WE NEED TO TALK:

“People suffer emotionally from a lack of belonging.”

the power of talking to strangers

Earlier this year I found myself sitting at a table in a Melbourne café, feeling uncomfortable and selfconscious as I tried to summon the courage to talk to one of the other customers. I had started 2020, as many of us do, by downloading an app with the expectation it would transform me into an all-round better person. My first task was to find someone drinking a coffee and engage them in conversation. The researcher who developed the app says small talk is a powerful tool to combat loneliness and cultivate a sense of community. Her studies have shown measurable improvements in people’s moods and mental health if they take the time to talk to strangers. But interrupting the solitude of the people reading their newspapers seemed like a big social risk, and I was not confident it would pay off.

As I fought against my instinct to stay quiet, the words of the app’s designer were playing in my head. “Nothing horrible happens if someone doesn’t want to talk to you,” UK psychologist Gillian Sandstrom had told me. She had observed that people often wrongly assume others won’t like us, or will think we’re weird if we try to talk to them. But her research found only about 10 per cent of people will resist an attempt to engage in friendly chit-chat, and she reminded me rejection isn’t a big deal.

Gazing at the stony faces in the cafe, I was sceptical, but then I spotted a workaround – the barista was smiling as he frothed some milk. I had detected an Italian accent when I’d ordered so I sidled up to the counter.

“What part of Italy are you from?” His expression changed from an absent-minded grin into a radiant smile as he told me he’d spent much of his adult life in Florence, but had actually been born in a small town on the coast. We chatted until he handed me my coffee and the conversation drew to a natural conclusion. As I left the café I felt a swell of happiness. I often chat with baristas but this was the first time I’d contemplated how the small tête-à-tête influenced my mood. The pleasant sense of wellbeing lingered as I walked the six blocks home. Huh, I thought, tapping my results into the app, the research was right.

The power of small social interactions is an area of study that has gained attention in recent years as governments grapple with the serious public health challenge of loneliness. In an epoch of isolation, psychologists are urging us to strengthen our sense of community by turning fleeting daily encounters with others into something more meaningful.

“We now live in a culture of disconnection,” Dr Sandstrom says. “People find it hard to make friends, and suffer emotionally and physically from a lack of belonging.”

As the daughter of chatty parents, Dr Sandstrom had an innate understanding of the warm feelings that come from a friendly chinwag in a supermarket aisle. But it was an experience during the first year of her Master’s degree that helped her identify these loose social connections as a potential research area. She spent the first few months of her postgraduate study feeling riddled with imposter syndrome and a sense that she didn’t belong. Luckily, there was a hot dog stand on a street corner between her research lab and her supervisor’s office.

“Somehow, I developed a relationship with the lady who worked at the hot dog stand,” she wrote. Every time she walked past, the lady would smile and wave, and this small interaction made Dr Sandstrom feel like she belonged. “We never spoke, but nevertheless she made a difference to my wellbeing.”

This relationship with the hot dog lady made Dr Sandstrom wonder whether we undervalue the minor interactions in our lives. It sparked a series of research projects, which in itself demonstrates that even the tiniest of interactions can lead to big events.

Happiness shared

My café encounter mimicked a study Dr Sandstrom conducted at a Starbucks to test whether we can get some social benefit from ordering a coffee. We know humans need relationships to thrive, but the bulk of the research on the importance of connection focuses on our ties with close friends and families. Dr Sandstrom wanted to see if socialising with someone we have a “weak tie” or no tie with is also good for us, and she recruited 60 coffee drinkers to help.

Participants were divided into two groups. One group was instructed to order their coffee as efficiently as possible and keep their contact with the barista purely transactional. The other group was instructed to have a genuine interaction with the person taking their order. “Smile, make eye contact to establish a connection and have a brief conversation,” they were told.

They were then asked to report on how the interaction made them feel. The results showed those who chatted to the person taking their order felt happier and more accepted.

“Simply taking the time to have a social interaction with a barista at Starbucks increases people’s sense of belonging,” Dr Sandstrom reported.

We know humans experience low moods when they’re struggling for social connection, but Dr Sandstrom found that even the most minor exchanges can begin to remedy this.

Two academics from The University of Chicago back up her findings. They also wondered if casual encounters could be turned into something more. As social animals, we long for connection, they reasoned, yet when presented with a plethora of opportunities to talk, we often opt for silence and isolation.

“From trains to cabs to airplanes to waiting rooms, strangers may sit millimetres apart while completely ignoring each other, treating one another as objects rather than sources of wellbeing,” Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder wrote in their study. “Why are such highly social animals at times so distinctly unsocial?”

To get to the bottom of this, they turned their attention to the morning commute. They divided their participants into groups and gave them one of three sets of instructions: use their train or bus journey to connect with a stranger, travel in silence, or do whatever they would normally do. Taking their experiment one step further than the Starbucks study, they also asked passengers to predict how they would feel after their journey. In the Chicago study, every one of the participants was surprised to find talking to a stranger on their way to work made them feel good.

“Commuters on a train into downtown Chicago reported a significantly more positive commute when they connected with a stranger than when they sat in solitude, yet they predicted precisely the opposite,” the study found. The same was true of the bus passengers. Another experiment the team conducted found the benefits go both ways. Dr Epley

and Dr Schroeder wanted to know if the person who is spoken to by a stranger also felt good. They recreated a waiting room environment, instructed one person to either strike up a conversation with a stranger, or sit in silence, and then surveyed both participants on the results. Happily, both the chatter and the chattee enjoyed the interaction. “Apparently, being talked to by a stranger is every bit as positive as talking to one,” they reported.

What was so interesting about their findings was that people completely misjudged how their spontaneous conversations would be received.

“People systematically misunderstand the consequences of social connection, mistakenly thinking that isolation is more pleasant than connecting with a stranger, when the benefits of social connection actually extend to distant strangers as well,” the study said.

Back in The Australian Women’s Weekly office, a week after my coffee experiment, my small talk app was still on my phone, neglected. I resolved to once again attempt to strike up a conversation with a stranger, knowing there was solid research to say it would do me nothing but good.

My work days start and finish with a train ride, and I looked forward to making it a little nicer by talking to someone. But as I stepped enthusiastically into the carriage I was confronted by a predictable hurdle. Almost everyone was hunched forward with their eyes glued to their phones. I thought back to Dr Sandstrom’s advice for breaking the ice. Asking questions like “How are you?” often results in short, closed answers with no follow-up, and she advises to instead draw on an observation about the person. “For example, commenting on a piece of jewellery or a book someone is reading,” she says. But in the end, I lost my nerve and reached my stop feeling ineffective and silly.

A potentially easier opportunity presented itself the following morning. A man around my age in a suit was standing opposite me with a copy of

In Cold Blood in his hand. He was looking around the train carriage with a friendly and open expression on his face. I’d read In Cold Blood and felt confident we’d have plenty of common ground. Psychologists say one of the reasons we’re afraid to instigate a conversation with a stranger is we’re afraid we’ll run out of things to say. Yet, once again, I couldn’t make the social leap.

Later, I asked Dr Sandstrom why the idea of a spontaneous chat with a stranger is so terrifying.

“People worry about not knowing how to start, having no idea whether they’ll be able to keep a conversation going, and where it will go if they do manage to keep it going. Finally, they worry about when and how to end the conversation politely,” she said.

Our fear of rejection is so ingrained it takes a mammoth effort to overcome.

Time to connect

In times gone by social rejection was a death sentence, and that self-preservation instinct persists today. Back in the 1990s, American Psychological Association researchers Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary took an exhaustive look at everything we know about belonging and found that “even just imagining social rejection” increases our blood pressure, and prolonged loneliness can have serious health effects. Using data from mental health facilities, Baumeister and Leary suggest that mental illness is up to 22 times more common among divorced people than married people. There’s evidence the heartache of loneliness can suppress the immune system. They even found that married people survive cancer better than single ones.

Fortunately, Baumeister and Leary also found the ill effects of rejection can be quickly relieved through social interaction. “Experiences of social inclusion appear to counteract the effects of exclusion and remove the anxiety,” they explained.

Their work stands as a reminder to make time to connect with those around us, not just our friends, family and colleagues, but the person who makes our coffee and the friendly man who walks his dog past our house at dusk.

“Perhaps with other forces in our lives pushing us to focus on our personal goals, we need reminders like these to look outward and seek connections with others,” Dr Sandstrom says. “The next time you need a little pick-me-up, you might consider interacting with the Starbucks barista, thereby mining this readily available source of happiness.”

With Dr Sandstrom’s wisdom playing in my head, I took the train home, determined to tap the well of commuter happiness the Chicago study promised. But as I looked around the carriage, my heart sank. It was again filled with weary workers engrossed in their phones.

As the train prepared to leave, the doors started to beep and a latecomer rushed on board. He was a casually dressed man leading a grey staffy who leaped confidently over the gap, and plonked himself down. The dog had a white diamond on his chest and a gorgeous, shiny coat. Without thinking about it, I heard myself say, “Gorgeous dog, what’s his name?” The owner smiled and I learned the dog’s name was Arlo.

“I wouldn’t usually take him on a train but we were out walking and look…” Arlo’s human lifted his foot to reveal a strap on his shoe had snapped. “Oh, that’s the worst,” I said. “Serves me right for buying cheap knock-offs.”

“The strap on my high-heel snapped when I was running late for an interview once.”

“A job interview, or…?”

It turned out Arlo and his human lived in my suburb and often went to the park near my house. After a neighbourly chat we parted at the turnstiles and I felt sure I’d see them again, and that we’d smile and wave when I did.

As I walked home I felt a genuine sense of what I can only describe as jubilance, coupled with a surprisingly strong feeling of community, all from just three short minutes of conversation. I pondered this paradox. We have limitless opportunities for social connection, yet loneliness is at near epidemic levels. Why do we find it so hard to bridge the gap? I knew the answer was fear.

I turned to Dr Sandstrom again, to ask her how to overcome this. Her advice was the same advice Elizabeth Bennet gives Mr Darcy when he tells her he does not have the talent of conversing easily with people he has never met before. Practise.

Not every conversation will improve your mood or change your life, she says, but together a lot of conversations will cause a shift towards connection, and “help us feel a little more trust and a little less fear”.

“Why are highly social animals at times so unsocial?”