Talking to strangers

There is a decent amount of real research on talking to strangers, and almost none of it reaches the people it would help, because it gets flattened into advice lists on the way. The findings are more interesting than the advice: the barrier is mostly a wrong prediction, not a missing skill. People are liked more than they think, enjoy these conversations more than they expect, and want to talk about more than they attempt.

It matters who is writing this, so: nobody here is a psychologist. We have not run a study and we are not qualified to advise anybody. What this section does is read the papers and report them — what was found, on whom, and what it fails to show. Where we add a suggestion of our own, and we do, it is marked as ours rather than blended in with the evidence.

One caveat belongs at the top rather than buried. Nearly all of this research was done on spoken conversation, face to face, with names attached — trains, dormitories, laboratories. This site is anonymous text. We think most of it carries across, and we say so on each page where we are extending a finding past the setting it was measured in.

One difference is not a matter of degree, though. Every study here begins with two people already talking. Online there is a step before that: people choose who to write to from a list they can filter by gender, age, country and language. Nothing in this literature covers being picked — so when a message goes unanswered, none of the research below is what explains it, and we say so where it comes up.

• Why is small talk so hard for some people? Not a missing skill — a wrong prediction. People expect talking to a stranger to go badly, and it reliably goes better than they expected. What the research actually found, and what it doesn't claim.
• Am I boring to talk to? You are the worst-placed person to judge this, and there is research on exactly why. What the liking gap is, how far it goes, and what it does not promise you.
• Does talking to strangers actually help with loneliness? Partly, and not in the way the question usually means. What the evidence supports, what it doesn't, and why we would rather say so than tell you what you want to hear.
• What do you say to start a conversation with a stranger? The opener matters far less than people think, and the only reliable failure is not sending one. Three shapes that work in text, one that doesn't, and the move that matters more than any of them.
• Good questions to ask someone you just met Not a list of fifty openers. The research singles out one kind of question — the follow-up — so every example here is one, with the evidence for why that is the part that works.
• What to do when the conversation goes quiet A pause is usually a turn boundary, not a verdict. Two moves that work better than reaching for a new topic — and why typed silence is a different problem with no solution.
• How do you get past small talk? People expect deep conversation to be awkward and unwelcome, and it is consistently less awkward than they predict — because they underestimate how much a stranger will care. The strongest finding here.
• How do you end a conversation politely? Almost nobody ends a conversation when they wanted to, and far more often both people wanted out earlier than either admitted. Why leaving is not the rejection it feels like.
• How to talk to strangers when you have social anxiety The one study that tested whether the fear can actually be moved, what it found after a week, and the clear line between that and treatment for a condition that needs a doctor.
• How to chat with strangers anonymously and stay anonymous What anonymity actually requires: what a site must not hold, and the things you give away yourself that no site can protect you from. Written about how this one is built.

The pages run in that order for a reason — each one ends by pointing at the next — but they stand alone, so start wherever the question you actually have is. What the site itself is, and what it keeps, is on the house rules and the privacy notice.