Science Says: Have Deeper Conversations

I want to ask you an intimate question. And yes, that is a threat.

PSA: This article is going to be awesomely nerdy, so let me take the excuse to make a relevant announcement…I have recently come on as the Research Director for the social health nonprofit SeekHealing. We are working on a study to study the effects of community-based connection practices on loneliness, social isolation, and health.

I am VERY excited to get this data, and of course will be talking about much of it here! However - if you want to get the earliest results and/or make tax-deductible donations to the project, please support our research fundraiser: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/seekhealing/cultivating-belonging-through-measurable-connection

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

---

My mom has a knack for making friends. A knack that, even as a 33-year-old, makes me put my hand over my eyes and groan, “Mooooooom!”

No matter where she is, she turns to strangers and asks them some inappropriately deep question. Then she tells them something inappropriately deep about herself. And then…before I’m done squirming in embarrassment…

…they’re friends?

My mom knows people all over the world. Multiple times, she has ended up on a plane to Thailand or Uzbekistan or Vietnam (traveling just for fun), gotten into a conversation, and ended up staying at that person’s house a few days later. People just fall in love with her, this tiny woman with a giant spirit and no social filters.

She upends all the rules. And somehow, it works.

There are two mysteries in this equation.

One, why do we believe that instigating deep conversation with strangers is not going to go over well, when Mom uses those techniques to make more friends than any one person can keep?

Two, why, even though I have been a communications teacher for 13 years specifically focusing on authenticity and vulnerability, do I get the squirmies about that degree of openness?

In other words: does social stranger danger exist? And if it doesn’t, why are our brains so convinced it do?

In this article, we’ll:

• Explore a wonderful study that tests the perception vs the reality of deep conversation

• Have an interview with mom on the upsides, downsides, and genesis of her openness

• Open up a pandora’s box of future questions on why, how, and when vulnerability can become more a part of our lives.

Is It Weird and Awkward to Get Real With Strangers?

I have to thank my new friend Floris Van Vugt, who runs the Human Connection Science Lab at the University of Montreal (Yes, wtf, I didn’t know it existed either), as the impetus for this piece. He sent me a wonderful article that documents a series of experiments on vulnerability with strangers. I’ll be quoting this a lot here, so I want to give attribution to the authors Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley for their research.

To quote the article’s abstract:

We hypothesized that people systematically underestimate how caring and interested distant strangers are in one’s own intimate revelations and that these miscalibrated expectations create a psychological barrier to deeper conversations. As predicted, conversations between strangers felt less awkward, and created more connectedness and happiness, than the participants themselves expected.

Translation: we expect people to be less interested in our vulnerability than they actually are. Thinking they’re not interested stops us from sharing, which keeps us from deeper conversations.

Kardas, Kumar, and Epley ran a series of experiments to test their hypothesis.

Depth Perception vs Depth Reality

Imagine you’re a financial executive at a management conference. You walk into a session, expecting a talk or workshop on a topic you’re familiar with. The room is full of strangers. But that doesn’t matter, because you won’t be interacting, right?

The speaker tells you to open up your computer or phone and scan a link. You read (paraphrased): “You are going to be randomly paired with another attendee here who you do not know. We will ask you to answer or discuss 4 questions:

1. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? Tell the other participant about it.

2. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

3. If you were going to become a close friend with the other participant, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

4. Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?”

Prior to making you interact, the page asks you to rate your expectations of the interaction. How interested do you think you’ll be in the other person’s answers? How interested do you think they’ll be in hearing yours? How awkward will this be? How happy will you be that you did it?

Needless to say, this was not the session you expected. You look nervously at the exit. But before you can escape, you’re paired up and given a card with the questions. For 10 minutes, you have a discussion you probably never expected to have at a management conference.

Then, you go back to your seat and report on how it was.

The Results