If you want to get better at talking to strangers, the first thing worth unlearning is the idea that you’re bad at it. What you’re actually picking up on is a stack of predictions your brain makes before you’ve said a word — that they’ll be annoyed, that you’ll be awkward, that it isn’t worth the risk. University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley has spent close to two decades testing those predictions against what actually happens when people talk to strangers. They’re wrong almost every time, and wrong in a consistent, measurable direction.
The fear is real. The reason for it usually isn’t.
Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark ran a series of studies, published in Psychological Science in 2018, on what they called the “liking gap.” They had strangers get acquainted in the lab, first-year university students meet their new dorm mates, and adults meet each other at a workshop. In every setting, the same pattern showed up: after a conversation, people reliably underestimated how much the other person liked them and enjoyed the exchange. Not by a small margin, either — and not just once. People seem to walk away from a chat replaying their own stumbles while missing the fact that the other person was doing the same thing, and mostly having a good time.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it’s the thing standing between most of us and the next conversation. It isn’t that strangers are secretly hostile. It’s that we’re bad judges of our own performance, in a direction that always makes us look worse than we were.
What happens when you actually do it
Epley’s own research went straight at the fear. In a series of field and lab experiments with Juliana Schroeder, published as “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, commuters on Chicago trains and buses were randomly told to strike up a conversation with a stranger, to sit quietly and keep to themselves, or to commute as they normally would. Before it happened, a separate group predicted solitude would be the more pleasant way to travel. Afterwards, the commuters who’d actually talked to someone reported a more positive trip than the ones who’d stayed silent — and no less productive a use of the time. “Connecting with strangers on a train may not bring the same long-term benefits as connecting with friends,” Epley told the University of Chicago’s Booth School, “but commuters on a train into downtown Chicago reported a significantly more positive commute when they connected with a stranger than when they sat in solitude.” The prediction and the experience pointed in opposite directions, every time.
Skip the weather talk
It gets more useful still. Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Epley published “Overly Shallow?” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2022, pairing strangers up to discuss four deliberately un-small questions — things like what they felt most grateful for, or a time they cried in front of someone else — for ten minutes. Beforehand, people expected the other person to be only mildly interested and the conversation to feel stilted. Afterwards, they reported more connection and more enjoyment than they’d predicted, and less awkwardness than the shallow small-talk version they compared it against. The deeper question wasn’t the risk. The small talk was.
It doesn’t need to be someone you’ll see again
None of this requires a new best friend to be the payoff. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn’s “Social Interactions and Well-Being” research, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, had people at a coffee shop either interact with the barista — eye contact, a smile, a genuine exchange — or keep it as efficient and transactional as possible. The people who treated it as a real interaction, however brief, left in a better mood. Sandstrom’s broader work on these “weak ties” — acquaintances, regulars, the people on the edge of your day — found the same lift shows up on ordinary days with more of these small exchanges than usual. The size of the relationship isn’t what matters. Whether you actually showed up to it is.
The practice bit
Here’s the study that matters most if the goal is actually getting better at this, not just knowing the theory. Sandstrom, Boothby and Cooney ran a week-long intervention, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2022, with 286 students across two universities. Participants played a kind of scavenger hunt that required them to repeatedly find, approach and talk to strangers over several days, logging what they expected and what actually happened each time. Going in, people predicted a stranger would be open to talking about 40% of the time. In practice, strangers said yes 87% of the time — and 87% of the 1,336 conversations logged were with the very first person someone approached. The part worth noticing: their predictions got measurably more accurate and more positive with each passing day of the study, and the more relaxed outlook was still holding up a week later. Roughly 40% of participants had exchanged contact details with someone they’d met and were still in touch.
That’s the whole case for calling it a skill rather than a trait. Nobody in that study got a personality transplant over five days. They just ran the same small, low-stakes rep enough times that their expectations caught up to reality. The nerves don’t vanish. They just stop being in charge of the decision.
Flat White exists for the version of this that’s the easiest to actually do: one stranger, one café, one hour, already booked for you. No cold approach, no scavenger hunt, no working up to it on your own — just the rep itself, on a Saturday morning, with the hardest part already decided.
Meet one person. Over coffee. On purpose.
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