We decide who a stranger is from their face, their clothes, their profile, and then we stop listening. The research below keeps finding what is left when you take that away: a person, worth hearing.
Mistakenly seeking solitude
A quiet train carriage, and a quiet mistake.
Watch a morning carriage fill up and you will see a wordless agreement take hold: headphones in, eyes down, nobody speaks. In 2014, behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked what that silence was costing, in a series of nine experiments that began on Chicago-area commuter trains.1
Commuters were handed one of three mornings at random. Connect: start a conversation with the stranger near you. Solitude: keep to yourself and enjoy the quiet. Control: commute as you normally would. The surveys came back by mail.
Before you see what came back, place your bet.
Your prediction
Compared with sitting quietly, talking to a stranger would make your ride feel…
About the same, you reckon
How positive the commute felt, in effect sizes
Commuters asked to forecast these mornings got the direction wrong, not just the size: they expected solitude to win (d = 0.41). The people who actually talked had the most positive commutes of all three groups, beating solitude by d = 0.63, and reported getting no less done.1
Human beings are social animals. Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being.
Epley & Schroeder · Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
They wanted to talk, too
The silence is not a preference. It is a misreading.
Why do we get it so wrong? Epley and Schroeder found the engine of the mistake. Commuters rated themselves as more interested in talking than they believed the people around them were.1 Everyone in the carriage is quietly assuming everyone else would rather be left alone.
Your estimate
Picture 100 commuters. Someone tries to start a conversation with each of them. How many go along with it?
You guess 50 of 100
100 of 100who tried, talked
Commuters predicted that fewer than 47 in 100 people would be willing to talk. In reality, everyone who returned a survey reported talking with the person they approached, and not a single person reported being rebuffed. The only riders who could not follow the instructions were seven who had nobody sit next to them.1
Commuters appeared to think that talking to a stranger posed a meaningful risk of social rejection. As far as we can tell, it posed no risk at all.
Epley & Schroeder, 2014
The liking gap
You are a harsher judge of yourself than the person you just talked to.
So the conversation happens. It goes fine, usually better than fine. And then the replay begins. Did I talk too much? Why did I tell that story?
Erica Boothby and colleagues measured the replay. After first conversations between strangers, each person answered two questions: how much do you like your partner, and how much do you think your partner likes you?2
After a first conversation · liking, 1 to 7
The liking gap · you are liked more than you knowTrained observers watching recordings of the same conversations could read how much people liked each other. The signals were there. The people inside the conversation were too busy judging themselves to hear them.2 The shyer the person, the wider the gap.
It is stubborn, too. Among first-year students assigned to share a dorm suite at Yale, the gap held at every check-in across the year until the last one, in May.2
- SEPgap
- OCTgap
- DECgap
- FEBgap
- MAYclosed
After people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.
Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark · Psychological Science, 2018
Overly shallow
Fine, you will talk. But you will keep it safe.
Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley ran twelve experiments with more than 1,800 people, pairing them, mostly strangers, for shallow or deep conversations.3 These are questions from the study. Someone you have never met sits down across from you. Which conversation would you rather have?
- What people expectedThat deep questions would be awkward, and that a stranger would not much care about their answers.
- What happenedConversations felt less awkward, more connecting and more enjoyable than expected, and the gap was larger for the deep ones.
- Having tried bothPeople who had one deep and one shallow conversation expected to prefer the shallow one, and ended up preferring the deep one.
- The fixSimply telling people these results made them choose deeper questions with a stranger.
Summarised from the paper and the American Psychological Association’s release on it.3
The barrier was in the forecast. People imagined that opening up would be met with blank stares. Strangers listened, and gave something real back.
The humanizing voice
The hardest stranger to hear is the one who disagrees with you.
Juliana Schroeder, Michael Kardas and Nicholas Epley recorded people explaining their views on divisive topics, then showed those explanations to people who either agreed or disagreed. Some evaluators read a transcript. Some listened to the audio. Some watched the video. Same words every time.4
Your pick
Someone is about to explain a view you strongly disagree with. How would you rather take it in?
Experiment 1, evaluators who disagreed with the speaker (297 evaluators in total). Ratings of uniquely human mental traits, such as seeming “rational and logical” and “refined and cultured”, on a scale from −3 to +3 against the average person; bars start at zero. Heard versus read: d = 0.55. Heard and seen versus heard only: no significant difference (d = 0.18).4
Reading the words of someone you disagree with makes it easy to imagine a shallow mind behind them. Hearing the same words, in their own voice, makes them seem more thoughtful, more rational, more human. And adding their face on top of their voice did not meaningfully change the result.4 The voice was doing the work.
In a final experiment, the researchers looked for what in a voice carries that humanity. Two cues stood out: intonation, the rise and fall of pitch, and pauses.4 The small sounds of someone thinking.
The same sentence, typed and spoken
The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.
Schroeder, Kardas & Epley · Psychological Science, 2017
It’s surprisingly nice to hear you
When we finally reach out, we type.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked people to reconnect with an old friend.5 Beforehand, they expected a phone call to feel more awkward than an email, and most said they would rather write.
Then the researchers assigned them, at random, to call or to email. The people who heard a voice reported a stronger bond than those who typed (d = 0.40), and no more awkwardness. Both groups spent about the same time on it, around 17 minutes.5 In the lab, strangers who chatted over voice or video felt more connected than strangers who chatted by text, again with no extra awkwardness.5
The same pattern shows up wherever researchers have looked. A brief real exchange with a barista lifted people’s mood more than being efficient did.7 On days students talked with more classmates than usual, they were happier and felt they belonged more.8 And in London, where silence on the train is close to a rule, commuters assigned to talk had a more positive journey and learned more.6
Overblown
Across seven studies and 2,304 people, the fears people hold before talking to a stranger turned out to be larger than what happened. Conversations go better than expected.9
It gets easier
After a week-long game of finding and talking to strangers, people feared rejection less, trusted their own conversation skills more, and their expectations grew more accurate by the day.10