Talking to strangers is more enjoyable than people think. Update accordingly. Notice that if you already know about how much people enjoy talking to strangers, but not how much they expect to enjoy it, then this new information becomes bad news, but I presume it is instead good news. Does this mean it is ‘that easy’? No, but it’s also not that hard.
I read the 2014 paper that this NYT article refers to. They ran the experiment on METRA which is a very white commuter line from Chicago Suburbs into downtown Chicago. Sample size less than 200, mean age 49 (SD 13). So it’s unclear how generalizable this study is to other contexts.
It is especially interesting that the NYT article chose to use the 2014 paper when the same author published a 2021 paper with basically the exact same setup but in the London Underground (and with a ~4x larger sample size) which I would expect to have a significantly less homogenous makeup (and therefore possibly more generalizable) than METRA. This is probably b/c while the 2021 paper did find that people somewhat underestimated how much they would enjoy talking, the control group had a larger underestimate of how much they would enjoy doing control things. So there was a larger difference between actual enjoyment and expected enjoyment in the group that was told to do whatever they normally do on their commute than the group that was told to talk to whoever sat next to them.
I will say that ignoring the difference between expected enjoyment and actual enjoyment being inconclusive here, in the london underground paper people expected to most enjoy talking to strangers AND did most enjoy talking to strangers. So it is somewhat interesting that people generally choose to not talk to others despite both expecting and realizing the most enjoyment by talking to others. Maybe there’s some tail risk considerations here where better avg commute isn’t worth 1/10k chance of talking to someone who decides to stalk you etc.
I read the 2014 paper that this NYT article refers to. They ran the experiment on METRA which is a very white commuter line from Chicago Suburbs into downtown Chicago. Sample size less than 200, mean age 49 (SD 13). So it’s unclear how generalizable this study is to other contexts.
It is especially interesting that the NYT article chose to use the 2014 paper when the same author published a 2021 paper with basically the exact same setup but in the London Underground (and with a ~4x larger sample size) which I would expect to have a significantly less homogenous makeup (and therefore possibly more generalizable) than METRA. This is probably b/c while the 2021 paper did find that people somewhat underestimated how much they would enjoy talking, the control group had a larger underestimate of how much they would enjoy doing control things. So there was a larger difference between actual enjoyment and expected enjoyment in the group that was told to do whatever they normally do on their commute than the group that was told to talk to whoever sat next to them.
I will say that ignoring the difference between expected enjoyment and actual enjoyment being inconclusive here, in the london underground paper people expected to most enjoy talking to strangers AND did most enjoy talking to strangers. So it is somewhat interesting that people generally choose to not talk to others despite both expecting and realizing the most enjoyment by talking to others. Maybe there’s some tail risk considerations here where better avg commute isn’t worth 1/10k chance of talking to someone who decides to stalk you etc.