Gillian Sandstrom on Talking to Strangers 

“Don’t talk to strangers’ is a common bit of parental advice that many end up following the rest of their lives. But those who follow a blanket prohibition on starting a conversation with someone they don’t know can often miss out on the delights and even the mental benefits that such chats can provide, says Gillian Sandstrom.  

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sandstrom – an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex – walks interviewer David Edmonds through some of the experimental findings she and her peers have made that back up that belief. “We’re finding some unique benefits of talking to strangers. So we’re finding that it increases your intellectual humility. So it makes you more open to the fact that other people know things that you don’t. And we’re finding that it makes you feel more trusting and more positively about other people.” 

Sandstrom herself reports having been shy in her younger days, such as when she worked as a computer programmer before studying psychology in her native Canada. “Fast forward many years and now I just absolutely love it,” she says, “And I find it just enjoyable and valuable and also meaningful. And so I wanted to do some research to understand, is it just me and is it something that I can then help others benefit from as well?” 

She has just completed a book, Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, that fleshes out both her journey and her work. 

The transcript of her chat with Edmonds appears below, and the podcast can be downloaded by right-clicking this link. 

David Edmonds: The scene on the London Underground. All seats taken, one or two people reading a book or a newspaper, the rest absorbed in their mobile phones. Nobody is talking to anybody else. And that, says Gillian Sandstrom, is a mistake. 

She’s the author of Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life. And her day job is associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex. Gillian Sandstrom, welcome to Social Science Bites. 

Gillian Sandstrom: Thank you for having me.  

David Edmonds: The topic we’re talking about today is strangers and talking to strangers. Seems a weird topic. Tell me how you got into this.  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think like many social psychologists, it is “me search.” It’s research that is personally relevant and I think that makes it really exciting and interesting to study. 

I used to be extremely shy and would have avoided talking to strangers at all costs. Fast forward many years and now I just absolutely love it. And I find it just enjoyable and valuable and also meaningful. 

And so I wanted to do some research to understand, is it just me and is it something that I can then help others benefit from as well? The first time I remember talking to a stranger on purpose, out of choice, I was on the subway in Toronto and there was a woman who was carrying this beautiful-looking cupcake. And I have a sweet tooth and I wanted to know where she got that cupcake. And so I asked her, thinking that it would be a very short conversation. 

I would ask my question, she’d give me an answer, but we kept talking. And by the end she had taught me that people can ride ostriches. And this was just such a delightful, fun fact. 

And I just thought, “Wow, that was really fun. And maybe I’ve been missing out on something. Maybe I should see if I can recreate the magic with someone else.” And so I started taking baby steps towards having more conversations with strangers.  

David Edmonds: So I think you argue that talking to strangers can be good for us, can make us happy. And this certainly seems to chime with my own experience. We’ve just been on a family holiday in Germany. We got talking to some American tourists and we got a real kick out of it, a real buzz out of it. But what’s the hard evidence that it does make us happy?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah. And actually I think talking to strangers on holiday is a common time when even people who are generally reluctant to talk to strangers, maybe do it a bit more often when they’re on holiday. There’s research showing that people are in a better mood after they talk to a stranger. They feel more connected. 

We tend to learn things, more things than we expect. So one of the first studies I did was during my PhD, I ran a study at Starbucks, and we recruited people who were walking down the sidewalk outside of Starbucks. And we asked them to go into the store. We bribed them essentially with gift cards and we gave them one of two sets of instructions. So either to basically act like a regular, make it a social, a real social interaction, rather than just ‘I pay you money, you give me coffee.’  

And so we asked them to smile and make eye contact and have a little chat. Or we asked people to be as efficient as possible, to have their money ready and to avoid unnecessary conversation. And we told them that that would be a good thing as well. The cashier would appreciate that. 

People went into the coffee shop, they bought their coffee, they followed our instructions, and they came out and answered a few questions. And what we found was the people who’d taken this little, tiny moment and turned it into something a bit more social were in a better mood. They felt more connected. 

They were a bit more satisfied with their Starbucks experience. So this little, tiny difference that we can make ourselves, right? It didn’t depend on the cashier and what they did. Us as the customer could make this positive change. 

David Edmonds: And I’m very aware of the replication crisis in psychology. Has this been replicated?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, it has. And actually, funny enough, at the same time that I was doing this work, Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder, who was his PhD student at the time, they’re at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, were doing similar research, I guess, in transportation in general. 

So they were asking people on trains to start up a conversation with the person sitting next to them, also riding buses and talking in taxis. And similarly, they found that people were in a better mood after they’d spoken with someone, a fellow commuter, even though they expected the exact opposite. They expected that they’d have a more pleasant commute if they just sat on their own and did their own thing. 

David Edmonds: OK, I want to ask you about expectations. But I’m interested in whether you have a theory about why it works. Why would talking to strangers have this effect? Does it have a bigger effect than talking to friends and family? What is it about talking to strangers that boosts our levels of connection and happiness?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s multiple answers to that question. 

I think we are starting to do some research that is finding sort of unique benefits of talking to strangers. I think part of it comes down to the fact that strangers are more likely to be different from you. The people that we’re close to, we just tend to have the same opinions and values, and we watch the same shows on TV. And so when you talk to a stranger, it’s novel, it’s unexpected, it’s spontaneous, you know, it’s not planned, right? It just sort of happens.  

And so you learn things, you get a different perspective on things, you have this sort of psychological distance from the other person that gives you, for me, it feels like it lets you see things a bit from a distance a little bit more objectively, a little more dispassionately. And that makes the conversations different and valuable in a way. 

David Edmonds: I live in London, people don’t talk to each other, typically, on the London Underground. And I’m assuming there are massively different norms about talking to strangers, whether you’re in a city, whether you’re in a village or in the country. Is there data on that?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think we’re still starting to get that. I mean, anecdotally, you know, I’m Canadian, I moved to the UK 13 years ago. Ever since I moved here, people said, “Well, up north, everybody talks, in Ireland, everybody talks.” And I think there are definitely regional and cultural differences. 

There’s actually a giant project starting up right now, spearheaded by some researchers in Turkey. We’re doing this big cross-cultural study, collecting data from more than 70 countries to see how often people engage in these kinds of interactions all around the world, and how that might be affected by cultural factors.  

I think it does come down to norms. And I think the norms can be very micro level, and they can change, right? 

So another thing I’ve been told since moving to the UK is that in 2012, London hosted the Olympics. And during the Olympics, everybody talked to each other. So there was this temporary norm where it was OK, we put aside those rules that we usually have, and everybody was happy to talk to each other. And then as soon as the Olympics were over, it went back to the way it was.  

I think if an alien came down and observed our behavior, they’d be very confused about why it’s okay to talk to someone with a dog or someone with a baby, but maybe not someone with a briefcase, you know, like, so we’ve invented these rules about when it is and isn’t okay.  

David Edmonds: And earlier, you were saying we didn’t necessarily expect our conversations with strangers to be uplifting. Is that why we don’t engage in talking to strangers? Is it because we don’t expect to enjoy it?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think there are many reasons why we don’t do it. And I think part of it is we’re just really unsure about how it will go in many ways. So we have lots of things that we worry about. 

And when I started doing this research, honestly, I thought I would run some studies, figure out what were the worries, what were the barriers that were holding people back? You know, what were the things that people were most worried about? And then I’d do some research, try to figure out how to get rid of those barriers, break down those barriers, and then make the situation better. I’ve come to the conclusion now that that’s just not going to work because there’s so many different things that we worry about that if you get rid of one barrier, we’ll just focus on a different one.  

People worry about talking too much or talking too little. They worry they’re not going to like their partner, that their partner isn’t going to like them. They worry about what if they don’t want to even talk to me. So there’s just so many things we worry about. 

The good news is I’ve done some research, a mini meta-analysis across many studies, where we find that those things that we worry about just don’t tend to happen. So we worry a lot more than we need to, just consistently across all these studies that we’ve run.  

David Edmonds: I wonder, though, if there’s a gendered element to this. I mean, at night, if I’m walking behind a woman, I will tend to cross the road so that I don’t scare her.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Thank you. 

David Edmonds: If a middle-aged man starts talking to a young woman, that might be a bit creepy. It might seem a bit creepy. So I wonder whether there’s a difference between a male and a female starting a conversation with a stranger.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean, I’ve had that question many times. 

Going back to the first part of how you worded it, I mean, I love talking to strangers and I’m encouraging people to talk to strangers, but I’m not saying you should do it in a dark alley or at night or after you’ve been drinking. This is like in public in the middle of the day at a park or on the bus. There’s lots of situations where it is a very safe environment to do that. 

But yeah, I understand that there is some extra awkwardness when it’s a cross-gender situation. And I think women have told me that they’re afraid to talk to a man because they don’t want someone to get the wrong idea. And men have said the same thing. They don’t want to talk to women and make people feel uncomfortable.  

But I mean, I think it would be really sad if we felt like we couldn’t talk to half of the people on the planet. So I think there are things you can do to signal that you’re just being friendly and it’s just a human moment. It doesn’t have to have those sort of extra connotations.  

David Edmonds: Like what? 

Gillian Sandstrom: You could just be explicit and say it. I’m just being friendly. You could just give a little more space. You could reduce eye contact so it doesn’t feel quite as intense.  

David Edmonds: You’ve measured this kind of kick that we get when we talk to strangers. How long does the effect last? Does it wear off very quickly? The following day, presumably we’re back in our equilibrium hedonic level. I’m wondering if you’ve measured how long this boost has on us.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Not exactly, but I can answer a related question. 

There is some research in multiple countries now showing that people who tend to talk to strangers more often report higher life satisfaction. So I think that’s not ‘a how long does the effect last?’ I think it’s more about there’s a cumulative effect, right? That’s been found in the UK, in Turkey, in Japan, all these places where people report having more interactions with strangers and with acquaintances, weak ties, like cashier at the coffee shop where you’re a regular, those people tend to report higher life satisfaction.  

David Edmonds: Might that not be correlation rather than causation so that those people who are more likely to engage in conversations with the cashier and with strangers are naturally happier people?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, that’s possible. I mean, it probably goes both directions. For me, I feel like, like I said, I used to be extremely shy and I didn’t talk to strangers. Now I’ve talked thousands of strangers. And for me, I think the biggest effect has been the cumulative one. Sometimes I’ve had conversations that have changed my life. I’ve had lots of fun conversations or interesting or informative conversations. I’ve had a good number of boring conversations or forgettable ones. But the cumulative effect has added up to me feeling more positive about other people, feeling more comfortable about my place in the world, feeling more connected to my neighborhood and my workplace.  

David Edmonds: Conversations that have changed your life. That sounds very dramatic. So what was that?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I mean, there’s been a few. And I mean, it’s never just one thing.  

But for instance, before I became a psychology professor, I used to, I was a computer programmer. So my undergraduate degree was in computer science. And so I went back to school and studied for a master’s and PhD in psychology. 

And I’d sort of decided that I couldn’t see myself in the job that I was in for the rest of my career. And I was thinking about what other job could I do in the same space? That was my limited view was I had to stay in computer science and just do something different in that field. And I happened to be talking to a lawyer, having a will drawn up. I made some offhanded comment about her degree that was hanging in a frame on the wall. And she said that she had just qualified as a lawyer in her 50s. And it was just this little piece of the puzzle for me. My parents are teachers. They were teachers their whole career. It didn’t occur to me that you could switch to something completely different. 

And maybe the lawyer didn’t. Maybe this was her first degree. But in my head, that’s how I interpreted it is that midlife, she had changed and done something completely different. 

And that opened my eyes and gave me this thought that, “Oh, maybe I could do something totally different.” 

David Edmonds: Is talking to strangers something one can get better at? Is it a skill that one can improve?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Absolutely. And I mean, I think it’s probably like most skills. Some people probably just sort of start out better than others. My dad is a unrepenting stranger talker, and he’s just really, really good at it. And I don’t think I’ll ever be as good at it as he is. 

But I’ve come a long way from that shy teenager. I was getting very frustrated because I ran a couple of studies where I got people to make some predictions. Then they had a conversation with a stranger. Then they reported on how it went, and it went so much better than they expected.  

But then I asked them, what if you were going to talk to someone new right now? And then those fears just crept up again. And so I got frustrated. I thought, how do I fix this? How do I help people see that, in general, the pattern is positive? It’s not just a fluke and exception that you had a nice chat with this one person. 

I think it makes sense that we think that, right? Because we give a lot of the credit to our conversation partner, if the conversation goes well. If it goes badly, we take all the all the blame, of course. If it goes well, we tend to give credit to our conversation partner. And so because we don’t know anything about who this next conversation partner is, we have a hard time assuming that it’s going to go positively, right?  

So I thought, OK, I came up with a solution. But then I had to figure out a way to test it. I thought, OK, the obvious answer is I need to get people to have many conversations with strangers in a short period of time, and then they can’t help but notice that it’s a positive thing.  

And so eventually came up with the idea, I need to make it fun for people. So I came up with the idea of having people play a talking-to-strangers, scavenger-hunt game. And so every day, people had this list of missions, they had to choose at least one was things like find someone who’s wearing a hat, or find someone who’s drinking a coffee. So that part of it was not meant to be difficult, right? There’s lots of people who wear hats and drink coffees. But then you had to actually go up to that person and start a conversation. 

And so what we found is, day by day over the course of the week, so people did this for five days, every day, people became a little less worried about being rejected by the other person. And they became a little bit more confident about their ability to start a conversation and keep conversation going.  

David Edmonds: Measured by how? How did you measure the fact they were more confident?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Every day, we asked them at the beginning of the day, you know, you’re going to be having a conversation today, how do you think it’s going to go? And then immediately after they had the conversation, they use this app to answer some questions.  

And they told us how it went.  

David Edmonds: I see. Now, this boost that we get is an average boost. And I assume that sometimes you have conversations where the effect is negative. Sometimes you have bad experiences.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, I think a lot less often than you expect. Something like 90% of the time, people were above the midpoint in terms of enjoyment. In terms of rejection, which is something that people worry about, in the scavenger hunt study, people had a total of 1,300 conversations, and people were rejected, meaning that they were unable to start a conversation with the first person they approached, that happened about 13% of the time. So not very often.  

And I think rejection is something that people worry about, but it happens less often than you think. And I think it doesn’t feel as bad as you think to be rejected by a stranger. It’s often quite innocuous. People don’t yell at you or completely ignore you. They just more often politely say, you know, I’m in a hurry, or I don’t have time right now. 

You know, it’s not what we build it up to be in our heads.  

David Edmonds: Are there topics that one should avoid? America is a very polarized place at the moment. I wonder if in America, if I was starting a conversation with a stranger, I should avoid talking about politics?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I am not really good at answering that question. 

I know that Nick Epley and his collaborators have done some work. And my understanding is that even conversations about politics go better than you expect. There is some recent research showing that even when you talk about a topic that you think is boring, you enjoy the conversation more than you expect. 

I don’t know if there are topics that you absolutely need to avoid. I think when you talk to a stranger, there’s enough distance. You don’t necessarily feel like you have to convince them of something or that there’s no reasonable expectation that they would convince you of something. You have this sort of psychological distance.  

And so I think even topics that are a bit dangerous don’t feel quite as threatening when you’re discussing them with a stranger.  

David Edmonds: And you yourself talking to strangers, do you try and get your talking to strangers kick every day?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Most days I will leave my house and I’ll go for a walk. I always hope to meet some dogs. I take dog treats in my pocket and try to make some doggy friends and then I talk to their humans. So yeah, most days I try to get out and talk to strangers. 

And I do it a lot when I’m on a bus or on a train. I don’t do those things every day, ride a bus or a train. But whenever I do, I always enjoy talking to people. 

David Edmonds: Where does your research go next?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I, hot off the presses research, have just done like a three-week-long scavenger hunt study with a wonderful postdoc named Taylor West. And we’re finding some unique benefits of talking to strangers. So we’re finding that it increases your intellectual humility. So it makes you more open to the fact that other people know things that you don’t. And we’re finding that it makes you feel more trusting and more positively about other people. That’s the sort of looking at the pro-social benefits of talking to strangers. 

I’m taking part in this giant cross-cultural study that I mentioned earlier to see if we can find that all around the world, people who talk to strangers more often report higher life satisfaction. That would be very exciting.  

And I’m still investigating some questions about rejection. I’d love to be able to tell people, and I have preliminary evidence, but still just sort of firming it up. I’d love to be able to tell people that being rejected by a stranger doesn’t feel as bad as you expect it to. So I hope I’ll be able to say that soon. 

David Edmonds: OK. Well, good luck with that. Gillian Sandstrom, this hasn’t really been a conversation between strangers as such, but it’s been fascinating, nonetheless. 

Gillian Sandstrom: So thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I hope you’ll talk on the Tube next time. 

David Edmonds: I promise to do that.