The Power of Talking to a Stranger

It could be said that everything we know about the power of chatting to a stranger started with a hot dog lady.

Dr Gillian Sandstrom was a young doctorate student studying in Canada, when she’d regularly visit a hot-dog stand on the university campus. Over time, she and the woman who worked on the hot-dog stand struck up a connection.

“I started nodding and smiling at the lady and, when she responded, even just that small connection made me feel seen, safe and part of the campus community at a time when I was pretty stressed,” says Sandstrom, now a lecturer in psychology and head of the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. The positive impact of her own experience led her to study the effect of simple social interactions, like a quick chat with the barista making your coffee.

She found that people were roughly 17 per cent happier on the days when they struck up a chat over the hiss of the cappuccino machine, or said hi to a neighbour in the hallway. “My work and that of others clearly shows that talking to strangers puts you in a more positive mood,” she says. “It also makes you trusting of other people which, I think, makes the world feel a little friendlier and safer.”

The reason for this is simple. People need people. We need to feel connected, even for just a few seconds—and the more people we do this with, the merrier. In fact, according to a study from Harvard Business School, people who interact within more different relationship levels—ranging from friends, family/partners, colleagues and strangers—throughout the day are happier than those with a less broad mix of interactions.

And, while you might not associate any extra spring in your step down to a chat you had with your barista this morning, other benefits from interacting with strangers are more tangible. Canvassing stories for this article we heard about job offers, savings on hotels and new friendships that all came from interactions with strangers.

“For me the big benefit is that it makes me more open-minded,” says Alex Kingsmill, a Melbourne-based counsellor and regular random chat instigator. “People have expressed their views on aliens, politics, the afterlife and parenting—they talk about everything. And while I don’t always agree, just hearing those views keeps me open to the possibility that my own beliefs aren’t the only ones, or even the right ones.”

The problem is many of us find the idea of striking up a conversation with strangers tricky—perhaps even a bit scary. “Humans have a core primal fear of rejection and so, even though logically you know nothing too bad could happen from just striking up a conversation with a stranger, a part of you is scared of getting hurt doing it,” says Brisbane-based psychologist Lana Hall from The Slow Life Project. “Plus, the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ advice you’re given in childhood makes you almost feel like you’re doing something wrong by chatting to someone you don’t know—but don’t let messages from the past hold you back.”

The good news is, the rejections we fear most, rarely happen. In Dr Sandstrom’s work, she found that only 10 per cent of approaches weren’t reciprocated, and when scientists at the University of Chicago asked people to start random conversations on their morning commute, they found the average conversation lasted a lengthy 14.2 minutes.

Even better, when the team checked in with the converser who had been spoken to, they found they had enjoyed the impromptu chat as much as the instigator. No wonder Dr Sandstrom found 41 per cent of people doing one of her experiments actually ending up swapping contact details with at least one person they had chatted with.

She also discovered that the more often you approach people the easier it becomes. “Repetition was key to success,” says Dr Sandstrom. “The more people talked to strangers the less worried they felt about being rejected—and more confident they became in their ability to start and maintain a conversation.” And this change in attitude didn’t take long either—just a week of regularly starting chats with people was enough.

As for where to find people to chat to, it’s been calculated that we meet 11 to 16 casual acquaintances a day that we could talk to if we chose, or you can seek out encounters. As part of her research Dr Sandstrom sets up a Stranger Scavenger Hunt. She gives volunteers a list of different characteristics—like someone wearing a hat, drinking coffee or carrying a blue bag—and asks her volunteers to find and chat to at least one person on the list every day for a week.

Why not create your own version of that list and try and achieve at least one interaction a day?

Sometimes though you might feel particularly drawn to chat to someone, and those are encounters you really need to pursue, says counsellor and chiropractor Dr Sarah Jane, founder of Spinal Energetics in Melbourne. In fact she met her PR Pippa Jageurs working behind the counter in a shop she had never stepped into before, and which Pippa didn’t normally work in. Working in the wellness space, Pippa knew straight away who Sarah was, and that she’d recently been advertising for a PR.

“Some people might say that’s coincidence but I don’t think there’s such a thing as coincidence,” says Dr Jane. “Opportunities to speak to people we need to connect with are put in front of us all the time, we just don’t always recognise them.”

So if you feel drawn to chat with a stranger, perhaps it’s actually the universe trying to tell you something.  

Another concern about making that first contact is knowing what to say, but even just a quick chat about the weather with your Uber driver is enough to raise mood.

“A lot of people worry that chatting about the weather is boring or obvious but it’s almost a code for ‘are you open to chatting’, then once you’ve made a connection you can start to ask more open-ended questions and get to know each other a bit more,” says psychologist Lana Hill.

Lastly, it’s helpful to know the signs that someone might be willing to chat—these include meeting your eye when you look at them or returning a smile. And, if someone responds with extra information if you do ask them a question, you’re lucky.

“That’s a common sign of extroverts who love to chat,” says Lana Hill. And, if you’re really lucky you could find yourself sitting next to Laura Maya, a 42-year-old author, now living in Tonga. She first started chatting to people when travelling alone in her 20s.

“Now, my husband calls me Lucifer because he says I’m like the character in the TV show who can get total strangers talking about their dreams and fears within minutes of meeting them,” she says. “Everyone has a story and a different way of seeing the world and you never know who is going to teach you something by saying the one thing you need to hear right now—or even set your life on a whole new path.”

Now how could you let a little shyness stand in the way of that?