Hello, Stranger
3 Strategies for Creating Opportunity
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“When you talk to strangers, you're making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life -- and theirs," Kio Stark, stranger enthusiast
“Don’t talk to strangers.”
This universal piece of advice is one we might all remember getting from adults in our lives at an early age. It’s right up there with:
“Don’t do drugs.”
“Don’t talk back.” and
“Don’t set the house on fire.” (Did you turn off the oven?)
We are raised believing that talking to strangers is scary and dangerous.
It’s actually good advice for a 5-year-old. At 5, we don’t have the ability yet to know the difference between stranger danger and stranger kindness.
But it’s terrible advice for adults *(and young adults). Talking to strangers is one of the most important things we can do, but we rarely learn how, when, or why to do it.
The Big Idea
My professional life has been all about talking to strangers. Doing research, raising community, looking to raise funding, create partnerships, build gatherings around action —-to do any of these we start by talking to strangers.
Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom recently was a guest on the Hidden Brain podcast, with Shankar Vedantam.1 She shared research she and her team have conducted that has found that speaking to strangers has a significant effect on our happiness, general well-being and opportunity. Seemingly trivial social encounters — chatting with a person in an elevator, making small talk with the Dunkin’ barista, or even just smiling at a passerby — can have profound positive effects.
Talking to strangers reduces bias, unlocks cultural understandings, and solves problems. Strangers hold answers to all kinds of questions. We need go out of our way to talk to more of them, and to teach young people to do so as well.
I love the interview with a stranger, linked below. Both short and deep. Seriously, listen.
Just this week, connections with strangers brought me (and my family) some gorgeous mod furniture, a box of sandwiches, a philosophy for living, and an idea for a new children’s book.2
These weak social ties3 we develop also build community. THIS is the mindset we need to teach and model in schools, in workspaces and in life - the power and skills needed to talk to strangers.4
Making Big Ideas Usable
In combing through research and considering personal experience, I’d offer three strategies for increasing opportunities to connect with strangers that might be shared in learning settings.
Strategy 1. Make your social map messier
Make your network slightly more inefficient. Don’t sit in the same seat every day in class, or go to a differently grocery store. Walk more slowly or go a different way, visit a different neighborhood. Changing which zip codes you frequent will enable you to encounter a whole new network of people.
More accidental encounters mean more opportunity to connect with strangers.
Strategy 2. Fight your filter
We filter automatically. The minute we meet someone, we are looking at them and thinking,"You're interesting." "You're not interesting." We immediately also see male, female, young, old, black, brown, white, stranger, friend, and we use the information in that box. It's quick, it's easy and it's a road to bias. And it means we're not thinking about people as individuals.
Fight the filters. Go against the quick judgment.
Strategy 3: Create Serendipity
Maybe you’re on a busy corner with a stranger, waiting for a light to change, and notice some third thing that you both might see and comment on, like a piece of public art, somebody preaching in the street or a good aroma coming from a restaurant. It could even be the weather. If you say something, you have just created opportunity.
Create serendipity, and the results will widen your social universe.
Mod furniture, a free box of sandwiches, new creative ideas — these were not coincidences. As I learn repeatedly, talking to strangers opens up serendipity.
If you want to test these ideas, I have a game. If you choose to play, or if you want to try this as an activity, the suggestion is that for seven days, carry out at least one mission: talk to a stranger each day. If you don’t want to talk, research has found that even making eye contact makes us feel more connected. 5
When you talk to strangers, you're making unexpected connections. If you don't talk to strangers, you're missing out on all of that. We spend a lot of time teaching our children about strangers. What would happen if we spent more time teaching ourselves? We could reject all the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. We could make a space for change.
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Note that most of the research to date on light social interactions has been carried out in Canada, the US, and the UK. In 2023, Gul Gumaydin and Sandstrom are working with a team of collaborators in Turkey and the UK to collect data from around the world to better understand where and why people talk to strangers, and the outcomes.
These are all true, this past week alone!
These are called weak (more casual, acquaintance) vs. strong (close friends and family) ties in the research. I do not like “weak”. How about light vs. tight ties?
The rules are very different depending on what culture you're in. In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy. This is known as civil inattention. If two people are walking towards each other on the street, they’ll glance at each other from a distance. That's the civility, the acknowledgment. And then as they get closer, they'll look away, to give each other some space. There are many regional and setting differences as well.
In other cultures, people go to great lengths not to interact at all. I just met an educator from Denmark a few weeks ago who said many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers that they may miss their bus stop rather than say "excuse me" to someone that they need to get around.
In Egypt, it’s almost the opposite. It’s rude to ignore a stranger. Strangers might ask each other for a sip of water. Or, if you ask someone for directions, they might invite you home for coffee. And while this might seem unusual in some cultures, the perspective opens our definition of ‘stranger.‘
As a part of this talking to strangers idea, I happened to find the email of one of the key researchers in talking to strangers. Maybe to meet one of your challenges, you could reach out to Dr. Gillian Sandstrom at: G.Sandstrom@sussex.ac.uk
Your essay hits the mark again, Jane. especially during this time of epidemic loneliness. "We all want someone to say, 'I am better because I met you today.' " As a matter of fact, this very quote was pulled out of a Washington Post special feature today.