Your colleagues like you more than you realise…

Dr Gillian Sandstrom is a researcher whose work explores her fascination with our conversations with other people – whether colleagues, friends or strangers. She’s just published a fabulous new book ‘Once Upon A Stranger’.

Her work says that we often have a ‘liking gap’ when we talk to people – we think they like us less than we like them – even if they are work colleagues. It turns out not to be true – our co-workers like us more than we realise.

It’s a brilliant discussion – and potentially a prompt for you to change how you live your life.

This week’s newsletter also goes into this theme in more detail.

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce
Gillian, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if you could kick off by just introducing who you are and what you do.

Gillian
Yeah, I’m an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, the science of how small talk, I put that in quotes, small talk, because I don’t think any talk really has to be small. Anyway, how small talk can add up to a big life.

Bruce
I actually discovered your work through reading some of your academic papers. And so, you know, I was really excited to see that you had this book coming out and imminently, and I was delighted to have a chat with you. It strikes me as really interesting because you’ve made your way into academia slightly later than some people do. You’ve managed to combine something which appears from the outside to be your life’s passion with also your subjective interest. And I just wonder if you could tell us maybe with an excursion via your dad, but I wonder if you could tell us how you became so interested in talking to strangers.

Gillian
Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right. There was no straight line and it’s just sort of accidental in a way, know, just taking what life gives you. yeah, so I did an undergraduate degree in math and I worked as a computer programmer for 10 years. And I was just feeling like I… wasn’t the job wasn’t as feeling as meaningful as I was hoping. And, you know, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, I couldn’t imagine doing that job for another 30 years and looking back and feeling like I made the best use of my one life, you know? And looking back now, I think, you know, probably I could have just got a different job in technology and that would have been fine. But at the time I just decided I needed to make this huge shift. And so I started paying attention to things that I was finding interesting in the world and eventually noticed that there was this common thread of psychology and somehow wrangled my way into doing a master’s degree in psychology. I’ll leave out some details or the story will be very long. And while I was doing that, so that was on a different topic. It was on the topic of music cognition. So not related to this at all.

But I ended up having this relationship with a woman who worked at a hot dog stand. And every time I walked past, this was on the campus where I did my master’s degree. It was a very urban location in Toronto, Canada, the biggest city. And I had this relationship with the woman who worked at the hot dog stand. I’d smile and wave at her and she’d smile and wave at me. I don’t know how that happened. It wasn’t like a deliberate choice. It just sort of happened. And it made me start thinking about how we have all these smaller relationships in our life, smaller, you know, compared to the ones we have with our friends and family. And, you know, I’d never invite the hot dog lady over for dinner or tell her my deepest, darkest secrets, but she made me feel comfortable. She made me feel a part of a community. You know, the fact that she recognized me just seemed extremely important. And it made me start thinking about all the other kind of people like that, that I had in my life. and that was sort of the starting point. I’ll skip a bunch of details, but I ended up doing my PhD.

in Canada and Vancouver in a lab that studies happiness. when you do a PhD, you have to kind of find your niche. And my supervisor said, what makes you happy? And what came to mind was the hot dog lady, these little interactions. And yeah, I think a lot of us do me search. I wanted to know, is it just me? Is it just?

Is it a weird thing that I feel that this hot dog lady is so important? Or is it something that is actually important to all of us and maybe more important than we realized?

Bruce
And you say in the book that your dad was a huge advocate of talking to strangers or, know, he was your inspiration.

Gillian
Yeah, so my dad is the biggest extrovert and it’s impossible to embarrass and he just absolutely loves talking to people and you can’t stop him. It’s like a compulsion for him. And I, you know, I wondered for a long time why he did it, you know, what he got from it. I never saw him get rejected or I don’t remember those times, which surely happened every once in a while. But I saw how much he enjoyed it, how much, you know, he’d make people laugh.

And it was really useful, you know, if we needed an extra chair at the table at the restaurant, we’d just send dad and he’d go get another chair. It would take him forever because he’d get a story and get talking to the people at the other table, but he would eventually come back with a chair. So I started to see just how, you know, enjoyable and valuable it could be to do this. But I thought I would never do it because I was way too shy. So I thought he had some special skills that I just didn’t have.

Bruce
I wonder if we could go into, we’ll sort of talk about the delight of talking to strangers in a second, but I wonder if we could just sort of explore some of the things that are often our barriers to talking to strangers that maybe we don’t think we’re going to enjoy it or the other person isn’t going to enjoy it. Could you just give us sort of a, you know, a, a, top line perspective on what we might instinctively believe and what the realities are.

Gillian
Yeah, I mean, when I started doing this research, thought, okay, that’s where I wanted to start. I realized that many people are a bit nervous about talking to strangers. So I thought, I’m going to figure out what people are worried about, and then I’ll figure out some way to fix those concerns. And then everybody will find it easier to talk and live happily ever after the end. Didn’t work out quite that way. For one thing, people are worried about so many different things.

And so I’ve come to believe that if you just fix one of the concerns, people will just worry about something else instead. But there’s long lists. So we worry about our behavior, how we’re going to act during the conversation. So we worry that we’ll talk too much or we’ll talk too little, or we worry about the content of the conversation itself. Like, will we know what to say? Are we going to have those dreaded awkward silences? I think that’s actually people’s biggest fear. We worry about what the other person is going to think about us.

Are they even going to want to talk to us? Are they going to reject us? And yeah, the good news is that none of these things tend to happen. So in terms of rejection from a study I’ve done, it looks like the rejection rate is about 13%. People think it’s going to be much higher. And I think we also think it’s going to feel worse than it does.

So I have some preliminary data about that. yeah, awkward silences also, you know, people can talk to others for far longer and in a more, you know, it’s just more enjoyable than we expect. So I’ve done a series of studies where I ask people to predict how it would go.

then I make them talk to a stranger and then they report back. And every single time we get these huge effects, like just compared to anything else that we’ve studied in psychology, it’s just a massive effect. People enjoy it far more than they expect to. And all these things that we worry about don’t tend to happen. So yeah, we just, we worry a lot more than we need to.

Bruce
And I guess one of the critical things is that our conversation partners enjoy it more than we expect. I was particularly taken with that for a couple of different areas. Firstly, when we’re talking to strangers, but also we see that extrapolated to work colleagues as well, I’ve sort of noticed. I just wonder, you know, what the effect of that is and why do we misjudge that?

Gillian

Yeah, so I don’t know if this is what you’re alluding to, but I’ve done some research with Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney on something called the liking gap. And so what we find is that when two people talk to each other for the first time, that’s how we started saying it for the first time, you these first impressions. But people think that their conversation partner liked them less than they actually did. So we say, yes, we enjoyed our conversation, but we don’t think they did. And so the liking gap basically in a nutshell is, you know, people like you more than

you think. But it’s not just first impressions, it lasts. So one of the studies that we looked at was roommates, flatmates living together at university. And even after months and months had passed of these people living together, they still thought that they liked their roommate more than their roommate liked them. And similarly in the workplace, so we’ve looked at that a little bit.

And again, even after working together for months and months, people think that they like their colleagues more than their colleagues like them. And it does have consequences for work. the more we underestimate how much our colleagues like us, the less willing we are to ask them for help. The more…

we feel like we can’t be open with them. It affects our feelings of teamwork, like our ability to be an effective team.

Bruce
Yeah, and that added with the fact that probably people are busy or that they might be distractible. I guess there’s a danger that we can misread someone’s opinion of us. That we have a conversation, we don’t think they like us, then they look like they’re trying to avoid us. And overall, we can end up with this conclusion that’s completely false, that actually we’re surrounded by people who aren’t that into us.

Gillian
Yeah, think so in my book, I named the negative voice in my head. I call him Sid because he’s insidious. But I think we all have this voice in our head telling us that we are not good at this. People don’t like us. And it really does seem that most of us feel this way. You know, there’s research showing that we, although we tend to think we’re better than average in almost every respect, you know, that we’re more honest, we’re better drivers, all this kind of stuff. We think we’re below average.

when it comes to having a casual chat at a party or a social event. So on average, people think they’re not good at this. So if you feel that way, you’re not alone. And so it’s because we can’t read someone else’s mind, right? We don’t know what they’re thinking. And we have that voice in our head filling in the gap saying all these negative things. And it’s a funny thing too, because in the… the studies where we looked at the liking gap, had people observe conversations. They can’t see the liking gap.

So it’s not that the person, you know, like there are signs that both people are getting along just fine. But we’re polluting that with that negative voice in our head. We tend to focus on all the negative stuff or less than optimal stuff, less than ideal. You know, we have this sort of vision about how we need to be perfect and we have to say just the right thing at just the right time and tell the story and just the the perfect way. Whereas the partner, our partners, our conversation partners just like, that was nice. Especially if it’s a stranger, I think, because you don’t expect it to go well. And then you have a pleasant conversation. You walk away thinking, that was great. That person was terrific.

Gillian

Because I think that some of the reasons that people might be reluctant to…reach out at work is, you know, is this sort of not being aware of the value of doing it, right? Like feeling like it’s a waste of time. We need to be efficient. We need to get to the real stuff, right? But I think, first of all, there’s moments where it maybe doesn’t take any extra time. These moments that maybe would have been wasted anyway, you know, those bits of time in the break room or the, you know, the moments before the meeting starts, you know, so I think we could

Gillian
you know use those as you know and make that investment in relationships, right? But I think there’s also this idea that what are we getting from it? Is there a you know an instrumental value in having these kind of interactions? And there’s some research by Jessica Methot showing that having small talk at work the kind of water cooler moments leads to people just feeling a bit more positive at work and do

more sort of organizational citizenship behaviors. It also makes people more distracted, so there’s pluses and minuses, but there’s also work showing that people who kind of get to know their colleagues a little bit, and often we do get that in, so these researchers, Ashley Harden is one of them, study these kind of inadvertent ways, so you know, I’m seeing you on a Zoom call right now, I’m noticing that you

you have a lovely blue wall behind you. I sort of was looking at the logo on your t-shirt. They’re little things where I might learn something about you without you even intending for me to. And they might be really vivid and memorable. And that when we do that, we feel more trust in our colleagues. We feel like it humanizes them and it makes us want to be more friendly with them, but also work more closely with them.

does affect the work aspects of our relationship as well. So I think those are pretty interesting findings.

Bruce
Yeah, absolutely. It’s so interesting, isn’t it? The challenge there, I was chatting to someone the other day and saying, look, know, people are not seeing the value of coming into the office. They feel like they can get their work done. They don’t, you know, they’ve had a few good conversations, but they feel like they don’t work with other departments. Why should they be there? And look, it’s very difficult to put a…

a reason out there other than vibes and other than, you you’re going to, you’re probably going to enjoy it more than you think. And it’s sort of, it’s so difficult when you’re presented, you’re asked to demonstrate something that could be better than efficiency in return.

Gillian
It is, and I think, you know, when we’re thinking about managers and the people who are working for a manager, I know, again, I, you know, I translate to teachers and students because that’s, you know, I can relate to that a little bit more, but.

It just feels like everybody wants to feel like they matter, right? Like that they’re valued and that they’re seen. And if your manager doesn’t know your name or doesn’t acknowledge you as a human and just seems to treat you as someone who’s providing value.

you know, output in the workplace. It just doesn’t make you all that motivated to put in that extra effort or offer an unsolicited opinion or do something proactively or do you know what I mean? Like, so yes, vibes, but I think…

that has more consequences than people really think about. It feels to me like that might be related to the sort of quiet quitting. People just doing the minimum. They’re like, well, I’m not appreciated, I’m not valued. They don’t care about me as a person. So I’m just gonna do what I need to do, but no more.

Yeah, I think it’s hard not to feel that way. I think we need to feel like we’re part of something and we’re valued and that, yeah, we put in a different amount of effort, investment and loyalty when we feel that way.

Bruce D
100 % I couldn’t agree more. Absolutely. It’s sort of that sense of feeling seen is a really important part of being human. And when we don’t feel seen, when we don’t feel, you know, the word you use, they’re mattering. I use that word all the time because if we don’t feel like we matter, you know, like you say, we do check out. And Gallup published some research last week that said that 10 % of British workers are engaged with their jobs. And we might ask ourselves, well,

Bruce D
Is that just not just a consequence of how we’re working? Yeah.

Gillian
That’s it. 10%. Wow. Yikes.

Bruce
In a world that’s obsessed with productivity, people might be listening to this thinking, why on do I need to talk to strangers? I’ve got enough to do, I’ve got enough to be getting on with. And I guess the reason I came away with, I’d love you to give an alternative reason if there is one, but the reason I came away with was what I took from your clicker study, which was that when you ask people to categorize their hot dog lady, their strangers that they chatted to.

Bruce
It had the impact, just these small chance encounters with a barista, with someone in a store. These chance encounters had the impact of making them happier. And it seemed to be like, you know, if we’re looking for a reason to chat to strangers, it just adds to the richness and the sort of empathy that we might extract from life. Is that right? Is that why we should be thinking about this?

Gillian
I find that a hard question to answer just because I think there’s so many benefits. So I think you’re right. I think I’ve been starting to think lately about

what is a life well lived? And I think there’s sort of three different answers to that. One is a life of pleasure. One is a life of meaning and purpose. And more recently, we’ve been thinking also a life that is rich, full of diverse experiences. And of course, you can have more than one of those things, but generally you need one of those to feel that you’ve spent your life well. And I think talking to strangers ticks all those boxes, you know, because

Like you just said, the research shows that having just small conversations with people makes you feel happier, puts you in a good mood, makes you feel more connected. It makes your life more rich because you learn things more than you expect to. It’s just a source of novelty and interest. I’ve met so many interesting people. I’ve met a sperm bank manager and a bat first aider and someone whose hobby is hashing. And I don’t need to know those things. but it makes my life more interesting and rich. And then the third aspect is meaning and purpose. it just feels like our world, we’re designing out the need to interact with humans in many ways. And it’s easy to depersonalize. We were talking about this before we started recording. And I think just having a small conversation with someone, just showing them that you see them and acknowledging their…

that they’re a fellow human is an act of meaning. It is a very powerful thing that any of us can do to make the world a little better. I think, yeah, there’s so many good reasons. And I think too, I could go on for a whole hour about this, Bruce. I think, you know, I started talking to strangers kind of almost by accident, I feel like, and then I…

Gillian
and enjoyed it and kept doing it. And now that I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of strangers, I feel that there’s a cumulative effect as well. So sometimes the individual conversations are interesting and fun and, you know, life changing every once in a while. A lot of the time, you know, the average conversation is average and some of them are boring, right? But I think every single one matters because they add up to me feeling like…

I can talk to anybody and people are generally okay. So I feel like I walk through the world differently now. I feel more safe, more trusting, more connected and sort of part of the world and that feels like it changes everything.

Bruce D
Yeah, I was in the habit last year of asking people, just like an abstract question, just merely to see what their answer was. I was asking people what percentage of the world’s population they felt were bad people and they could define that however you wanted. And it was just interesting because I was so fascinated with the numbers I was getting back because some people would, well, some people saying like 5%, I was saying one in 20 people you think is a bad person. I’m not criticizing the others.

Gillian
What did they tell you?

Bruce D
My instinct was like the answer is points one of I don’t even believe this thing is a bad person. but I wonder if a degree of talking to other people and, and recognizing the humanity in people is an important stepping stone to that. remember chatting to someone who worked in the NHS and they told me that the amount of patient aggression they were experiencing at the moment. and retail says this and I wonder if that’s a direct consequence of us depersonalizing the world around us. That, you know, when we need directions now, we don’t ask a human, we ask our device. And whether this might be just even in ourselves, if all we can do is seek to improve ourselves, then just exercising this muscle might be a great way for us to rebuild that empathy. Am I right with that, do think

Gillian
I have the same instinct. I have the same instinct. Yeah. And I think, you know, once I started doing this research and sort of feeling like I was

having an impact and making a difference on people, it just makes me want to do it more and try to notice even more often. there’s been so many times, you know, and I feel like this is something more recent that it’s probably changed, but I don’t have any data on that. But times where I’ve, you know, sincerely asked someone, how are you doing? And had them say,

Thank you for asking. No one ever asks me that. Like I feel like waiters and know, GPs and volunteers at historical sites that I’ve visited on holiday. Like so many different kinds of people say, nobody ever sees me. Or at least that’s what I’m hearing them say is nobody ever notices me. And they really appreciate just being seen. And it’s such a small thing that we can all do. But you’re right. I think we have to, that our

Society is allowing us to not have to do that and so we have to choose to do it. It has to be a bit more deliberate now.

Bruce D
You touched on one thing there that’s really interesting, which is this sort of interesting phenomenon that people often disclose more to strangers than they might do to the people in their lives. They use it as potentially like a of a fleeting confessional that they might tell you, you know, I’m pregnant or they might tell you something that’s deeply intimate to a stranger that they wouldn’t do elsewhere. Why do we do that? Why do we find the ability to confide in someone that we’ll never see again.

Gillian
Yeah, I was surprised to see that there’s a fair number of studies on this. A lot of them come from the health psychology literature, so it’s about health-related disclosures. But there’s some…

Although we might assume, and it’s probably true, that the people that are closest to us are the ones who are most willing to help us and want to help us, they’re emotionally involved and that can cause problems as well, right? So if we share something with someone we’re close to…

we worry about how they’re going to take it and it could put that relationship at risk and we really don’t want to do that. And then they sometimes can’t be as supportive as we’d like because whatever’s going on with us also affects them. So they’re emotionally involved as well. And so it’s hard for them to have that objectivity that can be helpful sometimes. And then in terms of health related information, if we’re looking for

you know, information to help us make sense of what’s going on and what might happen.

we probably want to talk to someone who’s been there. And that might not be someone that’s close to us. But one of the single most reasons that we tend to confide in people we don’t know is just because they’re in the right place at the right time. We spend a lot of our time around people we don’t know at all or don’t know very well. so it can be, they’re just in the right place at the right time. And we don’t have to worry about all those things I just mentioned or them remembering what we

Gillian
with them every time we see them and worrying what are they thinking of me. Yeah, so there’s lots of reasons when you think about it.

Bruce
Because some people, guess, inevitably, one of the pushback that you might get about talking to people you don’t know is that sort of thing that we were taught as a kid, the idea that strangers represent danger and that there’s risky in talking to someone that you don’t know, that you’re potentially unlocking something that could become a sort of regret, a source of regret. Do you think we overblow that?

Gillian
Yeah, I it rhymes really nicely, doesn’t it? So it’s hard to shake. I tried to come up with a new, you know, okay, can I come up with a new rhyme that works better? so I said in the book, you know, for me, strangers have been game changers. So maybe we could start to rhyme that way instead. Funny enough, kids were taught this. It came out of the 70s when there were a bunch in, you know.
a bunch of child abductions and so that’s when this phrase was coined. But actually children are being taught now, it’s a more nuanced message, it’s that some strangers, know, that there are tricky people that we have to be wary of, but also that if you need help you can go to other strangers, you know, that there are trustworthy strangers, you know, and to talk to a police officer or someone who’s in a shop or a parent. And of course

you know, there’s always those very memorable stories about how, you know, when things go wrong with a stranger. And so, you know, it does happen some of the time. But more often bad things happen with people we know. So we can’t avoid all risk. But, you know, my message isn’t you should talk to everybody all the time and dark alleys. Sure, go for it. But I think there’s a lot less danger than we think. And it probably does, you know.

Gillian
make us not reach out as much as we could and sort of means that we don’t get to enjoy all these benefits that come from reaching out and connecting with people. So we could choose to focus on the positives instead of focusing on the potential negatives which are unlikely anyway.

Bruce D
This podcast is about sort of work and about the relationships we have with work. you know, I was very much reading your work with a lens of us, firstly, interpreting the world around us and, you know, how we misjudge these things. Secondly, you know, a lot of us now find ourselves in a working environment where maybe because we’re not spending as much time together with colleagues or when we do spend time together with colleagues, they’ve got headphones on. And so…

our connection with them is maybe less warm than it was before. Do you think there are any lessons from your work that are applicable either for workplace relationships or, you know, maybe picking up relationships with people we’ve had in the past and reaching out to them. Are there any lessons that we can draw about maybe already existing weak ties and how we might sort of strengthen those connections.

Gillian
Yeah, I mean, I think there is some direct relevance to the workplace. And I think some of the things that hold us back from talking to strangers out in the world are probably also true with people in the workplace. you know, maybe underestimating just how valuable they are. Maybe just sort of an unwillingness to do it, like just not wanting to, not feeling like we have the skills to do it, feeling a bit just uncomfortable about it.

worrying about being too open with people. So I think all those kind of concerns that we have do potentially transfer to the workplace. We might ask, you know, we might think it’s not our job to be friends with our colleagues, right? There’s work and then there’s friends and, you know, we don’t want to blur those lines. It’s kind of…

I mean, I know there’s research in terms of like professors thinking it’s not my job to be friends with my students. And that’s absolutely true. But.

if you’re warm with your students, if you connect with them and they can sense that you’re supporting them and wanting them to be the best that they can be, it creates more positive outcomes, right? So there’s no reason that we think in psychology that people are sort of, we form impressions based on two main dimensions, which is warmth and competence, right? And so I think in the workplace, we risk sort of thinking in order to be seen as competent, I can’t.

be too warm or people are going to underestimate or are going to think that I’m as competent. And that’s just not true. We can be both and we tend to succeed more when we’re both. Sorry, that was the first part of your question. The second part was more about, it felt like two different questions to me, so apologies for. But yeah, the second part was about people that we’ve maybe lost touch with. And yeah, in terms of personal relationships, I’ve done some work on reaching out to old

Gillian
friends and I think when we lose touch with people, which maybe we did a lot during COVID in particular, but you know I think it happens. People are busy and relationships take time so we do lose touch with people. And we like the idea of reconnecting but we want the other person to reach out. We’re very real, we don’t want the discomfort and the know the you know what’s going to happen so we don’t want to be the one to reach out. So yeah my colleague Lara Acknin and I did a series of studies and we just had a really hard time moving that needle.

There’s other research finding that when you do reach out to someone they really appreciate it, you know, and I think people realize that that if someone reached out to you that it would feel really good, but still we have this reluctance. But in particular with workplace relationships, I know there’s a little bit of research on dormant ties and how we actually tend to, I mean, I guess in general, people that we don’t know as well tend to have information that we don’t have because they’re less similar to us than the

people we’re working with all the time or the people we’re really close to. We kind of have the same ideas, the same perspectives, so the people we don’t know as well have access to new information. And so I know there’s a study in terms of the workplace that if you need advice or ideas to help solve a problem, that people are more likely to get it from reactivating a dormant tie than from talking to someone that they’re currently working with.

That’s food for thought.

Bruce D
Well, I really liked the fact that you said there as well, there’s something in us that when we’re talking to someone who’s a weak tie, because we don’t necessarily have the same area of special special specialization as them, we sort of listen a bit more attentively to what they’re saying, you know, like that, they’re not doing the same work stuff. So we activate a bit more curiosity. And that seems to be an important element of this as well.

Gillian
That’s right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gillian
Absolutely, yeah, and there’s a few studies showing that it’s linked to creativity as well because where does creativity come from? It comes from piecing together little bits of information and we tend to get those little bits of different kinds of information from talking to people we know less well. So there’s research showing that people, it’s not just that people think they’re more creative, their supervisors actually say that they’re more creative, the people who have more connections with weak ties in the workplace.

Bruce
I’d love to sort of have a perspective of someone’s thinking, you know what, I want to do a bit more of this and make an effort. And I most definitely, I adored your book and I’ve made an effort. I a wonderful discussion with someone I gave blood to the other day. I was having great discussions with people all week. Wonderful. But if someone wanted to sort of give themselves a few nudges or, you know, what are the actions, the nudges that any of us could take?

Gillian
Hmm. I mean, I think there’s opportunity. think the first step is noticing, right? Noticing that there are opportunities all around us. So I think we maybe fail to notice that there are opportunities all around us. And that is something that we can learn to do better to spot these opportunities. And then there’s sort of baby steps. Like if people are anxious or worried, you can kind of work your way up. So you can start by just making eye contact with people, smiling at people.

to smile and nod because if you just smile people might think you’re just a smiley person but if you smile and nod I think they know that you’re smiling at them. I play a little game on the on the escalator when I get on and off the tube and I try to make eye contact with someone going the opposite direction and see if I can get anyone to smile back at me. It’s surprisingly hard because people aren’t paying attention right but that’s just like a way to try and make it fun for me and spread a little joy. So yeah you can work your way up to

this mile and nod and then you can work up to a greeting and then you can, you know, eventually work your way up to sharing a few words. And I think you can choose certain situations that are easier than others. So something that’s time constrained might be a bit less scary. You know, if you’re buying your coffee, there’s a very small window of time and then you’re just going to walk out the door. So it’s not that scary. You know, you can just give it a try and know that you can walk away and not…

Yeah, have it stay with you for the rest of the day if it doesn’t go well, which it probably will. So.

Bruce
Yeah, as someone who lives in London, even though I was deeply sympathetic to your book, there were moments in it where I was like, I don’t want someone to have a conversation with me right now. I was on the Tube somewhere, I was like, I’m too busy, I’ve got too much going on, I don’t want to talk. But like, I was looking for moments to have conversations along the way. every moment needs to be right for you, I guess.

Gillian
No, absolutely, yeah, not saying that people should be talking to all the people all the time. But I think sometimes the very moments where we feel like we don’t want to have the conversation are the ones where they can be most valuable. So, you know, it’s kind of an ironic thing about us humans that when we’re feeling a bit down or feeling a bit lonely, instead of reaching out, we tend to withdraw. We tend to want to be, you know, you know, inside our own heads. And those are probably the moments when we most benefit from having.

a little chat. So I talk to people on the tube all the time. Partly it’s a coping mechanism because I’m very much an introvert and so if I get on the tube I mean it’s noisy, it’s crowded, it’s hot, summer, winter, doesn’t matter, it’s hot. And so I will turn to the person sitting next to me and have a little chat because that helps me shut out everything else. And then you know it’s not it’s not fun being on the tube right? Like you’re probably rushing off somewhere, you feel like you’re in a hurry of a million things.

to do and yet you’re stuck there. But it helps feel like I’ve spent that time well, you know, I haven’t spent it…

getting anxious about what I have to do when I get off or I haven’t spent it thinking, you know, why have we stopped in the middle of a tunnel again? I’m just able to enjoy the moment and then have that energy to take with me to the next thing. So I think there’s a kind of ironic thing. You know, if you’re waiting in a queue somewhere, you can get really frustrated and stress about your to-do list or you can have a chat with someone and either way.

Yeah, either way you’re not getting something done while you’re waiting in that queue. But I think if you come away from it with that bit of energy, that spark from having a nice conversation, your to-do list is gonna feel a bit less daunting. You’re not gonna go back to that same feeling of stress. So I think there’s a bit of an ironic thing.

Bruce
Before we started, I mentioned to you that stat, which is that the biggest predictor of workplace engagement is having a friend at work. one of the things we can often find, I think you’ve mentioned it along the way here, is that people say, yeah, I don’t want my work colleagues to be my friends. I don’t want them to be my best friends. And this research by a researcher called Jeffrey Hall, and he says, you know, he’s trying to put a number on it. said like, you know, 200 hours worth of connection is what it takes to become a really close friend with someone.

Bruce
And you’ve got perspective on that, guess, which is to me suggests like that we shouldn’t be seeing friends as like these binary categories. Can you give me your take on how we should be thinking about friends and friendship connection?

Gillian
I mean, I guess I’m not saying anything so different, but I try to point out that all the relationships that you have are valuable in some way and you don’t have to turn everybody into a best friend. It’s very, like you said, it’s very helpful to have a best friend. But

there’s value in just having a one-off conversation with a stranger and walking away. is still value to be had there. And I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that we try to hold on to tight. Sometimes we think, we just had a nice conversation. We should exchange numbers and get together again. And, and if you want to, that’s great. but I don’t think you should feel like you have to and acquaintances, you know, once people are sort of more, you know, they’re known to you, but you’re not

that close to them. If you’d like to turn them into a closer friend, that’s great. But I don’t think you should feel like you have to, you know, there’s value in having, you know, a network of acquaintances, we get value from all those relationships without feeling, we shouldn’t feel the need to turn them into something else.

Bruce
There was a TikToker who was posting at the end of last year that was sort of adjacent to this. She was trying to make a friend a day. And I guess when we’re constantly told about either elective isolation or loneliness, the thing that she, I think, demonstrated, it’s sort of like a vivid coming to life of what you’ve written here, is that actually we’re surrounded with potential friends or we’re surrounded with people we could connect with. And even though

Bruce
We’re told that there’s a disconnection crisis and our lives at times might be feel like suffering from disconnection. Actually, we’ve got the resources in all of our lives to actually sort of bridge out of that. So I really sort of saw that and felt that these things, these philosophies can be sort of life enhancing, life changing in a very gentle way.

the thing I guess, yeah.

Gillian
think it gives people permission too. Like people have told me that they feel like this message is telling them it’s okay that I have the people in my life that I do. I shouldn’t feel bad about not having, you know…

For example, in the media, you know, there’s been some articles about having that group of friends, you know, we kind of idealize, you know, the group of six on the show friends and everybody thinks, why don’t I have that friendship group? And it’s okay if you don’t. So, yes, we need to have some close relationship. I’m not saying that this replaces other things, but I think it can enhance it, right? I think we can have loads of social connections, small social connection that that also contributes to our well-being, not just these really close ones and you can feel okay about the social relationships that you have.

Bruce
So talking strangers makes us happier. The people we talk to tend to enjoy it more than we realize and like us more than we realize. Even just the connections with people that we don’t necessarily know serve to make us happier in our lives. A lot of your, the writing in your book is based on your own research and the research of sort of adjacent people. You’ve mentioned early research that you, or you said you’re doing other stuff and I’d love to know.

Where you go next on this? What are you researching next? What’s the, you mentioned some sort of unpublished research, but what are you looking at next about this?

Gillian
Yeah, a few different things going on. have a terrific postdoc working with me. Her name is Taylor West and we’ve been doing a big project trying to understand what sort of more societal benefits we might see if people were to talk to strangers more often. So most of the research so far has focused on like, how do you benefit if you were to reach out and talk to people and how do they benefit? But we’re trying to look at more broadly, does it benefit our communities if people feel, you know,

they’re able to have these conversations. So that’s one thing. I’ve been more interested in interested in digging more into rejection. So I hope what I’m going to find and what I’m finding so far, but it’s early days, is that not only do we get rejected by strangers less often than we expect, but that it doesn’t feel as bad as we think it will. So rejection from, you know, someone that we’re really close to is obviously, you know, really

devastating. And so we probably take that with us into our expectations with strangers. But when a stranger rejects you, they don’t know you. It’s not personal. And so I suspect that it doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as we expect. And hopefully that’s, you know, yet another encouragement to be brave and reach out. And then I’ve been working with some colleagues in Turkey. We’re just about to start up a giant project collecting data.

over the world. So we’ve been finding, you know, that talking to strangers and weak ties, which is these little acquaintances like the hot dog lady, that those are related to well-being. And we found that mostly in North America, also the UK, and then my colleagues are in Turkey. So we found it there. But we’d really like to know if it’s a general thing. And so we’ve recruited, invited people to help us all over the world. So we have 60 or 70 different countries,

Gillian
and we’re going to look at whether greeting and thanking and chatting with people is associated with well-being everywhere and what kind of macro level factors might explain that. So I’m very excited about that.

Bruce
I’m really grateful for the chance to chat to you and just remind us your book, what’s the book called?

Gillian
called Once Upon a Stranger.

Bruce D
Well, strong recommendation from me. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.