Talk to strangers: How about a chat with someone you don’t know?

When was the last time you talked to a stranger in a queue, street or coffee shop?

Most people overestimate the awkwardness of starting conversations with strangers and underestimate its far-reaching benefits, and the pandemic-induced isolation has allowed these misconceptions to spread like the virus.

Swooping in to challenge the cycle of cascading loneliness is US writer and editor Joe Keohane.

People are scared that they have become hermits and forgotten how to socialise during the pandemic, he says in a Zoom interview from New York after the success of his book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World.

Talking to people we don’t know — even the briefest of conversations — is generally good for everyone, including introverts, he has found through years of research.

Keohane, 42, grew up in a chatty family of funeral directors, including his father, grandfather and siblings, and he would also engage with strangers.

But on a rare evening out as a new parent, he found himself at a bar staring at his phone rather than talking to people around him. “I realised I had just ceased talking to strangers in public and eliminated an entire category of social interaction,” he says. So he thought about what had changed.

“For one, I had a young daughter and was tired and you don’t have the latitude you had before being a parent, but also just having a smartphone ... if you’re [of] a certain privileged class you can go the rest of your life without talking to strangers.

All the research has found that when you put strangers together for conversations it was much easier and they were better at it than they expected

—  US writer and editor Joe Keohane

“The less you do it, the more concerned you are that you will be bad at it, feel incompetent and withdraw from public life.

For me, that didn’t feel good,” he says. “I had lost a source of serendipity, entertainment, enlightenment, poignancy and hilarity!”

This realisation catapulted him into finding out why conversations with strangers enhance our lives, why we avoid them and how to pursue them.

In the course of his investigation, Keohane met dozens of social scientists, psychologists, taxi drivers and baristas from diverse groups across continents, some of whom became friends.

“All the research has found, again and again, that when you put strangers together for conversations it was much easier and they were better at it than they expected, and the conversations lasted longer,” he says.

Studies that “made people go out and talk to strangers were unanimously positive”, people liked the participants more than they had anticipated and found the conversations more interesting.

While his experiences were overwhelmingly positive — and Keohane is the first to acknowledge it is easier as a white man to initiate conversations — research shows this holds true across groups.

University of Stellenbosch social psychologist, Dr Hermann Swart, who studies intergroup relations, says “anxiety is a key reason” people in SA are nervous about connecting outside their groups, but when they do talk the anxiety eases.

“The more positive encounters people have with other groups, the more confidence they develop that they are able to competently engage in conversation. This lowers their anxiety so that they become more willing to have them in future.

“Positive interactions lower prejudice ... People are more able to take the other’s perspective and have more empathy,” he says.

Being willing to listen and a sense of curiosity are essential to conversing with strangers, particularly in SA where interpersonal relationships tend to be fraught because of centuries of colonial and apartheid oppression.

South Africans do not know how to relate to each other, and we need to be curious, to want to reach a place of practical empathy

—  UCT psychology professor, Wahbie Long

UCT psychology professor Wahbie Long is an authority on how our divided past shapes the present. He describes SA as an alienated society where relationships are distorted by “paranoia, hostility, resentment and fear ... and degraded forms of power”.

Yet curiosity and conversation can overcome these barriers. “South Africans do not know how to relate to each other and we need to be curious, to want to reach a place of practical empathy. If there is no curiosity, there will be no relationship between strangers,” says Long.

Even among those who hold opposing views — the vaccinated and unvaccinated camps are the latest example — empathy invariably develops when people are willing to talk and listen, face to face, and recognise each other’s shared humanity.

Keohane met British psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, a world authority on conversations with strangers, who introduced him to Georgie Nightingall, the founder of the Trigger Conversations organisation in London, where he attended one of her seminars.

Nightingall took the group through the basic elements of conversation — respect, eye contact and listening — and then into developing conversations. Disrupting predictable small talk “scripts” — for example “How are you?” — with an unexpected reply such as “I am a seven today”, is one way to draw people out.

“Small talk is a greeting ritual,” says Keohane “to show you’re not a threat and you are cognisant of what is happening around you.

“If you’re at a networking event and the standard question is: ‘What do you do?’, you could ask: ‘What do you want to do more of?’ and this opens conversations to things that are much broader than work.”

Given the potential offered by conversations with strangers, why don’t we talk to them more often?

Fears about being incompetent and inadequate, or appearing stupid, violating social norms and anxiety about offending people from different groups are among the reasons people hold back, Sandstrom notes.

But even in situations when approaching strangers is “taboo” — on a subway or a train for example — experiments have shown commuters respond unexpectedly well most of the time.

Traditional healer Lindiwe Dlamini overcame the aloofness of the suburbs to get to know her neighbours, which has benefited them all during the pandemic. Having grown up with the philosophy of ubuntu in the townships, she says her move to the suburbs with its high walls was a sharp contrast.

But Dlamini reached out to her neighbours and this connection has been a lifeline for them all during the past two years.  She says: “When I checked my post, a child would say ‘hello Auntie Linda’ and sometimes [during hard lockdown] that was the only voice I would hear if my daughter was not here.

“When they had Covid, I was able to drop off stuff for them. We greet over the fence, and it is such a gift to still have conversations. “Now if I go to get groceries, I go out of my way to converse with the lady behind the till. I make even more effort to connect because she can no longer see my smile behind my mask.”

People are scared that they have become hermits and forgotten how to socialise during the pandemic says UCT's Long, who’s also a practising clinician. “They have been bunkered down in their rooms for one or two years and this fear that they are becoming asocial is real and could have lasting consequences.”

The pandemic has cut to the core of “what makes us human, our social nature”, says Long, musing that “we might be looking at the rise of a new kind of human”.

Yet Keohane’s experience in New York was that people showed a greater appreciation of each other once it was safe to be out again.

“As Western society, we were heading in a direction that would conclude with us sitting alone in our room looking at a screen.

“The pandemic shocked us by giving us a vision of what life, a decade from now, would ultimately look like.  It gave us a choice: do we want to live like this?”

He has made his decision. As the worst of the pandemic in SA seems to be subsiding, what will we choose this new year?

NEW STUDY

Recent research in the US has found that “swapping small talk with strangers for deeper dialogue” offered rewards that surprised the participants, making them feel more connected to each other.

“We wrongly assume that other people are somewhat indifferent towards us, so we avoid more intimate conversation, thinking it would be awkward. But we’d likely be happier if we dug deeper when we’re interacting with others,” said study co-author, University of Texas professor Amit Kumar.

More than 1,800 people took part in a series of 12 experiments, where they had to discuss relatively shallow or deep topics in pairs.

Shallow questions included small-talk such as: “What do you think about the weather today?” Deeper questions included: “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person.”

Excerpts from Joe Keohane’s book

THE GODS & STRANGERS: “Zeus often posed as a stranger to ensure people were behaving themselves and being hospitable. Jesus adopted that mantle, telling his followers that whatever they did to the lowest among them, they did directly to him ... In Islam, strangers are a dominant theme. Like Judaism and Christianity, the Koran places kindness to strangers just behind worshipping the one god.”

DOOR TO THE EXTRAORDINARY: Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and theologians for the past century have argued that there are far more profound and intangible benefits to hospitality towards strangers beyond just obtaining information or securing alliances.

“The arrival of a stranger breaks up the eternal recurrence of daily events and opens the door to the extraordinary,” writes the German social anthropologist Florian Mühlfried.