A Research-Backed Method to Ramp Up Our Social Skills
Introducing: The Talking to Strangers Game
Over the course of the 2024 election season, I talked to a lot of people I didn’t know. I live in a very swingy state (North Carolina) so I put in some hours volunteering with a group called Bull City Votes. It's a non-partisan group that does lots of voter registration and education, along with driving voters to the polls for groups that are often marginalized or disenfranchised. One tactic they train volunteers in is something called deep canvassing. Deep canvassing is not about campaign talking points or convincing anyone of your point of view, but it’s about making connections, asking questions and trying to tease out people’s daily concerns and help them connect how these concerns might be addressed by voting.
I’m an extrovert, and in my work as a journalist, I’ve had to get pretty comfortable over the years talking to people I’ve never met before. Still, in my first few shifts volunteering, I’d have to psyche myself up to put on a friendly, outgoing face and summon my courage to talk to strangers. But something interesting happened over the course of several weeks of regular volunteering: the more I did it, the easier it got. Plenty of people brushed me off or didn’t want to talk to me, but I generally didn’t have angry or hostile encounters with the hundreds of people I approached... attempting to talk about politics... in a deeply polarized and angry time in our country. In fact, I had many moving and memorable encounters, especially with elderly and disabled people who were so thrilled to be voting. By the time the election rolled around, I was so conditioned to greet people and try to strike up conversations I had to remind myself to tone it down when I wasn’t volunteering.
Ever since that experience, I’ve been much more willing to strike up conversations with people I don’t know. The reason: I basically subjected myself to an unofficial talking to strangers bootcamp.
My initial reticence to talk to strangers, I’ve learned, is extremely common. Multiple studies have found we are absolutely terrible at predicting how talking to strangers will go, and researchers in western contexts have found people overwhelmingly assume it will be a negative experience. Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, led a research team that asked commuters to predict if they’d prefer a quiet solo train ride or having a long conversation with someone they didn’t know. Most people said that a solitary commute would make for a better experience. However, the people Epley’s team asked to try to converse with a stranger on the commute, with the instructions “the longer, the better,” rated their commute a more positive experience than those instructed to keep quiet.
Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom and colleagues also led a study that essentially created an intervention to see if she could counteract people’s negative perceptions about talking to strangers. She developed a scavenger hunt game that encouraged people to find and talk to people who met certain criteria, and they were awarded points every time they did so. The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that the more people talked to strangers, the less negative they were about it. If they did it several times over the course of a week, not just once or twice, it could help override the negative perception about the experience and improve people’s attitudes about talking to strangers overall, even after the experiment was over.
Here’s how this applies to the How to Find Your People Club:
I think it’s unlikely (although not impossible!) that you will “find your people” by talking to a stranger in line at a coffee shop. You probably aren’t going to feel a meaningful connection with the cashier at the grocery store that gives you a deep sense of fulfillment and belonging. However, practicing our social skills and talking to strangers is really important if we want to make connections in community contexts. Showing up at a community event is a very important step, but if we hide in the corner staring at our phones, too nervous to talk to anyone, it may be hard to feel compelled to go back. That’s why it’s so important to practice talking to strangers regularly in low-stakes situations.
If you’ve never felt comfortable talking to strangers or you feel out of practice, this is not your fault. The pandemic made it easier than ever to go through life getting “contactless” goods and services like grocery delivery, and our overall declining sense of trust in America can make the world feel scary and hostile, giving us even more reason to keep to ourselves, which makes us less trusting because we’re talking to fewer people, which creates a negative feedback loop of isolation. So, in the name of living in a better world, let’s try to interrupt this cycle.
In order to better prepare you to make community connections, I want us all to get out of our shells and play the Talking to Strangers Game.
Here’s How it Works:
