Undervalued

Twenty minutes on a train. You sit down next to someone. How about starting a conversation?

We rarely talk to strangers. Why? Because we value such a conversation at very little: someone may turn us down and it will get awkward. And even if it works out, the conversation will hardly be one of the most pleasant. Besides, what could we possibly learn from someone we do not know… So there is hardly any point in starting, right? Let us check that in the research.

Let us begin with whether anyone wants to talk to us at all. Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder tested this with people commuting by train to Chicago. Those who were asked to strike up a conversation with fellow passengers expected that roughly half of them would be willing to talk. It turned out to be everyone. Literally nobody refused a conversation.

What about the awkwardness of the conversation itself? In the same research some people were asked to talk to a stranger and others to ride in silence. After the ride everyone rated how pleasant the journey had been. A separate group of passengers only predicted those ratings, and they bet that silence would be more pleasant. The opposite happened. The best ratings came from the people who had talked to someone.

And the last doubt: can you learn anything at all from someone you do not know? Here further research comes in. Stav Atir, Kristina Wald and Nicholas Epley asked people before a conversation with a stranger how much they expected to learn, and after the conversation how much they had actually learned. The conversations usually lasted about ten minutes. Every time the result pointed the same way: people learned more than they had expected, and most of all when the conversation was completely open.

So let us add it up again. Almost everyone will gladly take up a conversation, although we assume that every second person will refuse. The conversation is more pleasant than we predict. And it brings more knowledge than we think at first. Yet the whole carriage rides in silence, because we all hold on to the same mistaken assumptions.

Why are we writing about this? Because in design this valuation comes back with every project. Talking is especially important here. A lot. At every possible opportunity. Even on a train! And after this research we know that the hardest part of any conversation is our own mistaken assumption that it will fail. All the rest goes surprisingly well.

Your receipt

What will you do about it?

So how about talking to a stranger this week? And if you are short of an opening topic, we rather think the story from this post makes a very good start for a conversation. And at the end, if you feel like it, come back after that conversation and let us know how it went.

Sources
N. Epley, J. Schroeder, Mistakenly seeking solitude, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5) (2014).
S. Atir, K. A. Wald, N. Epley, Talking with strangers is surprisingly informative, PNAS, 119(34) (2022).