Talking to Strangers: 2,304 People Predicted It Would Go Badly

In one of the lab studies pooled in a 2021 paper, an experimenter started to walk each participant to another room, then pretended to have forgotten some papers. “Wait here,” the participant was told, and left sitting in a corridor. A confederate wandered in and sat down nearby. Whether the participant said anything was the experiment. In an earlier, similar study, only 20% did. When the researchers asked afterward, several said they had not been sure they were allowed to talk. In the version that went into the paper, the experimenter said outright that talking was fine, and most people in both conditions struck up a conversation.

The paper is Gillian Sandstrom and Erica Boothby’s “Why do people avoid talking to strangers? A mini meta-analysis of predicted fears and actual experiences talking to a stranger” (Self and Identity, 2021, 20(1), 47-71). Its answer is short: people fear a conversation with a stranger will go worse than it does. Across seven studies and 2,304 participants, the authors write, “conversations go better than expected.”

Six fears, ranked

The researchers split the worry into six. Three are about yourself: that you will not enjoy it, that you will not like the other person, that you will not be good at conversation. Three are the mirror image about the other person: that they will not enjoy it, will not like you, will not be able to carry the conversation.

Participants rated these before talking, and the ranking is revealing. People worried more about their own enjoyment than about their conversational ability, and more about their ability than about not liking the partner. They also worried more about the partner not enjoying the chat than about not enjoying it themselves, and more about the partner not liking them than about not liking the partner. In other words, the biggest fears point at the other person’s verdict, which is the same territory as the liking gap Boothby and colleagues found in 2018, where people underrated how much a partner liked them after talking.

Then the same people talked to someone, or at least had the chance, and reported how it went. The authors found that predictions were inaccurate on all six fears, and in the discussion they call them “vastly overblown.” Nobody got a perfect conversation out of it. The gap was in the forecast.

The fears do predict who talks

The fears were not idle. They correlated with how normal participants said it was for them to talk to strangers, with how many strangers they had spoken to in the previous week, and with whether they took the chance to talk in the corridor-style lab study. People with fewer worries tended to be lower in interaction anxiety and shyness, and higher in social curiosity.

The authors are careful here. These are correlations, and they write that there is “not yet experimental evidence” that shrinking the fears makes people talk more. They also point to non-psychological reasons: a person who works from home has fewer openings, and, as they note of London, “one does not talk on the Tube.”

What did and did not shrink the fear

Two interventions were tested.

Tips came first. In two studies, some participants were given advice on how to start a conversation. The tips nudged people to predict more enjoyment for themselves and their partner (effect sizes of d = 0.16 and d = 0.20 in the meta-analysis) and moved none of the other fears. Afterward, people who had received tips reported no different experience from people who had not.

The second intervention was a pleasant conversation. After one chat, participants’ worries about a future conversation fell on every measure. But in the studies where people had only one chat, their forecasts for the next one were still gloomier than the chat they had just had justified. The exception was a field study (198 people) in which participants talked to strangers daily for a week as part of a scavenger-hunt game. There the forecasts were no longer gloomier than the experience, apart from the worry about whether the partner liked them. The authors take this as a hint that repetition does what advice cannot, though that was one study, and not a randomized comparison of one chat against seven.

What to do with this on a Saturday

Tips alone changed little, and being told it was fine to talk changed a lot in the corridor study. That suggests the useful move is arranging permission and repetition, not memorizing openers.

Two ways to borrow that with friends, both my adaptation and neither tested in the paper. First, agree on a small dare together: each of you talks to one person you do not know, at a cafe or a climbing gym or a dog park, and you compare notes over dinner. A friend across the table makes the report-back real and gives the exercise a deadline. Second, give your friends a standing reason to be in the same place repeatedly. A recurring slot, the idea behind standing plans that put friendship on rails, puts you in front of the same cashiers, regulars and neighbors often enough for a nod to turn into a sentence. The point of Sandstrom and Dunn’s weak-tie research is that these thin contacts carry some wellbeing on their own.

Repetition is also where an app can fit in. DontSnooze asks you to send friends a short video as proof that you are awake, which means a small, daily dose of being seen. Nothing in the 2021 paper tested video or alarms, so whether that practice makes anyone more comfortable with being looked at is unknown. The narrower claim is that it creates the repeated exposure the one-week study points toward.

Limits worth keeping in view

The studies recruited university students and members of the public in the UK and the US, so the sample says little about other places. The lab partners were confederates, who may be friendlier or more consistent than a random stranger. The people who agreed to take part in an experiment about talking to strangers may be less terrified of it than average. “Tips” meant a particular set of tips in two studies, not all conversation advice. And the paper’s headline number covers seven separate designs, with the most interesting result, the week of daily chats, coming from one.

Questions about the seven studies

Does this apply to talking with people I already know?

The paper tested strangers only, drawn from UK and US university subject pools and the general public, and it does not claim to speak for friends. The line that every friend starts as a stranger is the authors’ framing in the introduction, not a result. What the data can say is that the first conversation, the one that decides whether a second happens, goes better than people forecast.

Were the strangers real strangers or paid actors?

Both. In the lab studies the partner was a confederate, a member of the research team playing a stranger. In the field studies, participants walked up to real people and talked for as long as they wished. In the biggest field study (1,521 people) only a small subset also answered the questions about a future conversation, so the ‘after one good chat’ result rests on far fewer people than the headline N of 2,304 suggests.