Small talk may be terrifying for some, but research has shown it can also be good for you.
A new project in the U.K. has found that even just saying hello to a stranger can result in significant behavioural changes.
The Neighbourly Lab collects data to help build happier communities. One of their pilot projects, located in Hammersmith, a neighbourhood in London, installed stickers on buses with messages encouraging kindness and interaction.
Stickers prompt bus passengers to speak to strangers, with slogans like “Who can say hello first?”
The idea came after the Neighbourly Lab spent days observing interactions between passengers on the bus, discovering that only one in five passengers greet the driver upon boarding.
But lab researcher Grainne O’Dwyer said the social interactions they observed following the sticker prompts were promising.
“We’re seeing more people engaging with the driver as they’re getting on. We see that as sort of a two-sided thing, making the bus driver’s job just a bit nicer, getting to have those interactions,” said O’Dwyer.
“And then from a passenger perspective, just having more niceness in your day to day — which seems like something is significant but really isn’t.”
Previously, The Neighbourly Lab noted that only one in five people greeted the driver.
After putting up the stickers, the researchers noticed the stickers prompted more people to say hello — even though only 27 per cent of the passengers they surveyed said they saw the stickers at all.
According to the researchers, 30 per cent of passengers on buses started to greet the driver upon seeing the stickers.
When the bus was particularly packed, they say there was a 10-per-cent difference in engagement between buses with those stickers versus without.
“That’s a very exciting thing to think about in terms of if you could make the signs bigger or more salient, or whatever kinds of small tweaks you might make, it could see an even bigger increase in engagement,” O’Dwyer said.
“As the small pilot that this is, it’s a big potential from what we can see,” she said.
O’Dwyer said the project aims to bring back a community feeling on Hammersmith bus routes.
But talking to strangers may do more than that: Canadian researcher Gillian Sandstrom, whose research informed the project, said these small interactions have been shown to promote feelings of “connection and trust in other humans.”
“I’ve been doing research on talking to strangers for about a decade now, and what my research shows is that it just puts us in a good mood,” said Sandstrom, who is a senior lecturer on the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex.
“I think it all stems from the human need for belonging and connection. So it’s really important to us to feel that other people see us and appreciate us and need us.”
Fear of rejection
If talking to strangers proves to be good for us, why do some of us go to great lengths to avoid it?
According to Sandstrom, it stems from the very human fear of not belonging.
“I think when people think about talking to strangers, they think, ‘Well, what if the person doesn’t want to talk to me?'” she said. “‘What if they reject me?’ And that’s a really big fear that people have.”
She pointed out that even if one interaction goes well, people will sometimes question what the next one might be like.
“We have this sort of negative voice in our head that’s telling us that we’re not good enough or interesting or likeable, and we’d really just have a hard time believing that these interactions go well,” said Sandstrom.
“We have a really hard time learning that, in general, if we do get over our fears and have these little interactions, that it generally goes really well. And we feel good; they feel good. It’s a win-win.”
She recalled turning to a stranger on the tube in London, who was polite but didn’t seem to want to continue a conversation — later taking her earphones out to put on and a book out of her bag.
When Sandstrom turned to the person on her other side, she ended up having a nice chat.
“Rejection actually happens a lot less often than people think,” she said.
In another experiment involving 1,300 conversations between strangers, Sandstrom found that overtures of conversation went unreciprocated only 10 per cent of the time.
Being rejected doesn’t necessarily mean someone is “making a judgement about you,” she said, adding that oftentimes, what’s keeping people from reciprocating conversation could be stress or anxiety.
Making up for lost time
As lockdowns swept the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, many found themselves alone or at home with their families.
That robbed people of everyday, random social interactions that result from “casual collision,” said Pete Bombachi, leaving many feeling isolated and lonely.
“The reality is we need these social connections,” he said.
Bombachi is the founder of the Toronto-based GenWell Project, which he describes as “a human connection movement” aimed at educating Canadians about the significance of social interactions.
He pointed to a study by Sandstrom that showed 50 per cent of our interactions occur by happenstance.
“Those are really what was ripped out of our lives because we weren’t in our normal routines of getting around, going to the office, heading to the coffee shop, having lunch,” Bombachi said.
Sandstrom agrees. She hopes people come to realize that these casual connections can mean a lot.
“You know, the relationships we have with that person at the coffee shop who remembers our order, or the person that we see at the gym.… We definitely don’t know their contact information. So we couldn’t keep in touch with them through the pandemic,” she said.
“I think we get such a hit of novelty from having those conversations — they’re spontaneous. We don’t know what to expect, which is both exciting and interesting.”