The doors open wide, you enter, and they close behind you. As the elevator begins its ascent, you realize it’s just you and one other person taking this ride. The silence soon grows uncomfortable.
Pop quiz. What’s your go-to move?
A) Stare at your shoes.
B) Pull out your cellphone.
C) Make brief eye contact.
D) Initiate chitchat.
If your answer was B, you’re like far too many of us, eyes glued to our phones, attention focused on the digital world.
Many of us tend to do just about anything to avoid conversation or even eye contact with strangers. And smartphones make it easier than ever to do that. A recent study found that phones can keep us from even exchanging brief smiles with people we meet in public places. But a body of research has shown that we might just be short-changing our own happiness by ignoring opportunities to connect with the people around us.
Several years ago, University of British Columbia psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and her colleague Gillian M. Sandstrom, tested whether short conversations with strangers could lift moods. They asked participants to enter a busy coffee shop and grab a beverage — half would get in and get out, and half would strike up a conversation with the cashier.
“We found that people who were randomly assigned to turn this economic transaction into a quick social interaction left Starbucks in a better mood,” Dunn says. “And they even felt a greater sense of belonging in their community.”
The same researchers found that these seemingly trivial encounters with the minor characters in our lives — the random guy at the dog park or the barista at our local coffee shop — can affect feelings of happiness and human connection on a typical day.
Social anxiety, however, could be preventing these types of interactions, says Nicholas Epley, a University of Chicago behavioral scientist.
One day, during a daily train ride, he noticed something paradoxical. People — social creatures — were basically ignoring one another. Why, he wondered, if connecting with others makes us happy, do we so often avoid it?
Either solitude really is more enjoyable than talking to strangers, he figured, or we have mistaken assumptions holding us back.
His curiosity led to a series of experiments revealing that train and bus commuters who interacted with other passengers experienced a more pleasant ride — even when they believed they would prefer the solitude of, say, reading a book.
It is fear that the person sitting next to us won’t enjoy talking to us that makes us keep to ourselves, Epley found. But when we do talk to each other, those social interactions with strangers tend to be both less awkward and more enjoyable than most people predict.
