Futurity

Listen: To boost your mood, talk to a stranger

Talking to strangers can be intimidating, but it could also boost your well-being. In this podcast episode, an expert explains how.
Two people talking on a bench while eating lunch outside an office building

Talking with strangers may be good for our well-being, Nicholas Epley argues.

“People out in their daily lives aren’t social enough for their own well-being,” says Epley, a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. “They don’t engage in conversations with strangers, for instance, nearly as much as they ought to to maximize their own well-being.”

Epley’s research has focused on the ways our minds understand, or fail to understand, each other. Now, he’s expanded that research to look into why talking to strangers may be the key to better well-being, even if it’s difficult.

“Turns out that people like talking to strangers quite a bit but because they think they’re not going to enjoy it very well, they don’t they don’t do it very often,” says Epley.

“I would say my lab has been consumed over the last few years with this really reliable result that people underestimate how positive others will feel when you reach out to them in a pro-social positive way. And we just find that effect relentlessly⁠—just relentlessly.”

Here, Epley explains his work and how talking to strangers is good for us and why it’s so difficult:

A transcript of the episode is available here.

Source: University of Chicago

The post Listen: To boost your mood, talk to a stranger appeared first on Futurity.

More from Futurity

Futurity3 min read
Team Identifies Protein That Lets Us Feel Cold
Researchers have identified the protein that enables mammals to sense cold, filling a long-standing knowledge gap in the field of sensory biology. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, could help unravel how we sense and suffer from cold te
Futurity3 min readGender Studies
Male Psych Researchers Forget Women In Their Field
When asked to name experts in their field, male psychology researchers are more likely to think of other men—no matter that most psychologists in and out of the academy are women. This difference in memory accessibility could be a significant contrib
Futurity5 min read
Team Unravels How Brain Chemicals Shape Social Decisions
In a new study, scientists delve into the world of dopamine and serotonin to reveal their role in social behavior. The research, conducted in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing brain surgery while awake, homed in on the brain’s substantia nigra,

Related Books & Audiobooks