‘You talking to me?” asked Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, in a question that has echoed down the decades since the 1976 movie. Bickle was an alienated loner who struggled to connect with others. “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” noted Funny Girl’s Fanny Brice a few years earlier.
But not all people are lucky. With one-person households comprising a quarter of the total, and various technological and epidemiological factors at work to keep us apart, people need people more than ever. Overseas, the trend is the same, with an American Enterprise Institute survey in 2021 reporting that 12% of Americans say they have no close friends (compared with 3% in 1990).
If Bickle and Brice had had the findings of an experiment by Harvard Business School doctoral student Hanne Collins and a team of researchers to hand, their thinking on the subject might have been a lot more results-oriented. The title of the researchers’ paper is a rough paraphrase of Brice’s words: “Relational Diversity in Social Portfolios Predicts Wellbeing”.
So what exactly is “relational diversity”? It’s academic speak for interacting with a wider variety of people in your life.
“There’s two elements of relational portfolio diversity,” Collins says. “One is the richness. That’s the number of categories of relationships that you’re talking to – family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, etc. And the other part is the evenness. Say you had 10 conversations yesterday. A very low relationally diverse situation would be if eight of those were with your romantic partner and two were with a friend.”
A more even scenario would be if you had conversations with colleagues, friends, your romantic partner, strangers and parents. Talking with eight people in your open-plan office doesn’t count.
The great news is this interaction can be incredibly beneficial, she says, and even “weak links” can boost your wellbeing. According to the research, positive effects include a lower risk of mortality, reduced susceptibility to the common cold, feeling happier, and “enhanced social learning”. It’s the emotional equivalent of all those “just a few minutes’ exercise a day can protect you from heart disease” stories.
Asked to expand on the benefits, Collins concedes that wellbeing is a “beastly construct”, but says measures used included self-reported life satisfaction; self-reported quality of life; overall happiness “during the past 24 hours”; as well as in-the-moment reports of positive emotion, negative emotion and happiness. Measured against another traditional gauge of wellbeing, the research showed that having a more relationally diverse social portfolio is about as beneficial as being married.
Weak ties matter
The study itself is clearly relatable, having drawn media interest from around the world. “It’s not obvious, but it’s not counterintuitive,” says Collins, explaining the appeal. “It also empowers you to take action in a way that you didn’t know how to before.”
More subtly, she notes, “we relate to certain types of people very differently across these categories. What we’re picking up on is that relating to different people in different ways, and having a diversity of that, seems good.”
And you can take advantage of this, no matter what your personal circumstances. Someone living in the Hokianga, for instance, may have fewer opportunities for an even range of contacts than someone living in central Wellington. What if you work from home? What if you live in the middle of nowhere?
“Maybe you call a family member, or you call a friend while driving home from work to just have a chat,” says Collins. “You could diversify in that way. Almost everyone has some power to do this. Maybe when I’m at the grocery store, I talk to the clerk. Or instead of calling the same person that I call all the time, maybe reach out to another acquaintance.”
What is it about a diverse range of contacts that is good for us? Collins has some theories.
“Social portfolio diversity is associated with increased emotional diversity. So people are experiencing many more types of emotions and have this more rich emotional ecosystem, which has been shown in previous work to relate to wellbeing.”
And the study has led Collins to further speculation about the benefits of the weaker links. “There’s a lot of different kinds of support: informational support, financial support, emotional support. We receive different types of support from different people in our network. Closer ties are more likely to provide emotional support. It’s possible that having this socially diverse portfolio gives us different places to turn for different types of support.” People, you will recall, need people.
Equally intriguing is another pet theory she has. “There’s research on the extent to which people experience ‘status variance’ across their interactions.”
Status what? Collins gives the example of a successful CEO who is also the worst player on his company’s weekend basketball team. “He doesn’t have status in that context. The extent to which people’s status varies across their relationships is good for them.”
It helps them see things from different perspectives. That means no going easy on the boss if they happen to be in your team – it’s not good for them.
These conclusions align with numerous other studies. Collins describes one by Mario Small, a sociology researcher who did a lot of work looking at students and who they turn to for different types of support. “Traditional theory would suggest that when we have emotional turmoil, we turn to our strong ties. Small found that the students actually turned to people who they had maybe just met when they were going through a really hard time.”
A possible explanation is that the weak ties don’t have a stake in the outcome, whereas family members might have agendas guiding their advice. Fellow students also have enough in common to be empathetic.
Increasing our range of human contact could be life-changing without much effort. “I think of the small micro decisions you could make that might make you happier,” says Collins. “Maybe calling someone when you’re just sitting there, or saying yes to coffee with someone you don’t really know. This is me; I try to do this now.
“To the extent that little micro decisions can maximise your happiness and help you enjoy the day to day, this could be a small, powerful change people can make in their lives.”
Apart from the global publicity, which doesn’t seem to have gone to her head, and the increased coffee consumption, has it changed Collins’ life?
“I consider myself fairly introverted, but I also really like talking to people. Then I have the anxiety of: should I talk to them or not? But I have implemented this in my life. I don’t have to go to big parties that make me stressed, but through the day, I can create moments of connection. That makes it feel very manageable for me.”
She also signed up for a guitar class: “It was actually a fabulous experience. Every week, I went into this room, and I met these people. Our lives don’t really intersect, but we’ve created a way to have connection. And that was really lovely.”
Vary your chat diet
Once we accept that we need to relate to a greater diversity of people for our own well-being, the question arises: how? What can we do to make those valuable connections? Will we all have to take guitar lessons?
Fortunately, no. After all, every friend we have was once a stranger, and the world is full of strangers who, although they may not become buddies, can become part of our portfolio of socially diverse contacts.
Joe Keohane has made this a mission. The New York writer is the author of The Power of Strangers: The benefits of connecting in a suspicious world, a book whose title accepts that the process is not straightforward. He describes many experiments in getting people to talk to strangers. Across the globe, the sequence and results are consistent.
“Almost uniformly, people regard the prospect of talking to strangers with dread,” says Keohane. “When you put people in a position to talk to strangers on the subway, which we’re not supposed to do, it really freaks them out.
“They think it’s going to go badly and they’re going to get rejected, especially if they’re violating a social norm: ‘People are going to think I’m a psychopath. Someone’s going to murder me.’”
This belief seems to persist despite clear evidence that the subway is packed with people not doing harm to one another. And willing to talk to strangers.
“The research has found again and again that people are shocked at how receptive others are to chatting. And they’re often surprised by their own performance and how well it tends to go.”
Keohane sees the benefits in nutritional terms: “I think of it as like a social diet – in the same way that we have a nutritional diet and it benefits us to have a variety of things. You can’t just eat meat; you can’t just eat broccoli. So, to keep ourselves socially and mentally healthy, it behoves us to have a variety of interactions.”
People don’t just fear physical harm from striking up a conversation. There’s performance anxiety as well. Again, this is largely unfounded.
“One of the main hang-ups that people have about talking to strangers is a fear that they’ll freeze up and they won’t have anything to say.”
It’s not an unreasonable fear, but there are strategies for overcoming it. (See “Talking to a stranger”, page 18.)
Keohane also observes the value of “weak links” and why they work.
“With someone at the store you buy coffee from, you don’t know each other’s names and you only exchange pleasantries, but you recognise each other. That gives people a stronger sense of belonging, a stronger sense of community. It can alleviate feelings of loneliness. All these benefits can come from a deceptively simple interaction.”
Affliction of the young
Researching his book, he discovered some important generational differences.
“Older people are much more comfortable doing this than younger people. And the research shows that younger people are at unprecedented rates of loneliness.
“In the past, the loneliest cohort was senior citizens, and now it’s 18- to 24-year-olds. This has never happened before. And it’s because they’re not in circulation, necessarily.”
Yep – those kids are all on their phones.
“So many times they would say to me: ‘I don’t know how to talk to people.’ They haven’t learnt to do it. They grew up in a world where it wasn’t necessary. They have a really hard time socially. And a lot of professors I talked to said they can’t believe how difficult it is for kids to make friends.
“The generation is viewing this as an issue. The rates of mental illness are through the roof. All these things are connected to loneliness. Political radicalisation can be connected to loneliness. That’s a host of problems that you get when you have a chronically lonely population.”
Ironically, if these strangers talked to each other, they would find they have a lot in common.
“One of the symptoms of loneliness is that you think that you’re the only one going through this,” says Keohane. “That’s what makes it so insidious, and so devastating for people.”
When students in experiments found out there were others in their position, “a lot of them made dates with people and made friends. They felt they were connected to a community and it allowed them to expand their social circle, and also demonstrated that it’s really not that hard.
“This is our nature as hyper-social creatures. The secret to our success as a species is our ability to connect with strangers.”
It would be irresponsible to leave this subject without acknowledging one significant piece of stranger danger: encountering the oversharer.
How to protect yourself when you realise you are a participant in a conversation – well, audience to a monologue – that may never end? Keohane has a fix for that.
“You definitely get them. This is another thing that really stresses people out about talking to strangers: how do I end the conversation? But you can disengage.
“You can just say, ‘Well, listen, it’s been really great talking to you. Have a great day.’ And then you can walk away. People won’t get offended by that.” l
Tips on how to talk to a stranger
It’s one thing to walk the walk, but just how do you talk the talk? Striking up a conversation with strangers is a daunting prospect to many people, but with handy tips from author Joe Keohane and a variety of online sources, you can be chewing a random’s ear off in no time at all:
- Statements, not questions, are a better way to open a conversation.
- Pre-frame statements: “I know I’m not supposed to say this, but …”
- Paraphrasing or echoing what people have said signals you are involved: “It sounds like you’re saying …”
- Smile, but not too much.
- Make eye contact, but not too much. Three to four seconds is okay.
- Give compliments, but not creepy ones. Okay: “That’s a nice shirt.” Not okay: “You have beautiful hands.”
- Research has shown that people respond well to a simple “How are you?”
- Be interested, not interesting. “Really? Tell me more.” Not “Really, well, I think …”
- Ask people questions, but don’t interview them: “Do you know how long the Santa parade has been held here?”
- Try triangulation and refer to a third person or thing: “That Hannibal Lecter float seems a bit out of place in the Santa parade.”
- Find common ground: “I see you think the Hannibal Lecter float is as funny as I do.”
- Be positive. No one likes a grouch (at first, anyway). “This parade is a great thing for kids to enjoy.”
- Ask open questions: “What made you decide to come to the parade today?”
- Focus on current events: “I see the Santa parade is on next week. Do they always have it in February?”
- Share some knowledge (but don’t be a smart arse): “Did you know the oldest Santa parade in the world has been running since 1887?”
- Give the other party an opportunity to display knowledge: “Do you know how long they’ve been having a Santa parade here?”
- Note something you have in common: “Gosh – I can go for days without bumping into someone else wearing a Santa suit.”
- Finally, be brave and speak up. The saying goes that “It is better to remain silent and risk being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt.” Its originator, American author Maurice Switzer, appears to have followed his own advice, which would explain why everyone thinks either Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln said it, and no one today knows who Switzer is.
Superficial chat is a good way to get started, but even deep conversations are probably not as scary as you think, says Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Kumar recently co-authored a study which showed that contrary to people’s expectations, the deeper a conversation goes, the more it contributes to wellbeing.
The experiment behind these findings assigned people to talk to each other about relatively intimate issues, with questions such as: “What do you feel most grateful for in your life?” and “When’s the last time you cried in front of another person?” A lot of people thought this would be really awkward. It wasn’t.
“People underestimate how much others are going to care about or be interested in what they have to say,” says Kumar. From the other person’s perspective, the fact that “you’re trusting them and you’re demonstrating that vulnerability is part of what might produce a more positive reaction”.
Certainly, some people are introverts and other people are extroverts but “those differences have more to do with people’s beliefs than with their actual experiences”, he says. There were no consistent differences based on gender, nor did it matter whether the conversation was in person or by video.
It also turned out that people actually desire more meaningful conversations, says Kumar. “So, it’s not like this is something nobody wants to do.”
A silent scourge
It has been known for a long time that loneliness is a significant issue for many people over 65. But there is a growing awareness that other groups, such as young people and minorities, may be suffering even more.
Surveys carried out by Stats NZ show women are more likely than men to feel lonely at least some of the time. But it is groups such as the unemployed, single parents, young people, Māori and those on low incomes who struggle the most.
Unsurprisingly, loneliness soared during the Covid pandemic, with many countries limiting social interactions and imposing strict lockdowns. But concerns predate the pandemic.
In 2018, the UK government was the first to appoint a “minister for loneliness”, and in 2021, Japan followed suit. The UK’s current minister, Stuart Andrew, has just launched a campaign that aims to reduce the stigma of loneliness by encouraging young people, in particular, to talk about it.
A local charity, Loneliness NZ, was formed in 2018 to help combat the issue here. Its co-founder, management consultant Spencer Scoular, now chairs the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection, an international body that links Loneliness NZ with similar charities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US.
Those involved in the field point out that loneliness and social isolation are not necessarily the same thing. A Treasury report from 2021 noted, for example, that people in rainbow communities reported high rates of social connection, but were also the loneliest group surveyed.
The mental stress caused by loneliness is well understood. But it may have physical effects, too. A study carried out in 2019, for example, appeared to show that social isolation may literally shrink your brain.
The study involved scanning the brains of eight German workers before and after they completed a 14-month stint in Antarctica. The scans showed the part of their brains responsible for spatial thinking and memory shrank by up to 10% during their mission.
Although no follow-up has been reported, the researchers said at the time they didn’t believe the damage would be long-lasting. The hippocampus is known to be highly responsive to stimulation, so it was expected the workers’ brains would grow again once they returned home.
– additional reporting by Listener staff
