12/25/2023 0 Comments Study deep conversations strangers![]() ![]() “I don’t know how the conversation got there, but she taught me that humans can ride ostriches,” Sandstrom says. Once, on the subway, she saw a woman holding a box of elaborately decorated cupcakes and asked about them. She was surprised at how easy and fun it was. Before long, she was talking with strangers too. So she started holding eye contact with people and found that it actually felt pretty good. “I thought, Well, that’s dumb,” she says. One day, Sandstrom, who had always considered herself an introvert, realized that she always looked down when she walked along the street. She was raised in Canada by extroverts who loved talking with strangers. In psychology, the sorts of exchanges Nic is talking about are known as “minimal social interactions.” The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom had a similar epiphany about them about a decade ago. She tells me that these experiences have taught her something invaluable: “Never underestimate the power of even the most minute positive connection.” But the conversations tend to go well, reassuring her that there is goodness in the world, and the possibility of belonging. She’s not reckless or naive, and she knows how to read people and detect trouble. But if they seem receptive, she’ll say, “Hi, I’m Nic,” and see where it goes. If they have headphones on or appear uninterested, she’ll leave them alone. She still loves to travel, and on her trips, she’ll size up her seatmate, or someone sitting alone at a table or the bar. These days, Nic is a successful nurse with an uncanny gift for connecting with her patients, and is happily married to a kind and sociable man. Read: A stranger helped my family at our darkest moment Yet, like Nic, many of us are wary of those interactions, especially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. The results of that research have been striking. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. ![]() A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. “I would go home with some amazing stories-granted, nobody to share them with-but I still had the stories. When times got hard, she found herself turning to strangers for comfort and “to stave off the loneliness,” she told me. This form of connection changed her life. Today, Nic has a name for these types of conversations: “Greyhound Therapy.” As she uses it, the term literally refers to talking with your seatmate on a long-haul bus but can apply to talking with strangers anywhere-at a restaurant, at a bus stop, in a grocery store. Read: Why do we look down on lonely people? They were actually sources of comfort and belonging. She found that, contrary to what she’d been raised to believe, these strangers weren’t dangerous or scary. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fear and expecting the worst, but they always went well. “Maybe I’m not gonna die if I randomly talk to them.” So she took more trips and connected with more people. “If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I’m not so bad,” she figured. At 17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people began starting conversations with her. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. Nic’s fear isn’t uncommon in a country where valid lessons about “stranger danger ” can cast all people you don’t know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she took steps to engage with the world. (Nic asked to be referred to by only her first name to protect her privacy.) “My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of everybody, because everybody’s evil and they’re gonna hurt you,” she told me. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. ![]()
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