In a suspicious world, many of us are reluctant to interact with strangers. But talking to people we've never met before, even in casual contact, can make us smarter and happier.
Like many others who grew up in America in the XNUMXs, I was raised to be afraid of strangers.
"A stranger means danger" was the main maxim of those days.
Parental concerns and humanity's natural mistrust of strangers were fueled by sensationalist media coverage and by the precipitous decline of social trust, which blossomed into a true moral panic.
Police officers, teachers, parents, religious leaders, politicians, media personalities and child welfare organizations have overcome differences and worked together to spread the message - contact with a stranger can put you in danger.
While there is no doubt that some people do have traumatic experiences with strangers, "stranger equals danger" had no statistical basis.
Then, as now, most sexual and violent crimes against children (even adults, if we're being honest) they are made up of people the victim knows: relatives, neighbors and family friends.
Abductions carried out by non-family members - which include those when a child is abducted by a complete stranger - they make up only one percent of all cases of missing children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States.
But it felt real and therefore became real.
The stranger connected with the danger and remained inseparable from it.
Could this way of thinking, however, in many of us affect our later interactions in life?
Did we miss something valuable?
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Some social scientists believe that teaching children that literally everyone in the world they don't know is dangerous could be actively harmful.
Political scientist Ditlind Stole, from McGill University in Canada, he claimed that decades of sending this message could damage an entire generation's ability to trust other people.
This is problematic - trust is key to the functioning of many societies.
"How many social or economic opportunities do we miss out on simply because we're afraid to talk to strangers?" Stole wondered.
While I'm not advocating the idea of strangers approaching children, or vice versa, I do believe that, as adults, we need to think about the benefits of talking to strangers safely.
For several years I researched why we don't talk to strangers and what happens when we do for my book The power of strangers: The benefits of hooking up in a suspicious world.
That effort brought me into the company of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, archaeologists, urban designers, activists, philosophers, and theologians, plus hundreds of random strangers I talked to wherever I went.
I discovered this: we miss out on a lot by being afraid of strangers.
Talking to strangers - under the right conditions - is good for us, good for our communities, towns and cities, our countries and our world.
Talking to strangers can teach you many things, inspire you, make you better citizens, better thinkers and better people.
It's a good way to live.
But it is more than that.
In a world that is rapidly changing, becoming infinitely complex and furiously polarized, it is also a way of survival.
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For more than 6.000 years, people have lived in cities - a form of social organization characterized by an overabundance of unknown people.
But only recently have psychologists begun to study what happens when we talk to all those faceless strangers we are surrounded by every day.
In 2013, psychologists Gillian Sandstrom, from the University of Sussex in Great Britain, and Elizabeth Dunn, from the University of British Columbia, published the results of an experiment in which 30 adults smiled and chatted with their barista in a Toronto cafeteria, and another 30 tried to make their transaction as short and efficient as possible.
"People are incredibly pessimistic about almost every aspect of talking to strangers," Sandstrom wrote, but that pessimism seems unfounded.
The authors concluded, "The next time you need a little boost, you might want to consider talking to a Starbucks barista... so take advantage of this already readily available source of happiness."
Working up the courage to strike up a conversation with a stranger may seem difficult, given that most of us don't take it for granted.
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Behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder of the University of Chicago asked everyday commuters to talk to strangers on public transit, taxis, waiting rooms — places where the social norm in Chicago is not to talk.
Understandably, most participants predicted that these interactions would not go well.
Not wanting to violate the social norm, they worried that the stranger would dislike the intrusion and reject them, making their commutes even more unpleasant than they already were.
When the participants went out into the world and actually began interacting with other people, however, they discovered that they were strangers surprisingly accommodating, curious and pleasant.
"Commuters appeared to think that talking to a stranger posed a significant risk of social rejection," wrote Epley and Schroeder.
"As far as we could tell, it didn't pose any risk."
On the contrary, participants who talked to strangers reported that these conversations were pleasant, interesting, and lasted longer than they expected, and that they made their commute to work much more pleasant.
Epley and Schroeder add that this points to a "deep misunderstanding about social interactions," concluding that "humans may be social creatures, but they may not always be social enough for their own good."
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Lest these results be attributed to the proverbial warm-heartedness of Midwestern Americans, Eppley and Schroeder conducted the same experiment in a historically less friendly environment and asked passengers to chat with strangers on public transport in London - a possibility that many Londoners view with dismay. a mixture of contempt and horror (a place where even eye contact is avoided).
And again, Epley and Schroeder got the same results.
The talks went extremely well.
In the meantime, the result was repeated in other countries with the participation of various participants.
The findings of those studies are remarkably consistent: Many people are afraid to talk to strangers, but when they do, they usually feel good about it: happier, less lonely, more optimistic,, more compassionate and with a stronger sense of belonging own community.
Several experts, as well as members of the public who talk to strangers, have told me that doing this actually makes them feel safer, because it gives them an affirmation that the people around them are benevolent.
However, there are still many reasons why people are uncomfortable talking to strangers.
People report that they worry about breaking social norms, they fear that they will be bad at the conversation or that they will not have anything to say, or them gets nervous about talking to another group and the possibility of being attacked or saying something wrong.
Many factors have conspired to prevent us from talking to each other.
Smartphones have certainly made it easier than ever for us to avoid interacting with people in our immediate environmentu.
And we could also be naturally reluctant to approach someone who doesn't seem trustworthy to us, even if we've never met them.
We prefer to work with someone who looks like someone we've trusted in the past but to someone who looks like an unreliable ex-acquaintance.
And so it comes as no great surprise that when these fears are proven unfounded, people are relieved.
I felt it myself when I had positive interactions with strangers.
"I think you're relieved just to feel that we've been sold the story that the world is a scary place," Sandstrom says.
"And then you chat with some random person, it goes well, and you think, 'Maybe the world isn't so bad after all.'"
That's no small thing.
At the time when so many people feel lonely, alienated, disconnected, disconnected, pessimistic, these results are both helpful and reassuring.
Interaction with strangers, even in passing, can help us build or rebuild social networks, reconnect us to our communities, and strengthen trust in the people around us.
As stated by one of the participating students in one of the more recent experiments by Gillian Sandstrom:
"I felt like I had forgotten how to make friends with people, but this study reminded me that most people are warm and you just have to open up to them."
As a white straight man, I was aware from the start that my interactions with strangers might be less fraught than they are for non-white straight men.
And so, when I was doing research for my book, I made sure to talk to as diverse a group of people as possible who are used to talking to strangers.
Despite their varied backgrounds and experiences, they can generally say that they have had the same positive effects that can be found in the research literature.
But I am by no means suggesting that these interactions are the same for everyone, and I am in no way writing off the fears of people who have had traumatic experiences with strangers.
That said, I categorically advise men in my position to take this into account when trying to chat with strangers themselves.
Sandstrom gives some other advice about talking to someone you don't know; first ask them an open question to get them talking and then answer them with something you have in common - there's a reason why the weather is usually discussed.
But if you have the chance, it's worth a try.
Talking to strangers can affect you in more profound ways than you can imagine and bring many health benefits.
After talking with strangers, we can become smarter, more knowledgeable and more compassionate, says the professor from Harvard University and winner of the "genius grant" MacArthur Daniela Allen.
When she taught at the University of Chicago, Allen was repeatedly warned by her colleagues to stay away from the city's poor neighborhoods.
She believes that this "fear of the unknown has had a bad effect on the intellectual and social abilities of a large number of her colleagues".
She refused to stay on the sidelines and achieved some of her most cherished achievements in those very parts of the city.
In the meantime, she has devoted her career to creating connections between people and groups who normally do not interact with each other.
"True knowledge of what lies beyond one's garden cures fear." writes Allen, "but only if we talk to strangers can we come to such knowledge."
By talking to strangers, you gain insight into the astonishing complexity of the human species and the myriad variations of the human experience.
It's a cliché, but you get the opportunity to see the world through other people's eyes, and without that, wisdom is impossible.
But it's not easy.
You will find yourself constantly having to question your own assumptions about the world and your place in it, which can be difficult and disorienting, but also exhilarating and even fun.
That's how we progress as individuals and stay together as a society.
That's how we get to know each other, and only by knowing each other can we hope to live together.
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It's ironic that after being raised to fear the unknown, I now find them to be a source of hope.
When these interactions go well - and they usually do - a positive perception of a stranger can grow into a better impression of people in general.
For me - and for many respected experts and complete strangers I've talked to - it all comes down to the question of data.
If I were to base all my perceptions of humanity on what is available through my phone or laptop, I would have a fantastically negative view of most people.
I would be paralyzed by the possibility that "the unknown equals danger" and I would feel completely justified in avoiding these simpletons, paranoids, hysterics, criminals, charlatans, savages and demagogues.
Instead, however, I went out into the world and talked to people.
I largely base my experience of the world on them, and as a result of talking to strangers, my view of the world has become a little more optimistic.
"I like humanity as a whole more because I'm talking to strangers," Allen tells me.
As a black woman in America, her interactions can be much more complicated than mine.
But, still, when it comes to talking to strangers, she says that "the positives greatly outweigh the negatives".
The Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia, USA - historically one of the leading exponents of the message that "strangers equal danger" - finally retired the term in 2018.
As Cal Walsh, the center's director, explained to me at the time, "We're trying to empower kids to make safe and smart decisions, not damage them for life."
Their decision was followed by other charities fighting for the safety of children around the world.
What can I say?
That's a good start.
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