The Case for Talking to Strangers

A Little More Social, University of Chicago professor Nicholas Epley’s book that can help repair our frayed civic fabric, opens with a hat story.

Riding a commuter train, Epley watches a woman in an elegant red hat take the last open seat beside him. Around them, passengers sit with “heads bowed in silence on the hunt for their own isolated acreage of solitude.” Then Epley says, “I love your hat.” She lights up. Thirty minutes of conversation follow — about families, jobs, and “how often we choose to ignore each other” in situations like this.

Epley’s paradox is simple: we are “social creatures whose happiness, health, and success depend” on other people, yet we are often reluctant to reach out in ways that positively connect us with them.

Through theory and empirical studies, Epley teaches us that our “overly pessimistic expectations about how others will respond” to our efforts to be social keep us from “doing good for others” and, in the process, “ourselves.”

Epley is not asking the socially awkward among us to operate hospitality wagons or engage in endless small talk. He wants us to notice the habitual reactions that keep us from helping build a more civil society.

Introverts might worry that Epley is asking them to transform themselves into extroverts. But Epley takes social anxiety seriously, drawing on clinical research to insist that the cure is not reassurance but exposure; anxious people “don’t think their way into feeling better; they feel their way to thinking better.”

The book’s first part is weakened by an overemphasis on studies of the benefits of extroversion. Introversion and extroversion can be fluid labels, as David Hume might have pointed out, and Epley’s best advice does not require extroversion. So, introverts, read on.

Reading A Little More Social reminded me of the years I flew Southwest. Weekly travel brought “A-list” status, and one woman flying regularly on the same route often stood near me in line. At first, she was only a famil…