The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World

by Joe Keohane

Overview

An interrogation of why we don't talk to strangers, what happens when we do, and why it affects everything from the rise and fall of nations to personal health and well-being, in the tradition of Susan Cain's Quiet and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens

In Strangers, journalist Joe Keohane takes us through an inquiry into our shared history, one that offers surprising and compelling insights into our own social and political moment. But if strangers seem to some to be the problem, history, data, and science show us that they are actually our solution. In fact, throughout human history, our address to the stranger, the foreigner, the marginalized, and the other has determined the fate and well-being of both nations and individuals. A raft of new science confirms that the more we open ourselves up to encounters with those we don't know, the healthier we are.

Modern cities are vast clusters of strangers. Technology has driven many of us into silos of isolation. Through deep immersion with sociologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, philosophers, political scientists and historians, Keohane learns about how we're wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers; what happens to us--as individuals, groups, and as a culture--when we indulge those biases; and at the same time, he digs into a growing body of cutting-edge research on the surprising social and psychological benefits that come from talking to strangers; how even passing interactions with strangers can enhance empathy, happiness, and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging; how paradoxically, strangers can help us become more fully ourselves. Keohane explores the ways in which biology, culture, and history have defined us and our understanding of the Other.

Part sweeping history, part thought-provoking self-help, Strangers is an ambitious and provocative work that will for the first time bring together all the history, science, and varying schools of thought on the idea of strangers, from the Torah to the Trumps. Deeply researched, Strangers will inspire you to see everything--from major geopolitical shifts to banal trips to the corner store--in an entirely new light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984855787
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joe Keohane is the features director at Medium and a veteran New York City-based journalist who has held high-level editing positions at Esquire, Entrepreneur, and Hemispheres, where he edited numerous award-winning stories. His writing--on everything from politics, to travel, to social science, urban planning, business, and technology--has appeared in New York magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Wired, Boston magazine, The New Republic, and half a dozen political science textbooks. Apart from journalism, he is a former working musician, and he won a prestigious Screenwriter's Colony fellowship for a comedy pilot, which remains, sadly, unproduced.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Strangers in a Classroom

In which I travel all the way to London to relearn what should be a laughably rudimentary human skill, and am made to feel uncomfortable—­a sign of things to come.

Our journey begins on a bright day in a small classroom at Regent’s University in London. I’m sitting on a chair, palsied with jet lag, clutching my third cup of coffee. There are four other people there, too. They appear to be functioning at a higher level than I am, thankfully. We have come here to learn how to talk to strangers. Our teacher in this endeavor is an energetic twenty-­nine-­year-­old named Georgie Nightingall. Georgie is the founder of Trigger Conversations, a London-­based “human connection organization” that hosts social events aimed at facilitating meaningful conversations among strangers. Georgie had been recommended to me by a renowned psychologist whom we will meet soon. I got in touch with her, and when she told me that she was planning an immersive three-­day seminar on talking to strangers, I bought a plane ticket. Not long after, I landed in London, slept a couple of hours, and then arrived bright and early to a classroom, more coffee than man, but ready to learn.

Georgie started Trigger Conversations in 2016. Up until then, her background had been eclectic. She had graduated from college in 2014, where she was pursuing both an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a master’s in “emotions, credibility, and deception, from a psychology and linguistics angle,” as she says. That got her interested in language and conversation. After school, she tried her hand at a few different jobs. She interned at a start-­up, worked a series of jobs as a project manager, and was for a time at the Francis Crick Insti­tute, a world-­renowned biomedical research facility. “That was my last real job,” Georgie says. After that she struck out on her own.

She was always a talker, though the prospect of talking to strangers made her a little hesitant, “partly because of some social anxiety about the fact that it wasn’t normal to speak to strangers,” she says. However, she had also grown bored with the conversations she was having with new people—­the usual “What do you do?” and “How was your day?” interactions that never go anywhere. She wanted to help introduce people to the idea that these conversations don’t have to be dull or formulaic. They can be scintillating, informative, and exploratory. After she founded Trigger Conversations, she drafted a short manifesto along those lines: “We are adventurers in conversation,” she wrote. “We are travelers without a destination. Exploring the unknown, without expectation. Each one of us a teacher and every person an opportunity.”

Georgie, as it turns out, was exploring the unknown in particularly treacherous territory, conversation-­wise. London in particular, and the United Kingdom in general, is something of a global center of a nascent talking-­to-­strangers movement—­in large part because of a concerted national effort to combat the nation’s loneliness epidemic. A recent study by the British Red Cross found that a fifth of the British population often or always feels lonely. In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed its first “loneliness minister,” a high-­ranking government official who steers policy geared toward repairing frayed social ties and reinforcing social cohesion.

In the past few years, numerous grassroots groups have cropped up to try to get Britons to talk to strangers in cafés, pubs, or on mass transit. A “Chatty Café” initiative, in which pubs and cafés set up specially marked tables where strangers can chat, has spread to more than nine hundred locations throughout the United Kingdom and beyond. In 2019, the BBC launched a series called Crossing Divides that sought to inspire people to connect over social, cultural, or ideological differences. This included a “chatty bus” day, during which riders were encouraged to talk to one another, because that “may be the only time we are exposed to others outside the cocoons of our family, friends and colleagues,” wrote Emily Kasriel, the BBC’s head of special projects.

This was, shall we say, a departure from how the English, and particularly Londoners, usually behave on mass transit. And yet, despite the egregious violation of a time-­honored social norm, chatty bus day was a success. “It’s the best bus I’ve been on,” one woman told the BBC, confessing that she usually suffers from acute social anxiety. Some members of the general public have expressed skepticism, if not hostility, toward these initiatives, believing it to be at best an open question as to how compatible the Londoner temperament is with such shenanigans. When I met an English friend for a beer in London and told him I was in town to learn how to talk to strangers, he replied, “You do know that we’re like the worst in the world at it, yeah?”

Georgie was understandably nervous about her new venture early on—­and not just because of the local horror at the prospect of chatting on the Tube. She worried that there wouldn’t be an audience for an organization that tries to facilitate conversations with strangers, or if there was, people may try it, but they wouldn’t like it. When she started running her first conversation events, she was forced to grapple with the norms and anxieties that kept people from talking. What would they say? Where would they start? How should they engage? There was a problem of “people not knowing how to be,” she says. “Because if you say to someone ‘Come to an event with meaningful conversations with strangers—­we won’t talk about work; we won’t talk about, like, where you live,’ they’re like, ‘So what can I talk about?’ Suddenly they don’t know what’s okay and what’s not okay.”

Georgie eventually realized that the way to get past that initial awkwardness wasn’t to offer more freedom, but less. She would gather people in groups of two or three, give them cards with specific questions on them, and set a time limit. That way, all the groundwork that must be done in order to start a conversation—­meeting someone, initiating a conversation, and finding something to talk about—­would be taken care of. The possibility of rejection would be nil, and there’d be no fear about not knowing how to end the conversation. People could just jump right in, and then when the buzzer sounded, walk away without guilt. “That’s incredibly liberating,” she says.

Since she founded Trigger Conversations in 2016, Georgie has done more than one hundred events and many training sessions—­with strangers, companies, communities, universities, and conferences, both in London and around the world. In 2020, for instance, she developed a program with the University College London to help college students get better at connecting with one another—­something, as we’ll see, they struggle with. She’s seen people come away from these engagements transformed—­more confident, more curious, more optimistic about the potential of incorporating these conversations into their lives more regularly. “So many people were coming to these events and being like, ‘How do I do this in real life? I want to talk to strangers, but I can’t just go up to them with a question card and say, Do you want to answer a question?’ ” she says.

This apparent pent-­up demand gave Georgie an idea. She wanted to create a class that could teach people the skills to strike up these conversations in their everyday lives. She started attending self-­development seminars and reading everything she could find that could help her understand all the moving parts that made up something as seemingly simple as a chat with a stranger. “How do you start a conversation that’s cold and make it warm very fast?” she wondered. “And how do you ask the right questions in order to establish rapport, or go deep or be creative and playful? How can you be authentic? What are the limiting beliefs you are having about yourself, or the beliefs about the other person that are affecting your ability to take risks?”

Table of Contents

Prologue: Strangers in a Cab xi

Part I What Happens When We Talk to Strangers?

Chapter 1 Strangers in a Classroom 3

Chapter 2 A Readily Available Source of Happiness That We Almost Never Take Advantage Of 11

Chapter 3 Hello Through the Howdy Door 34

Chapter 4 Human Makes Friend 40

Chapter 5 How to Talk to Half a Dozen Strangers at Once 62

Chapter 6 Talking to Strangers: Paleolithic Edition 70

Chapter 7 Meet the Murderer and the Man from Another Dimension 80

Chapter 8 How Humans Came to Rely on the Kindness of Strangers 89

Chapter 9 How to Listen to Strangers 101

Chapter 10 The God of Strangers 115

Part II Why Don't We Talk to Strangers?

Chapter 11 Strangers in the City 137

Chapter 12 Why Are We So Afraid of Strangers? 154

Chapter 13 How Fear of Strangers Can Make Us Friendly 166

Chapter 14 How to Procreate with Strangers in Finland 184

Part III How to Talk to Strangers

Chapter 15 Okay, So When Are We Allowed to Talk to Strangers? 201

Chapter 16 How to Talk to Strangers 211

Chapter 17 Talking to Strangers in the Field 226

Chapter 18 Talking to Them 241

Chapter 19 How to Talk to Enemy Strangers 260

Chapter 20 Upon Encountering a Stranger 282

Chapter 21 A New Social Renaissance 288

Acknowledgments 303

A Note on Sources 307

Index 309

A Book Club Guide 329

Editorial Reviews

This is one of those remarkable books you may not realize you’re going to love (or need) until you’re well into it. The Power of Strangers is deeply and gamely researched, lucidly and engagingly written (as if by a pal), informative, thought-provoking, playful, useful, and possibly life-changing. What a great way to start the post-pandemic.”—Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses 

“In a thrilling, immersive journey across time and continents, Keohane upends everything we thought we knew about the people we don’t know.”—Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling 

“Joe Keohane has changed my life. The very thought of talking to strangers has always given me mild nausea and stress sweats. But after reading this book, I’ve been converted. The Power of Strangers is an important tool in rescuing our tribal, smartphone-obsessed world. If you see me on the street, please say hi, so we can discuss it.”—A. J. Jacobs, author of Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey

“Why do people feel so disconnected, divided, and alone? Could a simple fix lead to increased happiness, ingenuity, health, and attraction? In this perfect post-pandemic read, Joe Keohane answers these questions—illustrating via scientifically backed evidence and engaging real-life examples how talking to strangers can address many of the biggest problems facing our societies and ourselves, and how it is far easier than we think.”—Sarah J. Tracy, Ph.D., professor, The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University

“Thank Zeus, human nature, and the brilliant Joe Keohane for The Power of Strangers, an illuminating, witty—and dare I say life-affirming—blend of psychology, anthropology, and lived human experience. I never knew, before now, why strangers are chattier at farmers markets than in supermarkets, or why the vital and broadly applicable craft of listening (and the gift of being listened to) feels so good. God knows this book is timely and necessary, in this struggling republic of ours. I not only love it, I'm grateful for it.”—Paige Williams, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Science, and the Global Quest for Fossils

From the Publisher

★ 2021-06-02
After a year of quarantine and masks and years of severe political division, journalist Keohane shows us why it’s vital for us to come together.

"You cannot hope to be a good citizen,” writes the author in his first book, “you cannot hope to be a moral person, if you do not first make an effort to see that the world is a very different place for the person sitting next to you. That their strangers are not necessarily your strangers. And the way to understand this, across social boundaries, or racial boundaries, or ideological boundaries, or any other boundary that has been thrown up to keep us apart, is to talk to them.” Keohane seeks to teach readers how to have those conversations. Joining him on his adventures—e.g., cross-country train trips, seminars abroad—after a year in lockdown is a strange experience at first, but by the end, it makes the prospect of reentry even more exciting. Reading this book is like taking a college course that becomes a cult favorite because the witty, enthusiastic professor makes the topic seem not only entertaining, but essential. Keohane has some of the mannerisms of that popular professor—e.g., describing the process as “our journey”—and liberally dousing the data with asides and wisecracks. When he quotes Jane Goodall on grim similarities between marauding chimps and humans, a footnote reads, "Say what you will about us, but, in our defense, we do generally manage to refrain from eating one another's newborns." In an earthy retelling of the Old Testament, Keohane characterizes Jesus' origins in "motley, rowdy" Galilee with its "mix of Jews, Samaritans, Greeks and Syrians, living shoulder to shoulder": "Sort of like the Messiah coming from New Jersey." And why the Old Testament? Apparently, it has plenty to say about strangers, as do the members of a huge cast of memorable characters ranging from experts to homeless people all over the U.S. and Europe.

Possibly life-changing ideas supported with extensive sociological research, lively storytelling, and contagious jollity.

Kirkus Reviews