. They're just the people that we happen to cross paths with during the course of our day, so because the patterns of our day changed, we just didn't see them. I had Barry at the pet store who would remember me and recognize me and ask about my cats. I wouldn't reach out to Barry at the pet store, would I? Don't even know how to do that. So I think the pandemic disproportionately affected our relationships with weak ties.

Shankar Vedantam:

At the same time, Gillian, I think a lot of people are reporting, even people who enjoy working from home and feel like working from home has actually allowed them to spend more time with family and better have a better work-life balance, many people then report, "I somehow feel cut off from the world in important ways." Perhaps part of what they're experiencing is what you are talking about here. Your spouse is still your spouse, your child is still your child, your coworker is still your coworker, and you have fixed ways of dealing with them. Weak ties are what bring in surprise and unpredictability into your life.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I think that's true, and I think that that has a bigger or maybe different impact than people think. During the pandemic, if we are talking to our close friends, we're probably already watching the same shows on Netflix. We already know all their opinions. We have nothing new to talk about because nobody was able to go out and do new things. So I think it's the weak ties that get us access to new kinds of information or new stories or new adventures. Because we were cut off from them, I think we really missed out on a huge portion of the novelty that we tend to get day-to-day.

Shankar Vedantam:

As we go about our daily routines, there are countless opportunities to connect with others. We often take these opportunities for granted, but long months of social distancing in the context of the pandemic make it clear that our lives are made richer by the people around us, even people we don't know very well at all. When we come back, techniques and strategies for making the most of our weak ties. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Across a number of research studies, psychologist Gillian Sandstrom has found that people are happier when they have lots of casual conversations with strangers or people they know only slightly; the cafeteria worker who makes you a sandwich, the lifeguard who watches over your kids at the swimming pool, an usher at the theater. Most people don't prioritize these relationships, perhaps because they're fleeting. Gillian grew up shy, but has tried to become more outgoing in conversations with strangers. In recent years, she has developed something of a science on how to go about talking to strangers. She has discovered that there are distinct psychological problems in starting conversations, maintaining conversations and ending conversations, and each problem requires its own solution. She explained to me the challenge involved with breaking the ice.

Gillian Sandstrom:

When I was doing my PhD, I used to talk to people on the bus all the time and it wasn't a common thing to do. You don't talk to people on the bus. So when I would do that, I think people's original reaction, their initial gut reaction is, "Do I know you?" They think, "Maybe that's why you're talking to me. Maybe I've met you before." then they realize, "Uh-oh, I don't know you." Then they think, "Uh-oh, what is happening here? What do you want? What is going on?" Then I think you get to the third phase, which is just, "Oh, you're being friendly, cool," and then you have a nice chat. So I think sometimes you have to be aware that there is going to be that awkward moment because unfortunately, it is just not the norm, and so people have to make sense of what's going on. But I think if you can be a little bit patient, you almost always get to that stage where people can accept that you're just being friendly.

Shankar Vedantam:

Breaking the ice involves, well, breaking the ice. You have to accept there are going to be a few moments where the other person might be wary. There may also be situations where someone clearly does not want to be engaged in a chat. As they say, read the room.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I can think of a time not too long ago when I was on the tube in London and the unwritten rule is that you do not talk to people on the tube. So I was just breaking all of the norms to do it, but I've had some really great chats on the tube, so I just keep doing it. But I remember once being on the tube and turning to the person sitting on my right and trying to start a conversation and she was polite. I think I started just saying, "How are you? Have you had a busy day?" She responded, but it was very clear from her body language that she just did not want to talk. She was getting out a book and getting herself set up and plugged in, whatever. So I thought, "Okay, that's fine." I don't think we should push ourselves on people.

So I literally turned my head to the person sitting on my left and I started talking to them and we had a really nice chat. People worry too much about rejection because first of all, I don't know why that woman didn't want to talk to me, but there's 100 reasons and I could choose to believe that she didn't like me or it was something about me. But I could also choose to believe that, like I said, maybe she's shy, maybe she's anxious, maybe she just really is reading an amazing book and I get it. So I can choose to believe something that isn't so personally negative and just most people do want to talk. It didn't surprise me that the person on my left was a bit more willing.

Shankar Vedantam:

The second problem people face in talking to strangers is in maintaining the conversation. If breaking the ice feels scary for many people, awkward silences can be terrifying.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I think it helps to pre-think, "What might I do if that happened?" it could be things like, "Well, I'll share something about myself," or, "I'll comment on something that was in the news today," or, "I'll ask them a question," or, "I'll take a breath and just wait a moment and it'll be fine," but I have to make sure I don't panic. That would be a good thing to think about.

Shankar Vedantam:

Sometimes, Gillian says, the problem is not an awkward silence, but a perfectly interesting conversation that suddenly goes sideways.

Gillian Sandstrom:

I saw this man with a net and he was scooping up fish and I thought, "What in the heck is he doing?" So I went up and I asked him, I said, "What are you doing?" He said he lived nearby, and he said, "This happens sometimes we get a heavy rain and the fish wash downstream and they get stuck somewhere, and then the water goes down and they're in big trouble. So I'm just catching the fish and moving them to somewhere where they're safe."

I thought, "Oh, this is amazing. This guy's a fish hero and what a cool story." We continued talking, and the conversation shifted away from the fish and it was early days in the pandemic. So inevitably we ended up talking about that. I discovered that he thought that the pandemic was a hoax and that the government was making up stories, and that's not my view. I couldn't understand why someone would think that way. Why would the government do that? So I started to think, "Who is this person and what's going on here? Here they are a fish hero. How is a fish hero also having these ... ?" You just never know someone, do you?

Shankar Vedantam:

Did you sidle away from the conversation at that point, Gillian? What did you do?

Gillian Sandstrom:

I just think that we can serve a benefit to other people by talking to them and by listening to them. So I think it's pretty rare, at least in my own experience, I don't tend to get into any heated topics when I'm talking to a complete stranger. It's usually fairly innocuous and fun. It doesn't get into politics and religion and all the heavy stuff that we avoid at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I'm just seeking out a fun interaction. So I just let him talk a little bit. But yeah, it just drew to a natural close and I moved on.

Shankar Vedantam:

Can you talk a little bit about how when we have conversations that are awkward or conversations that start off being interesting but end up in an odd place, many of us draw the wrong conclusion from this, which is that the next conversation is also likely to be difficult, or the next conversation is likely to be unpleasant? In some ways, we overcount the likelihood of negative interactions.

Gillian Sandstrom:

So yeah, I've run a bunch of studies in the lab where I've asked people to predict how a conversation will go. Then they actually have a conversation with a stranger and then they tell me how it went. The people's worries before the conversation are quite high, but after having the conversation they say, "None of those things actually happened." But if you ask them to predict what would happen if they had another conversation right now, those fears creep back up. Not all the way to the level that they were at before the study, but definitely higher than they should be based on having just had a pleasant conversation. So it seems that people have trouble generalizing and it makes some sense because every human is unique. So it'd be easy to think, "Well, just 'cause I had a nice conversation with this person, why would I expect to have a nice conversation with the next person?"

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian wanted to figure out if she could override people's tendency to undercount the likelihood of good conversations and overcount the risk of bad conversations.

Gillian Sandstrom:

The only way I can think of to fix this would be to get people to have a lot of conversations so they can start to see a pattern and start to see that most of these conversations are pleasant, but how am I going to do that when people don't even want to have one conversation with a stranger, let alone lots? So I stole an idea. I was thinking, "I need to turn it into a game. I need to make it fun somehow." so I was thinking, "Ah, maybe I could turn it into a bingo game or something," but a researcher in my department had placed posters around the building. They were recruiting people for a study involving a scavenger hunt. It was a study about memory, but I thought, "Ooh, scavenger hunt, I could get people to do a scavenger hunt game that involves finding and talking to strangers."

Shankar Vedantam:

What was the scavenger hunt game that involves talking to strangers? I thought scavenger hunts are about finding treasure.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Well, people and conversations with strangers are a treasure, come on. So yeah, I came up with a list of missions that were things like find someone who's wearing a hat or find someone who's drinking a coffee. I came up with a whole list of missions, about 30 of them, and I wanted them to be easy. Most scavenger hunts, you're trying to make it a little tricky so people can't find everything, but I wanted people to be able to accomplish every single mission.

Shankar Vedantam:

Some volunteers were asked to merely observe the strangers they found. Others had to engage the strangers in conversation.

Gillian Sandstrom:

We found that over the course of the study every day, people reported being less and less worried about being rejected by the people they approached and more and more confident in their ability to start and maintain and end the conversation. So it really did seem that there was this gradual improvement and that repeated practice was important. Just having one conversation was not enough, it was this gradual improvement over time that stuck even a week after the scavenger hunt had ended, people still had more positive feelings towards talking to strangers,

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian began to see how important it was to not just have the insight that talking to strangers could be fun, but to actually practice doing it. She has developed a workshop to get people to practice these skills. It's called How to Talk to Strangers.

Gillian Sandstrom:

The workshops became research and then the research fed back into the workshops, but really, it's just a big practice session. You're bringing in a bunch of people who think they'd like to learn more how to talk to strangers. So before the workshop starts, it's very quiet in the room. There's crickets 'cause everyone feels a bit awkward and they don't know what to do, what's going to happen. So I always start the workshop by just saying, "Okay, you have to turn to someone sitting next to you and just have a conversation right now." Then it's just this beautiful moment because there's this buzz in the room and it's just like, "Oh my God, people are talking," and then it's really hard to shut people up.

Shankar Vedantam:

Do you have icebreakers yourself that you've used Gillian as you've become a better conversationalist and better at talking to strangers, what do you go up and talk to strangers about? How do you start a conversation? What do you do?

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah, I have a few different go-to methods now. So maybe it's especially an English thing. They joke about it all the time, but it's: Talk about the weather. I think the reason we do that is because it's a shared circumstance. It's something we're both experiencing at the same time. So I think that principle can be used more broadly. So if you're in the same place as this person at the same time, then you have various things in common with them already. So you can comment on the shared situation that you happen to be in. If you're on a bus or something and something unusual happens, then all of a sudden you're all on the same team, aren't you? Everybody talks when they never would've talked before because you've experienced this situation together. But sometimes I do it in a different way, which is by pointing out something that I'm seeing in the environment.

So sometimes I'll point out happy, playful dogs to someone else that's walking past me in the park and just draw their attention to it, or I've pointed out the spring flowers that are popping up. But that's also linked to the last main technique I use, which is just to tap into your curiosity. I can't tell you how many conversations I've started just by going up to someone and saying, "What you doing?" Like I did with the fish hero, I saw him scooping up fish in a net and I thought, "What is he doing?" So I've gone up to lots of different people. I think you have to be a little careful 'cause you don't want it to come across as accusatory. It has to come across as curious. So you have to do it with this lightness in your voice that it's just out of curiosity and fun rather than being an accusation.

Shankar Vedantam:

So there have been studies that found that conversations don't end when one party wants them to end, and they don't even end when both parties want them to end, partly because people are so uncomfortable with terminating conversations. Conversations can go well past the point they're enjoyable for either party. How do you get out of conversations with strangers, Gillian?

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah, I really am still trying to work that out. Most of the time that I talk to strangers, I'm out walking around the park or something and it's really easy to just walk away when you're finished as opposed to being on a bus or sitting next to someone on the plane. People don't talk until it's 15 minutes before the landing because otherwise, they're stuck there for the whole flight. But I've definitely gotten stuck in conversations and I feel like I'm still not very good at figuring out how to get out of them. I've run these How to Talk to Strangers workshops, and like I said earlier, people can come up with a hundred ways to start a conversation, nobody really knows how to end them. Most of the time when people are brainstorming, it's just a list of lies. It's just, "I need to go to the bathroom," "I need to make a phone call."

Shankar Vedantam:

Or texting a friend and asking a friend to call you in the middle of a conversation so that you can be pulled away.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Right. Yes, we've all seen those episodes on TV, haven't we? "If you haven't heard from me, call me in seven minutes and help me get out of this." It depends on the situation. If it's a mixer or a networking event where it's intended for people to talk to multiple partners, then there are some clever things you can do like introduce the person to someone else and then move on. But when I've taught these workshops, there's always one person, and I think it's literally one person who says that they just thank the person for the conversation and signal that it's over and it's time to move on, and maybe even explicitly say that, "It's been nice talking to you, but I think it's time for us to go now." Everyone looks at this person and says, "You can do that?" So that tells me how uncommon it is, but why not? So I've definitely been trying to do that more often, is to just thank the person, acknowledge, I think that's what we want. It's very unpleasant when you're talking to someone and instead of saying that they just start looking around and you can see them fidget. That's the worst. It would be much better if someone just said, "Thank you, and I'm going to move on now."

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering if at these workshops, Gillian, anyone ever brings up the question of gender? I asked this question because sometime ago we came by an interesting post on Reddit. A trans man named Lysander Baker wrote that he had transitioned from female to male over the course of the pandemic, and he'd noticed that his social interactions had changed. I want to play a clip of what he told us.

Lysander Baker:

It made me realize how difficult it was to try to socialize just casually as a male because everybody around me was perceiving me as a threat. Then it struck me, it's like, "Oh, it's because I'm now being perceived as male and suddenly it's a whole different ball game."

Shankar Vedantam:

So Lysander told us, Gillian, that he felt that his license to talk to strangers had suddenly expired.

Lysander Baker:

My interactions with strangers changed mainly because the rules changed completely. Before, I could get by with lighthearted jokes, one-off zingers. But after, that started to become much more poorly received.

Shankar Vedantam:

What do you make of this, Gillian, this mandate to talk to strangers? Is it some ways harder if you are a man compared to a woman?

Gillian Sandstrom:

So at the How to Talk to Strangers workshops that I've run, I've heard those kinds of comments from both genders, actually. So women are nervous about talking to a man because they don't want to send the wrong signals, and men are worried about talking to women because they don't want to have their behavior interpreted in the wrong way. So I think everybody's nervous about talking to each other. It's really a shame, isn't it? Because we don't want to not talk to half of the human population, but I don't think we have to get stuck there. I think there's probably things we can do in our body language to signal that by keeping some distance, maybe less intense eye contact. I think there's probably some things we can do to signal that we're just being friendly, or we could explicitly say it like, "Look, I'm not hitting on you, I'm just being friendly.:

Shankar Vedantam:

We started this conversation, Gillian, by talking about how you thought of yourself and perhaps still think of yourself as being introverted, but I understand that partly maybe learning from your own experience as an adolescent or as a young person at parties, you now make it a habit to go up to the person who is standing by themselves in a corner at the party, the person who is clearly the introvert and actually strike up a conversation with them?

Gillian Sandstrom:

Yeah, There's a few reasons for that. One is completely selfish because I'm very much an introvert, and so that's still an environment that I don't feel comfortable in. When there's a lot of people, especially when there's lots of people I don't know, or it's a really noisy environment, that's when I feel the most uncomfortable. I know that the way to fix that to make myself feel better is to get into a one-to-one conversation with someone. But then in addition to that, I'd like to think that there's a pro-social motive as well. You look around the room and you see someone else who doesn't have anyone to talk to. I know now that so many of us feel socially anxious or socially awkward. So there's guaranteed to be somebody else who doesn't really know anybody and doesn't have someone to talk to. So I'll look around for that person and go and start a conversation with them. So I'd like to think that it's helping both of us.

Shankar Vedantam:

In many ways, Gillian, you grew up thinking of yourself as being shy and introverted, and in some ways, it's remarkable how far you've come. You've really practiced changing your own behavior. Do you ever think to yourself, "It's remarkable how far I've come and how much I've changed?"

Gillian Sandstrom:

Just recently, actually, a couple of weeks ago, I had a moment where it really struck me how far I've come. I was at the opera and I had come back from the intermission and I started chatting with the people who were sitting next to me farther in from the aisle than I was. I said, "How are you doing?" They said, "Fine-ish." I thought, "Ooh, something is really wrong if a complete stranger admits that they're not just fine." I said, "What's going on?" It turned out that the woman had Parkinson's and she was feeling very uncomfortable sitting where she was. She was worried that she might need to leave part way through the second act, but she was so far in from the aisle that it would mean disrupting everybody. She had thought that she would be sitting on the aisle, and so she was very upset to find out that she wasn't.

I said, "Would you like me to ask if people would be willing to move over so you could sit on the aisle?" I offered this thinking probably she's going to say no because it will feel like a big deal. But surprisingly she said, "Yes, that would be wonderful. I would feel so much more comfortable." So I said, "No problem." So I talked to two couples and I asked them if they'd be willing to move over, and of course, they were happy to do it. Most people are kind and if you ask them, they'll do something like that. I'm sure they felt good to be able to do that.

So we all moved over, and the couple moved over to the aisle. As her husband passed me, he said, "Thank you so much. I couldn't have done that." It really just struck me in that moment past Gillian couldn't have done that either. So it was really a moment where I realized, "Wow, somehow everything has changed in these baby steps. I'm a complete introvert. I never would've thought of talking to strangers years ago and here I am, and asking people to move over in their seats was just not a problem at all, I didn't even think twice about it." It just has no fear for me anymore because I've had so many pleasant conversations with people over the years that I knew it would go well.

Shankar Vedantam:

Your dad would've been proud of you, Gillian.

Gillian Sandstrom:

My dad would've been proud, yeah. I did tell him this story. I think he was quite proud.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gillian Sandstrom is a psychologist at the University of Sussex. Gillian, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Gillian Sandstrom:

Thank you for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Matt Schwartz. A few years ago, Matt helped us produce a wonderful episode of Hidden Brain titled Romeo and Juliet in Kigali. We've stayed in touch ever since and he alerted us to the story that Lysander Baker posted on Reddit. Thanks for thinking of us, Matt. If you liked this episode and would like us to produce more shows like this, please consider supporting our work. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, if you would like to help support the show you love, go to support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.