Hello Stranger 2010 Full Movie
Albina Hickel
Oh, hello, person I have never met before. I am so glad you ran up to me on this street where I am walking with my baby. You did not scare me at all with your very loud voice and the way you grabbed my arm. In fact, I am super relieved because I have a series of questions about my baby that I hope you can answer, and I am going to ask them because I know you would never ever offer me unsolicited advice.
While enjoying my fresh wok lunch in Amsterdam, I noticed something odd: other folks coming in for something to eat ignored the person standing at the counter, preferring to order through a digital kiosk. The crazy thing about this? They are just centimetres apart!
Perhaps I am noticing these things because I am reading the book "The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World" by Joe Keohane. In his book, the author discusses his own experiments with talking to random strangers, enriching it with research and historical literature about the origins of mankind, hospitality, and the sheer need to connect with others to survive.
Think about it for a moment. When was the last time you greeted somebody you didn't know? When did you spontaneously engage in a conversation? Chances are you don't even remember! Likely either you or the other person were "busy" with other things (like tinkering with a smartphone).
As a human species, we have reached where we are today because our ancestors collaborated. You don't need to go out hunting for food, do you? We evolved from tribes to larger communities where meeting strangers had the potential to grant us access to food and other resources. Unknown people were treated as guests and were offered generous hospitality for this reason.
We shop online, scan our groceries at the self-checkout, order a taxi via an app, and sit behind our screens in the cafe or coffee bar. Contact with random strangers is becoming rarer and rarer. Yet there are surprising benefits to having a simple conversation with someone you don't know.
Even a short and simple conversation can make you feel good. You might learn something unexpected, and without a doubt, it has the power to enrich your understanding of others. Like the author of the book about meeting strangers, I set out to see for myself if this was really true.
Over the past few weeks, I have been engaging in conversations with random people: at the train station, in the supermarket, on the street, and in the city. I always start cautiously, simply greeting someone or making an 'easy comment' on things like the weather or something equally innocuous. Once you get a reaction, you can easily 'feel' if the person is open to further discussion. An open-ended question, like "where are you going?" (at a train station), often yields great results. I've had multiple conversations where people shared more than just their destination, often providing detailed reasons for their travels. Being a good listener ensures the conversation flows naturally.
It's genuinely enjoyable. I've learned a plethora of unexpected things, such as life in Suriname, how the role of train conductors has evolved over the years, what the volcanoes are like in Iceland, and a policymaker's thoughts on the impact of AI on people's comprehension of the world.
I truly believe that more people should connect with others by simply talking in an analogue and natural way. It could foster a better understanding of one another, serving as a powerful antidote to the increasing polarisation of our modern world.
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Connecting with others makes people happier, but strangers in close proximity often ignore each other. Prior research (Epley & Schroeder, 2014) suggested this social disconnection stems from people misunderstanding how pleasant it would be to talk with strangers. Extending these prior results, in a field experiment with London-area train commuters, those assigned to talk with a stranger reported having a significantly more positive experience, and learning significantly more, than those assigned to a solitude or control condition. Commuters also expected a more positive experience if they talked to a stranger than in the solitude or control conditions. A second experiment explored why commuters nevertheless avoid conversation even when it is generally pleasant. Commuters predicted that trying to have a conversation would be less pleasant than actually having one because they anticipated that others would be uninterested in talking. These experiments clarify the precise aspects of social interaction that may be misunderstood. People may avoid pleasant conversations with strangers because of miscalibrated concerns about starting them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
We navigate our interactions with strangers according to a host of unwritten rules, rituals and (sometimes awkward) attempts at politeness. But what if the people we meet were not a problem, but a gift?
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