the power of micro connection

My friend, Kerryn Powell, recently asked the question, “What’s one quiet act of connection, courage, or kindness you can offer this week?” I love this question, because it reminded me of the “Strangers on a Train” study from the book The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. In the study, commuters were asked whether they would rather keep to themselves or talk to a stranger on the train. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most said they would rather keep to themselves, predicting that talking to a stranger would entail having “ones ear talked off”. This is what is known in Positive Psychology as affective forecasting, which entails all the predictions we make on a daily basis on whether something (in this case, an interaction with a stranger) will make us happy. What research tells us about affective forecasting is that we are terrible at predicting whether an event will bring us happiness or unhappiness. One reason for this is that we tend to either over- or underestimate an event’s duration and intensity due to our own impact bias. In this study, participants overwhelmingly predicted that talking to a stranger would be a negative experience and that keeping to themselves on the train would be a much more positive experience. They were forecasting what they thought would make them happy. However, the results of the study found that talking to a stranger led to a much more positive experience than anticipated, with most even rating their commute as better than usual. The interaction led to people feeling more connected and happy than if they had kept to themselves. I love knowing that even a micro-interaction, like a random or fleeting conversation with a stranger, can boost our mood and remind us of how interconnected we are.

How do you connect with others? Are there connections, macro or micro, that you look forward to every day? Would you be open to talking to a stranger on a train?

~Kate