The world would be a better place if we talked to strangers

“Hello . . . ”

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The woman in the grocery store, full-length down jacket, permed hairdo, arm-length shopping list, zettawatt focus, is trundling a grocery cart maxed to the rim with pretty boxes of panettone, the giant bready cupcake-shaped Milanese fruitcake that appears at Christmas. She is cruising the dairy aisle but her basket is overflowing with panettone, and if you are someone who wants or even needs to talk to strangers, a basketful of panettone is all the inspiration you need. “Can I ask you,” a man, a complete stranger steering his own cart at right angles to the woman, says, “what do you do with all that panettone?”

“I give it away,” the woman says, without a moment’s hesitation, as if being spoken to by an unknown guy in the dairy aisle is the most natural event in the world, as if, in fact, she has been waiting all her life to be asked such a question. She smiles broadly. “People love it.”

“But do you toast it first?” the man says. By now a small aneurysm of shoppers has coagulated in front of the chilled shelves of heavy cream and buttermilk.

“No, it’s quite soft.”

Whereupon another random shopper, another woman, joins the impromptu chatfest. “It makes really delicious French toast!” she declares, eliciting oohs and mmms of wonder from all.

“Well, thank you,” Stranger Man says. The conversation dissipates as quickly as its participants scatter to the cheese and cereal aisles. They are all slightly but benignly smiling. Some faint elation has dusted down and graced their day.

A new year seems to encourage random chatting. Time is turning over, and anything seems possible. Strangers are pushed into one another’s orbits unexpectedly as they celebrate and then recover. And while a recent New York Times poll found family gatherings are being shortened to avoid political fights, there is actually a (growing) movement that encourages people to talk to unknown passersby. In the fractured, war-soaked, propaganda-wrapped, technologically siloed, permanently argumentative and deeply unfixable world we inhabit these days, talking to strangers turns out to be an escape hatch.

“Is that book any good . . . ”

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You would be surprised how many books and articles and essays and websites are dedicated to the subject of talking to strangers. Ian Williams, the Giller Prize-winning novelist, recently published What I Mean to Say, his Massey Lectures, on the subject. “We need to address the deterioration of civil and civic discourse,” Mr. Williams writes, while noting how many contemporary topics are banned or off-limits or avoided as too difficult (politics, race, religion, privilege, gender, education on and off campus, etc. ad nauseam). It’s an excellent book.

Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Talking to Strangers (2019) is less about talking to them than it is about making narrow and sometimes deadly assumptions that stop us from knowing our fellow citizens. The careful, respectful curiosity required to talk to a stranger is a staple ingredient of democracy as well.

The American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once wrote an essay about talking to strangers: He witnessed a young woman crying on her phone, but because he had his own phone to hide in, “to avoid the work of being present,” did not speak to her. He regretted his decision. Being attentive to others is not a requirement of life, Mr. Foer wrote. But “it is what we get in exchange for having to die.”

Still, for all the attention the subject gets in writing, we talk to strangers less and less. In 1964, according to the Chicago National Opinion Research Center, 53 per cent of Americans believed “most people” could be trusted. By 2002 that number had plunged to 35 per cent. Two decades later, other surveys reveal that 70 per cent of Americans trust each other less than ever. Only one in five Canadians talk to strangers. They are three times happier than those who don’t, according to researchers at Simon Fraser University.

“It’s easier on an elevator,” a young stranger explained to me on the subway the other day. “Because you know you’re going to be able to get off soon.” She was in her late 20s, South Asian and took her earphones off to chat. She didn’t make a habit of talking to people on the subway. “That kind of social behaviour is not something people do any more.” Pause. “It’s easier for me to talk to the aged,” she said. “Because they’re of a generation where that kind of thing was more generalized.” I haven’t noticed that in my seven decades on Earth, but we conversed for four stops before she got off the subway and our conversation slid shut.

“I love your dress. Where did you buy it . . . ”

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In 2022, Gillian Sandstrom, a Canadian psychologist at the University of Sussex, published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in which she revealed people can be trained to overcome their fear of talking to strangers. A total of 286 subjects were split into a control and an experimental group. The experimental group played a scavenger hunt-like game that required them to talk to strangers every day for a week. They kept diaries, both in the morning as to how they expected their encounters to go and in the afternoon to record how they actually fared.

“People are remarkably pessimistic about the prospect of talking to strangers,” Dr. Sandstrom and her fellow researchers concluded. But “by the end of the study, participants in our treatment group reported significantly more positive attitudes toward talking to strangers.” Daily practice made them less shy. “One of the things we get from talking to strangers or even people we don’t know very well,” Dr. Sandstrom told me recently, “is that you’re more likely to be surprised. There’s more novelty than you get from the people you talk to all the time, who share your opinions and watch the same shows.” Surprise is our reward for daring to overcome our loneliness. And chronic loneliness, Dr. Sandstrom is quick to point out, “reduces human mortality.”

A self-proclaimed introvert, Dr. Sandstrom became interested in talking to strangers when she was casting for a Ph.D subject and realized how much she cared about certain casual acquaintances – notably the woman who operated a hot dog cart on the campus of Toronto Metropolitan University, where she was a student at the time.

Their passing encounters imparted “a sense of belonging that I didn’t get in the same way from my fellow students,” Dr. Sandstrom remembered. “And it made me think about how I had other people like that in my life – people I didn’t really know very well and would never, you know, have over for dinner, but who made me feel safe in my community. I started to realize how important they were.”

Her first conversation with a complete stranger took place on the Toronto subway. “I saw this woman carrying a beautiful cupcake and I asked her about the cupcake. And by the end of the conversation, she taught me that people can ride ostriches. You know, I didn’t need to know that. But it was delightful.” Their random conversation had no discernible value, but felt important anyway. Try running that algorithm.

Dr. Sandstrom grew up watching her father, a high-school teacher, talk to every stranger he encountered. He maintained a stable of well-practised opening lines, such as asking a five-year-old if she was 16. “Kids can get shy. But if you say something a little bit crazy, they have to tell you you’re wrong,” Dr. Sandstrom said. He was exceptionally observant, deft at turning a noticed detail into an encounter.

She more recently helped found Talk to a Stranger Week, which took place in November in Toronto under the auspices of the GenWell Project, an outreach program aimed at relieving depression and chronic loneliness. Half of all seniors and 75 per cent of people with mental-health issues claim to suffer from crippling solitude. More than 100 studies have established that loneliness can shorten a human lifespan.

“Can you believe how much carrots cost these days . . . ”

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It is no surprise that talking to strangers has become a rare habit: Civil discourse in general is on life support. One need only turn to social media to grasp how uncivil public conversation can be. No wonder institutes to repair public discourse have sprung up like weeds across North America: There’s one at Vanderbilt University, another at Duke, and others still (to cite just a handful) at Columbia, at the State University of New York at Binghamton (where the Center for Civic Engagement offers a course in the principles of conversation), at the University of Alberta and at the University of Toronto.

Novelist Randy Boyagoda is the chair of the U of T’s Working Group on Civil Discourse, which has met regularly since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Prof. Boyagoda is a staunchly reasonable and rational guy who speaks in complete, complex sentences. “I don’t think anyone would disagree that following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing military campaign in Gaza and elsewhere”– note his even-handedness – ”the university campuses in Canada and elsewhere have been convulsed by the intensity with which people with different viewpoints have wanted their voices to be heard, maybe too much to the exclusion of others.” But even before Oct. 7, “it has been difficult for people to feel willing and able to raise dissenting questions productively.”

Prof. Boyagoda attributes our intolerance to a spate of causes, notably the omnipresence of technology and the effect of the pandemic on a generation of students that spent three years glued to screens and is not used to dealing with spitting-mad human beings in the flesh. The very idea of civil discourse has taken a beating as well – ”the idea that it can be itself chilling, controlling, determinative of who’s willing or not to speak, based on who’s secure,” i.e. privileged.

The solution, Prof. Boyagoda claims, is two-pronged. First, “assign the best of intentions to the other person.” Then assume the mantle of “epistemic humility. I don’t necessarily know everything about this subject,” Prof. Boyagoda says, “or about this person I’m talking to. And by virtue of acknowledging that at the front, I create a space to learn more about the other person.”

Which, when you think about it, is what happens when someone starts a conversation with a stranger. You dare to open a door the stranger can take or refuse as they wish. When the overture works – when a conversation, however brief, transports you to a place you never expected to visit – a small but intense thrill ensues.

Some people call this grace. Joseph Wiebe, the director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta, calls it platonic. Dr. Wiebe believes the collapse of public institutions and the atomization of social life that Robert Putnam famously described 30 years ago in Bowling Alone have been further encouraged by online life (though research is split on this subject). “Our experience online is so individually tailored and targeted that it becomes harder and harder to see what we have in common. And so we become our own authority. That’s why our disagreements are so terrifying. We align ourselves so personally with a position that a disagreement becomes about me, not about my opinion or my argument.”

But there are moments when we inadvertently slip free of our identities, which is what happens when you have a successful chat with a stranger. This is that moment of grace, that briefly freeing burst of elation. “My whole life is trying to replicate that experience,” Dr. Wiebe said. “Plato’s whole point in writing The Republic was to recreate Socrates’s conversations about the good, because that way you have the highest and most mysterious experience of the divine. The experience of elation you get after a good conversation is an experience of the divine – an experience of insight about yourself in the presence of another that makes you feel good. What you’re describing has a long history. It’s that experience of being part of something outside yourself, and therefore greater than yourself. And it’s not an experience you have by yourself. You have to be invited” – hence the stranger – ”and you need to make yourself ready to be in the presence of the divine.” Hence noticing details you can talk about to someone you don’t know.

I had been trying to talk to strangers wherever I went, but I often lost my nerve. There was, for instance, one morning on the subway, the lavish woman with the false eyelashes and the French manicured nails wearing boots that consisted of thick slabby white rubber soles at the bottom of long, thigh-high sleeves of black pleather. I wanted to know if the boots were waterproof, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I was afraid she’d think I was a perv, but I was genuinely curious to know if the design of the boots was as effective as it was striking. Nor could I work up the gumption to talk to the guy who spent five minutes staring at a picture of a hamburger on his phone. I was standing behind him. I could’ve said, “you must be hungry,” but I didn’t.

Every time I couldn’t bring myself to talk to a stranger I felt a little less alive, as if something small but valuable, some kernel of courage, had slipped through my fingers forever. Research suggests people are afraid to talk to strangers for two main reasons: fear of having nothing to say in an awkward silence, and fear of rejection. “People are nervous, or socially anxious, or maybe tired after a long day, or maybe don’t speak English very well,” Dr. Sandstrom told me. “We don’t know why people might not want to talk. That’s why I’ve learned not to take it personally.”

But this is true: The more stabs I took at stranger talk, the more successful they were.

On the streetcar one afternoon, I found myself standing beside a young mother with a baby in a stroller. The mother was dressed in the rough-elegant style that is so popular these days: Blundstones, a fine tweed overcoat, maroon flood-length corduroys. Meanwhile the baby was alert to everything happening on the streetcar: dinging bells, sliding doors, announcements, onlookers.

“That’s a very watchful baby you have there,” I said.

“He’s been like that since the day he was born,” his mother said. He was seven months old.

“Obviously a city baby, then. Used to the bustle.”

“He is. I am not. I find the city overwhelming.”

“This city?” I said, remembering how dead and dull Toronto was when I arrived decades ago.

“Oh, yeah. The GTA? You don’t find it insane?”

She’d grown up in the country, outside Ottawa. We chatted for a while about places we’d lived, why we liked them. My stop was coming up. “What’s his name?” I asked.

“Walter.”

“What a great name. Old-fashioned.”

“They’re coming back.” She paused. “He’s named for his great-grandfather.” She seemed ever so slightly proud as she said it. I wondered who he had been to have earned so great an honour, a nod of recognition from the future. Then I stepped off the car into the grey winter afternoon.