Your colleagues like you more than you realise…

This is Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. I saw a tweet said smoking a cig outside a bar will yield you more dates than every dating app combined. That's sort of today's podcast really. If you follow the newsletter, last year I posted about research conducted by Nick Eppley at the University of Chicago that said that if we talk to strangers, we tend to anticipate the experience will be awful. But it tends to be delightful, tends to be one of the highlights of our day. Nick Eppley's based in Chicago, but I saw that someone in the UK had done adjacent work. Gillian Sandstrom had explored sort of similar themes about strangers and our interactions with maybe people we don't know well or weak ties. One piece of work she did, she got people to record whether they had conversations with people they knew well or people they didn't. She found that both make us happier. There's joy in chatting to strangers. And the challenge is, she found, is that we misjudge these interactions. There's a liking gap where we feel that other people didn't enjoy them as much as we did. Interestingly, it also goes for flatmates and work colleagues. We think people aren't into us. I think if you combine that, there's an interesting phenomenon I talk about in the newsletter today of fubbing, which is sort of phone-based snubbing that some psychologists have attempted to measure. And they've said that those environments where we find ourselves with someone and they get their phone out, quite often we interpret that as a sign that people don't like us or they're not interested in us. That's interesting because I guess if you combine this idea that we don't necessarily think people enjoy our interactions, then we're surrounded with people who appear to be sort of rejecting us, spurning us. It's no wonder that the amount of people saying they've got a friend at work is the lowest level ever. I was really interested in the relevance of all of this for work, of how talking to other people might be a skill that we can develop and actually just makes us happier. Gillian's written a new book called Once Upon a Stranger. It's one of those books where it was genuinely a real favourite of mine and I've recommended it to a couple of people. I think because you can very immediately start applying it in your life and seeing the payoff. Here's my conversation with Gillian Sandstrom. Gillian, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if you could kick off by just introducing who you are and what you do. Yeah, I'm an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, The Science of How Small Talk, I put that in quotes, small talk, because I don't think any talk really has to be small. Anyway, how small talk can add up to a big life. I actually discovered your work through reading some of your academic papers. And so, you know, I was really excited to see that you had this book coming out and imminently and I was delighted to have a chat with you. It strikes me as really interesting because because you've made your way into academia slightly later than some people do, you've managed to combine something which appears from the outside to be your life's passion with also your subject of interest. And I just wonder if you could tell us, maybe with an excursion via your dad, but I wonder if you could tell us how you became so interested in talking to strangers. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. There was no straight line and it's just sort of accidental in a way, you know, just taking what life gives you. But yeah, so I did an undergraduate degree in math and I worked as a computer programmer for 10 years. And I was just feeling like I wasn't, the job wasn't as feeling as meaningful as I was hoping. And, you know, I didn't want to, I couldn't imagine doing that job for another 30 years and looking back and feeling like I'd made the best use of my one life, you know. And looking back now, I think, you know, probably I could have just got a different job in technology and that would have been fine. But at the time, I just decided I needed to make this huge shift. And so I started paying attention to things that I was finding interesting in the world and eventually noticed that there was this common thread of psychology and somehow wrangled my way into doing a master's degree in psychology. I'll leave out some details or this story will be very long. And while I was doing that, so that was on a different topic. It was on the topic of music cognition. So not related to this at all, but I ended up having this relationship with a woman who worked at a hot dog stand. And every time I walked past, this was on the campus where I did my master's degree. It was a very urban location in Toronto, Canada, the biggest city. And I had this relationship with the woman who worked at the hot dog stand. I'd smile and wave at her and she'd smile and wave at me. I don't know how that happened. It wasn't like a deliberate choice. It just sort of happened. And it made me start thinking about how we have all these smaller relationships in our life, smaller, you know, compared to the ones we have with our friends and family. And, you know, I'd never invite the hot dog lady over for dinner or tell her my deepest, darkest secrets. But she made me feel comfortable. She made me feel part of a community. You know, the fact that she recognized me just seemed extremely important. And it made me start thinking about all the other kind of people like that that I had in my life. And that was sort of the starting point. I'll skip a bunch of details, but I ended up doing my PhD in Canada, in Vancouver, in a lab that studies happiness. And, you know, when you do a PhD, you have to kind of find your niche. And my supervisor said, what makes you happy? And what came to mind was the hot dog lady. You know, these little interactions. And yeah, I think a lot of us do MEsearch, you know. I wanted to know, is it just me? Is it a weird thing that I feel that this hot dog lady is so important? Or is it something that is actually important to all of us and maybe more important than we realize? And you'd say in the book that your dad was a huge advocate of talking to strangers. Or, you know, he was your inspiration. Yeah, so my dad is the biggest extrovert and is impossible to embarrass. And he just absolutely loves talking to people and you can't stop him. It's like a compulsion for him. And I, you know, I wondered for a long time why he did it, you know, what he got from it. I never saw him get rejected. Or I don't remember those times, which surely happened every once in a while. But I saw how much he enjoyed it, how much, you know, he'd make people laugh. And it was really useful. You know, if we needed an extra chair at the table at the restaurant, we'd just send dad and he'd go get another chair. It would take him forever because he'd get a story and get talking to the people at the other table, but he would eventually come back with the chair. So I started to see just how, you know, enjoyable and valuable it could be to do this. But I thought I would never do it because I was way too shy. So I thought he had some special skills that I just didn't have. I wonder if we could go into, we'll sort of talk about the delight of talking to strangers in a second. But I wonder if we could just sort of explore some of the things that are often our barriers to talking to strangers that maybe we don't think we're going to enjoy or the other person isn't going to enjoy it. Could you just give us sort of a, you know, a top-line perspective on what we might instinctively believe and what the realities are? Yeah, I mean, I, when I started doing this research, I thought, okay, that's where I wanted to start. I realized that that many people are a bit nervous about talking to strangers. So I thought, I'm going to figure out what people are worried about. And then I'll figure out some way to fix those concerns. And then everybody will find it easier to talk and live happily ever after. The end. Didn't work out quite that way. For one thing, people are worried about so many different things. And so I've come to believe that if you just fix one of the concerns, people will just worry about something else instead. But there's, you know, a long list. So, you know, we worry about our behavior, how we're going to act during the conversation. So we worry that we'll talk too much or we'll talk too little. Or we worry about, you know, the content of the conversation itself. Like, will we know what to say? Are we going to have those dreaded awkward silences? I think that's actually people's biggest fear. We worry about what the other person is going to think about us. Are they even going to want to talk to us? Right? Are they going to reject us? And yeah, the good news is that, you know, none of these things tend to happen. So in terms of rejection, from a study I've done, it looks like the rejection rate is about 13%. People think it's going to be much higher. And I think we also think it's going to feel worse than it does. So I have some preliminary data about that. And yeah, awkward silences. Also, you know, people can talk to others for far longer and in a more, you know, it's just more enjoyable than we expect. So I've done a series of studies where I ask people to predict how it would go. I was chatting to someone the other day and they were saying, look, you know, people are not seeing the value of coming into the office. They feel like they can get their work done. They don't, you know, they've had a few good conversations, but they feel like they don't work with other departments. Why should they be there? And look, it's very difficult to put a reason out there other than vibes and other than, look, you know, you're going to, you're probably going to enjoy it more than you think. And it's sort of, it's so difficult when you're presented, you're asked to demonstrate something that could be better than efficiency in return. It is. And I think, you know, when we're thinking about managers and the people who are working for a manager. I know again, you know, I translate to teachers and students because that's, you know, I can relate to that a little bit more, but it just feels like everybody wants to feel like they matter, right? Like that they're valued and that they're seen. And if your manager doesn't know your name or doesn't acknowledge you as a human and just seems to treat you as someone who's providing value and output in the workplace, it just doesn't make you all that motivated to put in that extra effort or offer an unsolicited opinion or do something proactively. Or do you know what I mean? Like, so yes, vibes. But I think that has more consequences than people really think about. You know, it feels to me like that might be related to the sort of quiet quitting, you know, people just doing the minimum. They're like, well, I'm not appreciated. I'm not valued. You know, they don't care about me as a person. So, you know, I'm just going to do what I need to do, but no more. Yeah, I think it's hard not to feel that way. I think we need to feel like we're part of something and we're valued and that, yeah, we put in a different amount of effort, investment and loyalty when we feel that way. 100%. I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. It's sort of that sense of feeling seen is a really important part of being human. And when we don't feel seen, when we don't feel, you know, the word you use there, mattering, I use that word all the time because if we don't feel like we matter, then, you know, like you say, we do check out. And Gallup published some research last week that said that 10% of British workers are engaged with their jobs. And we might ask ourselves, well, is that just not just a consequence of how we're working? That's it. 10%. Wow. In a world that's obsessed with productivity, people might be listening to this thinking, why on earth do I need to talk to strangers? I've got enough to do. I've got enough to be getting on with. And I guess the reason I came away with, I'd love you to give an alternative reason if there is one. But the reason I came away with was what I took from your clicker study, which was that when you ask people to categorise their hot dog lady, their strangers that they chatted to, it had the impact, just these small chance encounters with a barista, with someone in a store. These chance encounters had the impact of making them happier. And it seemed to be like, you know, if we're looking for a reason to chat to strangers, it just adds to the richness and the sort of empathy that we might extract from life. Is that right? Is that why we should be thinking about this? That's a hard question to answer just because I think there are so many benefits. So I think you're right. I think I've been starting to think lately about what is a life well lived? And I think there are sort of three different answers to that. One is a life of pleasure. One is a life of meaning and purpose. And more recently, we've been thinking also a life that is rich, you know, full of diverse experiences. And of course, you can have more than one of those things, but generally you need one of those to feel that you've spent your life well. And I think talking to strangers ticks all those boxes, you know, because, you know, like you just said, the research shows that having those small conversations with people makes you feel happier, you know, puts you in a good mood, makes you feel more connected. It makes your life more rich because you learn things more than you expect to. It's just a source of novelty and interest. I've met so many interesting people. You know, I've met a sperm bank manager and a bad first aider and someone whose hobby is hashing. And, you know, and I don't need to know those things, but it makes my life more interesting and rich. And then the third aspect is meaning and purpose. And it just feels like our world, it's, we're designing out the need to interact with humans in many ways. And it's easy to depersonalize. We were talking about this before we started recording. And I think just having a small conversation with someone, just showing them that you see them and acknowledging that they're a fellow human is an act of meeting. It is a very powerful thing that any of us can do to make the world a little better. So I think, yeah, there's so many good reasons. And I think too, I could go on for a whole hour about this, Bruce. I think, you know, I started talking to strangers kind of almost by accident, I feel like. And then I enjoyed it and kept doing it. And now that I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of strangers, I feel that there is a cumulative effect as well. So sometimes the individual conversations are interesting and fun and, you know, life-changing every once in a while. A lot of the time, you know, the average conversation is average and some of them are boring, right? But I think every single one matters because they add up to me feeling like I can talk to anybody and people are generally okay. So I feel like I walk through the world differently now. I feel more, I feel safe, more trusting, more connected and sort of part of the world. And that feels like it changes everything. Yeah. I took, I was in the habit last year of asking people, just like an abstract question, just merely to see what their answer was. I was asking people what percentage of the world's population they felt were bad people. And they could define that however you wanted. And it was just interesting because I was so fascinated with the numbers I was getting back because, you know, some people were saying like 5%. I was saying one in 20 people you think is a bad person. Look, I'm not criticising the others, but my instinct was like the answer is 0.1 of, I don't even believe this thing is a bad person. But I wonder if like a degree of talking to other people and recognising the humanity in people is an important stepping stone to that. I remember chatting to someone who worked in the NHS and they told me that the amount of patient aggression they were experiencing at the moment, and retail says this, and I wonder if that's a direct consequence of us depersonalising the world around us. That, you know, when we need directions now, we don't ask a human, we ask our device. And whether this might be just, even in ourselves, if all we can do is seek to improve ourselves, then just exercising this muscle might be a great way for us to rebuild that empathy. Am I right with that, do you think? I have the same instinct. I have the same instinct, yeah. And I think, you know, once I started doing this research and sort of feeling like I was having an impact and making a difference on people, it just makes me want to do it more and try to notice even more often. And there's been so many times, you know, and I feel like this is something more recent that it's probably changed, but I don't have any data on that. But times where I've, you know, sincerely asked someone, how are you doing? And had them say, thank you for asking. No one ever asks me that. Like, I feel like waiters and, you know, GPs and volunteers at historical sites that I've visited on holiday, like so many different kinds of people say, nobody ever sees me. Or at least that's what I'm hearing them say is nobody ever notices me. And they really appreciate just being seen. And it's such a small thing that we can all do. But you're right. I think we have to, that our society is allowing us to not have to do that. And so we have to choose to do it. It's a little bit, it has to be a bit more deliberate now. You touched on one thing there that's really interesting, which is this sort of interesting phenomenon that people often disclose more to strangers than they might do to the people in their lives. They use it as potentially like a sort of a fleeting confessional that they might tell you, you know, I'm pregnant or they might tell you that something that's deeply intimate to a stranger that they wouldn't do elsewhere. Why, why do we do that? Why, why do we find the ability to confide in someone that we'll never see again? Yeah, I was, I was surprised to see that there's, you know, a fair number of studies on this. A lot of them come from the health psychology literature. So it's about health-related disclosures. But there's, there's, there's some, although we might assume, and it's probably true, that the people that are closest to us are the ones who are most willing to help us and want to help us. They're emotionally involved and that can cause problems as well, right? So if we share something with someone we're close to, we worry about how they're going to take it and it could put It happens. People are busy and relationships take time. So we do lose touch with people. And we like the idea of reconnecting, but we want the other person to reach out. We don't want the discomfort and the, you know, the, you know, what's going to happen. So we don't want to be the one to reach out. So, yeah, my colleague, Lara Ackman and I did a series of studies, and we just had a really hard time moving that needle. But there's other research finding that when you do reach out to someone, they really appreciate it, you know? And I think people realize that, that if someone reached out to you, that it would feel really good. But still, we have this reluctance. But in particular, with workplace relationships, I know there's a little bit of research on dormant ties and how we actually tend to, I mean, I guess in general, people that we don't know as well tend to have information that we don't have because they're less similar to us than the people we're working with all the time or the people we're really close to. We kind of have the same ideas, the same perspectives. So the people we don't know as well have access to new information. And so I know there's a study in terms of the workplace that if you need advice or ideas to help solve a problem, that people are more likely to get it from reactivating a dormant tie than from talking to someone that they're currently working with. So that's food for thought. Well, I really like the fact that you said there as well, there's something in us that when we're talking to someone who's a weak tie, because we don't necessarily have the same area of specialization as them, we sort of listen a bit more attentively to what they're saying, you know, like they're not doing the same work as us. So we activate a bit more curiosity and that seems to be an important element of this as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And there's a few studies showing that it's linked to creativity as well, because where does creativity come from? It comes from piecing together little bits of information and we tend to get those little bits of different kinds of information from talking to people we know less well. So there's research showing that people, it's not just that people think they're more creative, their supervisors actually say that they're more creative, the people who have more connections with weak ties in the workplace. I'd love to sort of have a perspective of someone's thinking, you know what, I want to do a bit more of this and make an effort. And I most definitely, I adored your book and I've made an effort. I had a wonderful discussion with someone I gave blood to the other day. I was having great discussions with people all week. Wonderful. But if someone wanted to sort of give themselves a few nudges or, you know, what are the actions, the nudges that any of us could take? I think there's opportunity. I think the first step is noticing, right? Noticing that there are opportunities all around us. So I think we maybe fail to notice that there are opportunities all around us. And that is something that we can learn to do a bit better to spot these opportunities. And then there's sort of baby steps. So like if people are anxious or worried, you can kind of work your way out. So you can start by just making eye contact with people, smiling at people. I tend to smile and nod because if you just smile, people might think you're just a smiley person. But if you smile and nod, I think they know that you're smiling at them. I play a little game on the escalator when I get on and off the tube and I try to make eye contact with someone going the opposite direction and see if I can get anyone to smile back at me. It's surprisingly hard because people aren't paying attention, right? But that's just like a way to try and make it fun for me and spread a little joy. So yeah, you can work your way up to the smile and nod and then you can work up to a greeting and then you can, you know, eventually work your way up to sharing a few words. And I think you can choose certain situations that are easier than others. So something that's time-constrained might be a bit less scary. You know, if you're buying your coffee, there's a very small window of time and then you're just going to walk out the door. So it's not that scary. You know, you can just give it a try and know that you can walk away and not, yeah, have it stay with you for the rest of the day if it doesn't go well, which it probably will. So as someone who lives in London, even though I was deeply sympathetic to your book, there were moments in it where I was like, I don't want someone to have a conversation with me right now. I was on the tube somewhere. I was like, I'm too busy. I've got too much going on. I don't want to talk. But like, I was looking for moments to have conversations along the way, not every moment needs to be like that. No. And absolutely. Yeah. I'm not saying that people should be talking to all the people all the time, but I think sometimes the very moments where we feel like we don't want to have the conversation are the ones where they can be most valuable. You know, it's kind of an ironic thing about us humans that when we're feeling a bit down or feeling a bit lonely, instead of reaching out, we tend to withdraw. We tend to want to be, you know, you know, inside our own heads. And those are probably the moments when we most benefit from having a little chat. So I talk to people on the tube all the time. Partly it's a coping mechanism because I'm very much an introvert. And so if I get on the tube, I mean, it's noisy, it's crowded, it's hot. Summer, winter, it doesn't matter. It's hot. And so I will turn to the person sitting next to me and have a little chat because that helps me shut out everything else. And then, you know, it's not, it's not fun being on the tube, right? Like you're probably rushing off somewhere. You feel like you're in a hurry. You have a million things to do and yet you're stuck there. But it helps feel like I've spent that time well, you know, I haven't spent it getting anxious about what I have to do when I get off or I haven't spent it thinking, you know, why have we stopped in the middle of a tunnel again? I'm just able to enjoy the moment and then have that energy to take with me to the next thing. So I think there's a kind of ironic thing. You know, if you're waiting in a queue somewhere, you can get really frustrated and stressed about your to-do list, or you can have a chat with someone and either way. Yeah. Either way, you're not getting something done while you're waiting in that queue. But I think, you know, if you come away from it with that bit of energy that sparked from having a nice conversation, your to-do list is going to feel a bit less daunting. You're not going to go back to that same feeling of stress. So I think there's a bit of an ironic thing. Before we started, I mentioned to you that stat, which is that the biggest predictor of workplace engagement is having a friend at work. And one of the things we can often find, I think you've mentioned it along the way here, is that people say, yeah, I don't want my work colleagues to be my friends. I don't want them to be my best friends. And this research by a researcher called Jeffrey Hall, and he says, you know, he's tried to put a number on it. He said like, you know, 200 hours worth of connection is what it takes to become a really close friend to someone. And you've got a perspective on that, I guess, which is to me to just like that we shouldn't be seeing friends as like these binary categories. Can you give me your take on how we should be thinking about friends and friendship connection? Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm not saying anything so different, but I try to point out that all the relationships that you have are valuable in some way and you don't have to turn everybody into a best friend. It's very, like you said, it's very helpful to have a best friend, but there's value in just having a one-off conversation with a stranger and walking away. There is still value to be had there. And I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that we try to hold on to tight sometimes. We think, oh, we just had a nice conversation. We should exchange numbers and get together again. And if you want to, that's great. But I don't think you should feel like you have to. And acquaintances, you know, once people are sort of more, you know, they're known to you, but you're not that close to them. If you'd like to turn them into a closer friend, that's great. But I don't think you should feel like you have to. You know, there's value in having, you know, a network of acquaintances. We get value from all those relationships without feeling, we shouldn't feel the need to turn them into something else. It was a TikToker who was posting at the end of last year that was sort of adjacent to this. She was trying to make a friend a day. And I guess when we're constantly told about either elective isolation or loneliness, the thing that she, I think, demonstrated sort of like a vivid coming to life of what you've written here is that actually we're surrounded with potential friends or we're surrounded with people we could connect with. And even though we're told that there's a disconnection crisis and our lives at times might feel like suffering from disconnection, actually we are, we've got the resources in all of our lives to actually sort of