A shared universe › Blog › The kindness of a stranger · Español
A few kind words from someone you don’t know help because those brief encounters leave us in a better mood and make us feel more part of something, far more than we expect. Even so, we tend to avoid them, because we think the other person doesn’t want to talk, and studies suggest we are nearly always wrong. Sometimes the person who helps most is not someone close. It is the person at the chemist’s, someone in the lift, or someone we have never seen before who says exactly what was needed.
The psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, of the University of Chicago, asked train and bus commuters to talk to the person next to them, to talk to nobody, or to do what they always did. Those who had chatted with a stranger reported a more pleasant journey than the others, and they got no less done along the way.
What is striking is what people thought beforehand. When other people were asked to imagine those same situations, they expected the opposite: that keeping quiet would be more pleasant. The results are in their 2014 paper, pointedly titled “Mistakenly seeking solitude”.
According to the authors, part of the problem is that we underestimate how much other people want to talk to us. We take it for granted that the other person would rather be left alone, and since we never try, we never find out that it wasn’t so.
In another of their experiments, in a waiting room, those who were spoken to enjoyed it just as much as those who started the conversation. The good feeling of a chat is catching: you don’t have to be the one who takes the first step to come out ahead, and whoever takes it usually brightens the other person’s moment.
The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom studied, with Elizabeth Dunn, the relationships that never quite become friendship: classmates, acquaintances, people we pass every day. In a 2014 paper, they found that students felt happier and more part of something on the days when they talked to more classmates than usual.
In two further studies, which looked at all of a day’s conversations, with close people and with acquaintances, encounters with those weak ties were also linked to feeling better. Their conclusion: even brief contact with the people on the edges of our lives adds to our well-being.
There is something special about receiving a kind gesture from someone who has no reason at all to make it. Sometimes a sentence said in a waiting room or at a bus stop stays with us for a long time. Perhaps it helps because of this:
It doesn’t need to be a long conversation. These small gestures are usually enough:
If you like the idea of doing something good for someone you don’t know, acts of kindness has more on why helping does you good too. And if what weighs on you is a lack of company, unwanted loneliness looks at what really helps.
A shared universe works like this: whoever leaves you a few words doesn’t know who you are, and you will not know who it was. Only the gesture remains. And you can do the same for someone else too.
You can light a star with what weighs on you, what you hope for or what you are grateful for, in a few lines and without names. And you can keep other people’s stars company with a touch or a few words. The “Keep someone company” button takes you to the stars that have had the least company.