Does talking to a stranger make a commute more positive than keeping to yourself?

Details

Researchers instructed commuters to connect with a nearby stranger, remain disconnected, or commute as usual. On both trains and buses, participants who connected reported a more positive experience than those who did not, without reporting lower productivity.

Separate participants asked to predict these experiences expected the opposite: they thought solitude would be more positive. Related experiments suggested that this mistaken preference came partly from underestimating other people’s interest in connecting, which could keep people from learning what such interactions are actually like.

A separate laboratory waiting-room experiment also examined the experience of being approached. Participants who were talked to had experiences reported as equally positive as those instructed to start talking. This suggests that the positive experience was not limited to initiators in that setting; it does not establish that both roles are equivalent in every context.

The central finding is a gap between expected and reported experiences of connecting with strangers in these settings. The abstract does not provide sample sizes or the size of the benefit, so its magnitude and broader applicability remain uncertain.