Strangers, who knows who they are, what they think, what dangers they hide. Better to avoid talking to strangers, a recommendation that everyone has received sooner or later. But that’s not what psychological research suggests. According to Gillian Sandstrom, Senior lecturer in Psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex, in Great Britain, talking to strangers is instead an activity not only potentially pleasant, but also capable of contributing to personal well-being. At least once preconceptions, fears of embarrassment and the specter of boredom have been overcome.
An opportunity not to be missed
In an article published in The Psychologist, the journal of the British Psychological Society, Gillian Sandstrom declares that she is personally introverted, but that she nonetheless supports without hesitation the importance of seizing every possible opportunity to exchange a few words with strangers, both for the pleasure that can derive from it and because it often becomes an opportunity to learn new concepts and skills. Especially if you are in an unfamiliar place, as happens when you travel to another country.
The positive effects of talking to strangers
A lot of field research has demonstrated the positive effects of talking to strangers. For example, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has shown that people generally underestimate how much they could learn in a casual conversation with people they don’t know. “But it is an underestimation that does not arise from the belief that there is little to learn from others” say the authors of the research, coordinated by Stav Atir of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the USA. “In fact, the participants in our study were convinced that they could learn more from others than others could learn from them. Instead, the underestimation of the learning possibilities arises from the fact that the conversation with a stranger does not have specific elements of predictability. Thus, paradoxically, not knowing what one could learn from a conversation with a stranger can keep people from trying to have that experience which would help them understand how much there is to learn».
Positive effects on mood
But talking to strangers shouldn’t be an activity aimed only at trying to acquire new knowledge. The positive aspects in terms of sociability are very important: various studies have shown that this kind of openness has a positive effect on mood and sense of self-confidence. To better understand this point, we can try to turn the situation around: everyone, as an unknown potential towards the others, can imagine how they would respond to anyone who tried to establish polite contact. And in fact, experimental research has shown that on average people are much more sympathetic than you think towards those who try to break the ice, for example by giving a compliment. To imagine the difficulties are more those who try to pay the compliment rather than those who are “importanted”, as demonstrated by research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by two US researchers, Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns. “During the experiment, those who had to pay a compliment to a stranger felt anxious and his level of anxiety was predictive of the belief that that compliment would be received badly,” say the authors of the research. “Conversely, the prediction made by study participants that they did not have to give the compliment themselves and therefore did not feel anxious was much less pessimistic.”
2023-07-22 06:39:31
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