When we feel bad or lonely or want to communicate with someone, we usually go to our families or friends. So we limit our communication to a small group of people. In such situations, chatting with people we don’t know can be ‘ridiculous’ or ‘scary’ for most of us.
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition found that many people’s ideas about communicating with strangers may not match the facts. Experts have found through experiments that people’s ‘deep conversations’ with strangers make them feel much better than expected.
Deep conversations with strangers make people happy
The researchers found that people’s expectations when interacting with people they don’t know were not consistent with the results. These results were obtained by comparing the ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ conversations people had with strangers and people they were close to in experiments on 1,800 participants.
At first, the participants told the experts what they expected about a ‘deep’ conversation with a person they didn’t know. After the conversation, the participants were asked what really happened and how they felt. This allowed the experts to compare expectations with actual results. As a result of the studies, it was revealed that people underestimated their communication with strangers and felt more connected and happy after their conversations.
Other experiments compared ‘shallow’, i.e., superficial conversations with ‘deep’ conversations, and conversations between close people and strangers. In the reviews here, participants’ expectations for conversations with people close to them were more accurate than those with strangers. This was because they knew that people who knew them closely would be more interested in them.
Interests and expectations can create psychological barriers to conversations
In addition, whether people’s interests and expectations create a psychological barrier to deep conversations with strangers and the opinions of the parties about each other were also examined. “Our experiments also aimed to test whether people systematically belittle other people, show interest in them, and avoid them,” the authors of the article said. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the participants talked about deeper topics when talking to someone they saw as more ‘loving’. This supported the hypothesis of the experts and revealed that psychological barriers may occur in conversations made with a negative expectation.
As a result, the scientists emphasized that these results may vary from culture to culture, and underlined that the quality of life of people is directly proportional to the quality of social relations. For this reason, it was stated in the published study that strong communication with people can be beneficial, and that having more meaningful conversations with a person you do not know instead of having a superficial conversation can yield very positive results.
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