Talking to Strangers Linked to Happiness

Turns out chatting with the clerk in the checkout line just might be a key to happiness.

A fascinating article by Rhitu Chatterjee on NPR.com examines the role of casual connections with strangers on our mental health and overall well-being.

Psychologist Dr. Gillian Sandstrom, who works at the University of Sussex, used to be a computer programmer. When she went back to school to pursue a psychology degree, she felt distinctly out of place. Ten years older than her classmates, she felt isolated, wondering if she could ever fit in. Then came the hot dog lady, who changed her life.

As she crossed campus each day, she passed a hot dog stand. She never bought a hot dog, but each day she would smile and wave, and the hot dog lady would smile and wave in return.

“She made me feel happy,” she says. “I felt better after seeing her and worse if she wasn’t there.”

Years later, those brief but memorable interactions inspired Sandstrom to craft a study to examine the benefits of social connections – specifically, encounters with strangers or acquaintances, anyone outside our close relational circle of friends, family, and people at work.

Her relationship with the hot dog lady “really got me thinking about how we have so many people in our lives,” says Sandstrom, adding, “We’re only close to a small number of them, but all of the other people seem to matter a lot and maybe a lot more than we realize.”

Social connectedness impacts our physical and mental health

Her work is part of a growing body of research that examines the effects of social connectedness on our physical and emotional health.

Their findings? Not only is social connectedness essential to our overall physical health – so much so that its absence is linked to health problems, dementia, and even premature death – but even casual connections with others in our community greatly enhance our mental health and happiness.

In a 2014 study, Sandstrom examined whether others also experienced the kind of emotional lift she felt from her interactions with the hot dog lady. She and her fellow researchers recruited over 50 participants for a six-day experiment, giving each of them two clicker counters.

“I asked them to count every time they talked to someone during the day,” she said.

On one clicker they tallied their interactions with people close to them, which sociologists call “strong ties.”

The other clicker was for counting “weak ties” — interactions with strangers, acquaintances, people at work we don’t see frequently.

At the end of each of the six days of the experiment, the participants took an online survey to report how many strong and weak ties they had tallied each day — and how they were feeling.

“In general, people who tended to have more conversations with weak ties tended to be a little happier than people who had fewer of those kinds of interactions on a day-to-day basis,” she says. Not only that, but the more of those interactions a person had, the happier they felt.

Interacting with strangers – what’s the point?

A later study specifically looked at the impact of interactions with strangers on mood. She and her colleagues gave Starbucks gift cards to 60 people in Vancouver. Half the participants were tasked with ordering their drink and leaving, keeping interactions to a bare minimum. The others were told to connect with the barista, to “try to make eye contact, smile, have a little chat, try to make it a genuine social interaction,” said Sandstrom.

Their findings?  Those “who chatted with the barista were in a better mood and felt a greater sense of belonging than those who didn’t interact much with the staff.”

What is ‘relational diversity’ and why does it matter?

Other research focuses not only on interactions with strangers but on a wide variety of interactions with others – both strong and weak ties – as key to mental health.

Hanne Collins, a graduate student at Harvard Business School, is the lead author of a study on this topic. Her work draws on data from eight countries. She and her fellow researchers discovered that the more broad and varied the interactions a person had with others in one day – not only friends and family but strangers, colleagues, acquaintances – the happier they felt.

Having conversations with “lots of different people might build the sense of community and belonging to a larger social structure,” Collins explained. “That might be very powerful.”

Her work might be an antidote to large numbers of Americans suffering from what the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”

It’s worth a try. Simply reaching out and chatting with others you encounter might substantially lift your mood and sense of belonging in the world.

Read the full article here.

 

Chatterjee, Rhitu. “Why a stranger’s ‘hello’ can do more than just brighten your day.” NPR.com, 23 Aug 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/08/23/1193148718/why-a-strangers-hello-can-do-more-than-just-brighten-your-day?utm_id=57794967&orgid=305&utm_att1=&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social_organic&utm_term=100004631272924___&utm_content=_&utm_campaign=well+being+trust+2023__rockitworks_smi.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash