“Stranger Danger”: A Missed Opportunity for Connection?

I learned many things during my year abroad in Italy. Some of these learnings have led to goals I’ve adopted this year, like ‘resist checking technology on waking’, and ‘call instead of text’. However, one goal that I’ve found more of a challenge to implement is engaging more with strangers.

I clearly remember the moment this goal began to form in my mind. My Italian hairdresser, who lived on my street, was doing my hair when her father dropped by with some lunch he had prepared. Throughout the haircut the conversation ebbed and flowed, sometimes in my poor Italian, other times in her poor English. At the end when I went to pay, she insisted I stay and have some of the lunch her father had dropped off earlier. I was hungry, yet I declined her offer, and I remember feeling strange about this for weeks after.

I think my rejection of the hairdresser’s offer had a lot to do with where I am from. I have become increasingly aware that urban Australia is a place where strangers are often happy to have little or nothing to do with one another. We walk past each other in the street, avoiding eye contact and going about our day with solitary determination. This made me think about when I was a child and how casually I would approach another person I did not know, wondering if they might like to play with me.

When did my attitude change, from curiously approaching to fearful avoidance? And when did approaching a stranger, asking them to play or be my friend, become so taboo?

The stranger barrier stems from personal fear and social norms

Our attitude to strangers is largely informed by the place in which we have grown up. In this way people all over the world exhibit different norms. In the south of Italy, I observed that strangers were not afraid to approach one another for little reason at all except out of curiosity and a desire for connection.

A very contrasting example was in London 10 years ago, when American-born Jonathon Dunn felt disillusioned with the turnout at staff social events he had gone to great effort to organise. He also didn’t understand or like the feeling of people he had met before blatantly ignoring him on the street. He decided to have a go at warming the glazed gloominess of London by printing hundreds of badges and handing them out at the train station near his office. The free badges read ‘Tube Chat?’ and were designed to facilitate interactions between strangers on the underground network.

This harmless exercise was met by major dissatisfaction, where resistance groups made counter badges printed with ‘don’t even think about talking to me’. Researchers attribute the negative response to two factors – social norms and personal fear or insecurity.

Human fear and comfort zones come from an intolerance to uncertainty

A fear of talking to strangers is common for adults, and it stems from a fear of what is unknown and uncertain to us. The term ‘stranger danger’ itself came out of a panic in 1970s and 1980s America when the media misrepresented the danger strangers can pose, particularly to children (you can learn more about this in the fascinating episode on the podcast ‘You’re Wrong About’). Despite the distance in time and space, many Australians have been raised with this background caution.

Whilst some level of caution regarding strangers is rational, most of the time a brief interaction with a stranger doesn’t pose a genuine threat. The activity of engaging with a stranger may even teach you something, broaden your perspective, or boost your mood.

To improve your tolerance of uncertainty, you must first understand the equation that governs your life and then change the way this equation looks. If you find you have an intolerance of uncertainty and the unknown, your equation likely looks this this:

 unknown + unplanned = scary, danger, embarrassment, disaster

Instead, you want it to look like this:

 unknown + unplanned = exciting, opportunity, growth, adventure

Notice how the perspective shift in the second equation is very much in line with how you were as a child considering a new friend? Approaching your day-to-day according to this second equation will allow you to have a profoundly more relaxing and rewarding experience as you move through life.

People naturally underestimate their conversation partner’s enjoyment of the interaction

In addition to a fear of uncertainty, social psychologists and researchers explain our avoidance of interacting with strangers also stems from what they call the ‘Liking Gap’. In a 2018 study performed by Yale university, researchers discovered that participants often underestimate their conversation partner’s enjoyment of their interaction, as well as how much their partner liked them after the interaction.

They explained this is because we tend to focus our attention on the things we believe we did poorly in a social interaction, and overlook the positive signals coming from our social partners. The study also found people expected strangers would be open to conversing with them 40% of the time, but strangers were actually open to it 87% of the time, and 41% went on to exchange contact information afterwards!

So in sum, you are not as clunky, awkward, and inadequate as you believe yourself to be and people like you a whole lot more than you think.

Even a little interaction has benefits

Research by Wesselmann and colleagues showed that even something as little as eye-contact with a stranger makes a person feel more connected and positive. In a world where there so many of us feel desperately lonely (read more about the loneliness epidemic here), talking to strangers makes the world a much better place to exist in because talking to strangers humanises other people, and challenges our assumptions.

As the existential psychologist Sarah Kubrik explains so eloquently: many of us make assumptions about those unknown to us and use them as a canvas onto which we project our own assumptions, biases, and insecurities. By conversing with strangers, you will see how little we know about a person’s true value when we are separated by distance or missing information. This teaches us empathy, open-mindedness, and non-judgement, as well as makes the world feel a less isolating place.

Why not start small and give it a go?

Yes, it is going to feel awkward initially. You are going against what is normal to you. But normality is just a construct, and we can fill it with anything we want. As you gain more interactions with strangers, you will challenge your own assumptions. Firstly, combating the Liking Gap, you may realise people are often friendlier than you expected them to be. Secondly, realising the wisdom of the old idiom; don’t judge a book by its cover, because you don’t know what it can offer you.

Interacting with strangers is only going to feel more normal with every additional interaction. Start by making eye contact and smiling as you walk past someone on the street. Soon enough you will look back at your militant individualism and feel a sense of bemusement as recognise all the valuable interactions you’ve been missing out on all this time.

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You can read more about how to talk to strangers here. If you’d like to read more about departing your comfort zone, you can do so here, and if you think your avoidance of strangers might have more to do with feeling socially anxious, learn about the common signs here.