PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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We often underestimate how much small talk can impact our wellbeing. Research shows that even brief conversations with strangers can boost our happiness and sense of connection, but fear and anxiety often keep us from reaching out.

Summary: We often avoid talking to strangers because we assume they’d rather be left alone, or worry the interaction will be awkward. But research shows that our expectations about these interactions are often wrong. Even brief conversations can make us happier and more connected. On this episode of The Science of Happiness, learn how small choices like saying hello, asking a question, or offering a compliment can help us overcome our hesitation and create meaningful moments of connection.

How To Do This Practice:

1. Notice an opportunity: Throughout your day, look for moments when you’re near someone you don’t know—a person on public transit, in line at a coffee shop, or walking through your neighborhood.
2. Put away your phone: Create a little more space for connection by taking out your earbuds or putting your phone away, rather than using it to avoid interacting with the people around you.
3. Take the first step: When you notice an opportunity, say hello, introduce yourself, or ask a simple question. You don’t need the perfect opening—just get the conversation started.
4. Ask a follow-up question: Show genuine curiosity about the other person. Ask about something they’ve mentioned and let the conversation unfold naturally.
5. Share something about yourself: Connection goes both ways. Offer a little about your own experiences, interests, or perspective so the conversation becomes a two-way exchange.
6. Try it again: Pay attention to how you feel afterward, then look for another opportunity to connect. Treat it as an experiment and practice making small choices that bring you closer to the people around you.

Today’s Guests:

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN is a community organizer in the Bay Area and a coordinator at a Japanese cultural senior center.

NICHOLAS EPLEY is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Learn more about Nicholas Epley here: https://www.nicholasepley.com/

Related Science of Happiness episodes:

Why Compassion Requires Vulnerability: https://tinyurl.com/mrxsad33

When It's Hard To Connect, Try Being Curious: https://tinyurl.com/mr32nwtv

The Contagious Power of Compassion: https://tinyurl.com/y6bpvbv5

Related Happiness Break episodes:

A Meditation on Original Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/mu2uzs2c

Our Deep Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/y2epxyxn

Visualizing Your Best Self in Relationships: https://tinyurl.com/3xbrs63f

Message us or leave a comment on Instagram @scienceofhappinesspod. E-mail us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I was taking public transport and thinking about, "Oh, who would I talk to if I were to approach someone right now, and how would I do that?"

I typically don't talk to people, at least not strangers. I'll talk to people in my life, but typically not people that I walk by on the street or sit next to on public transit or see in the grocery store or anything. I'm typically arms crossed and on my phone when I'm going throughout my day or sitting in public transit, and I think that adds a layer of maybe separation between me and the people around me.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Have you ever sat next to someone on a bus or a train and thought, "I could say something to this person," and then decided not to? Maybe you reach for your phone instead, or look out the window. Chris Fujinaka Hein knows that feeling well. He describes himself as shy and rarely talks to strangers. But the science is clear that even brief conversations with strangers can make us feel happier and more socially connected.

I'm Shuka Kalantari. Welcome to The Science of Happiness.

We know social connections matter, supporting everything from brain function and memory to better physical health, longevity, and less stress. So we asked Chris to try something that, for him, felt pretty uncomfortable: ride public transportation and strike up conversations with people he didn't know.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I learned so much about this person in only five minutes, and I'll probably never see them again.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Later in the show, we'll hear Dacher Keltner's conversation with behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley on how we can overcome our fears of social rejection and make small shifts to feel more connected with the people around us.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: The feedback we get is driven by our own beliefs or expectations. And if I believe you are unpleasant to talk to, if I didn't think you wanted to talk to me, I'd never talk to you and I'd never find out I was wrong.

SHUKA KALANTARI: But first, my conversation with Chris after these ads.

Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari.

It's no secret that we're experiencing problems with loneliness. In 2023, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy even declared that it was an epidemic. We also know that social interactions can enrich our lives, activating brain systems involved in pleasure and reward, and even supporting our immune system.

So we asked our guest today to try to make some new social connections. Chris Fujinaka Hein is a community organizer in the Bay Area and a coordinator at a Japanese cultural senior center. But despite spending much of his time bringing people together, he's naturally shy and wants to become more comfortable building relationships and connecting with new people.

Chris, thanks for joining us today.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Hi, thanks for having me on.

SHUKA KALANTARI: So you've described yourself as naturally shy, even though your work often puts you in front of people, a lot of people. Can you tell me a little bit about that tension and how you found yourself a shy person, kind of community organizing, working with seniors, being face-to-face as opposed to in front of a screen all day?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I started community organizing in college, and at the time I was in front of a screen all the time because I was studying computer science. So it was a really good way for me to meet like-minded people and work towards something together. But I think it really has pushed me to become more outgoing and see my shyness or maybe being a little awkward as not something that should keep me away from building community.

SHUKA KALANTARI: We know from research that people benefit from about one to three hours of social interactions each day, even if they're brief interactions. So we asked you to try a social connection practice where you had to ride public transportation and strike up a conversation with a stranger. As a shy person, what propelled you to take on this assignment?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I got a text from a friend asking me to take on this assignment.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Our producer, Anna.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Yeah. And I'm pretty open to taking on new experiences, so I was taking public transport and thinking about who would I talk to on BART if I were to approach someone right now, and how would I do that? And I thought, "Yeah, like, I can do that, and I'll just do my best no matter if I'm uncomfortable in this new situation."

SHUKA KALANTARI: So, you mentioned BART, that's the Bay Area Rapid Transit, our subway system, and you chose for this practice to ride BART and talk to people. Lay out the scene for us. What were you thinking when you first started?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I was a little nervous as I was making my way to BART. I went on two separate occasions.

Then the train came, and I sat next to this one lady.

At first I was nervous. I felt embarrassed to try to start the conversation. They were on their phone.

I just said, "Hi." And she put her phone down, uncrossed her arms, and there was like a short pause, and I just said, "Oh, I'm making my way to El Cerrito Plaza."

And that's how we started the conversation. She asked where I was going, and we kept talking for the remainder of the BART ride. The BART ride was maybe only five minutes long, so as soon as I got on BART, I heard, "El Cerrito Plaza, next stop." And I felt like going in, I knew it was gonna be a really short conversation, and I needed to start it as fast as possible to really make it count.

But I learned a lot about her, and she was really open to sharing these things that were really personal to her life. She told me she was twenty years old, so I had asked if she was a student, and she said that she had recently dropped out. She was actually a mother. She had dropped out of college because she got pregnant, and there were these really big things that are happening in her life.

And within the next minute, the BART stopped, and I said, "Oh, thank you for talking to me. I had a really good conversation." And then I had to leave.

SHUKA KALANTARI: How did you feel after that conversation? Just, you know, a five-minute ride and you got so deep into a person's story. What was going through your head as you got off the train?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I feel like my shyness comes from a lot of social anxiety, so I was like, "Oh." Kind of, it all hit me, like, "Wow, we had this really big conversation, but it was so short. I wish I had said this or asked her about that." I was happy to have been able to learn so much about this person, and even though they were in their own world at the time, they were really open to talking to me.

But I think there was a lot of anxiety in my body because it was a really new experience.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Studies do show that people tend to think that other people don't want to be bothered, that other people don't want to chat. And sometimes they don't, but the majority of the time, people are ready to connect.

So you tried this practice again.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Hm.

SHUKA KALANTARI: You took another BART ride.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Hi. I just got to BART -- the North Berkeley BART station again. It's 2:40, and I'm excited. I'm a little nervous again, but I'm going to start a conversation with someone and see how it goes.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Was this a longer ride? What'd you do?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I got dropped off at North Berkeley BART station and was planning to talk to someone. That was my goal. 

I was still feeling nervous, but learning from the first time, I was pretty optimistic that, you know, I can do this. People are open to having these conversations. And I met someone as we were waiting for the BART to come. It was coming in maybe 10 minutes, and he was on his phone when I started the conversation.

I asked, "Hi, how are you? I'm wanting to make sure I'm going in the right direction." At the time, I couldn't tell if it was the right line, so he explained, "Oh, yes, you're in the right spot." And from there, we kept talking, and he got off at the next two stops. In the meantime, we talked about a lot of things. I had asked if he takes BART often, and he told me he does, but he's been going to San Francisco a lot because he has a new job there.

And we talked about how he's working at this AI company, and quickly mentioned that he has opinions about AI and then moved on. And then I followed up with, "Oh, can you explain more about how you're working in AI, but you have opinions? Like, what do you mean by that?" And he talked about how it's everywhere in our lives, and everything now has an AI chatbot or some aspect of AI in it, where he feels like it's overdone and too much.

And in a way, he's contributing to everything that's happening. And he also said that the pay was good, which made it worth it.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Were you more on the listening end, or were you sharing about yourself, your life?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Yeah. I was. We continued the conversation and he was saying he's taking a gap year from school because he doesn't really love what he's studying, and he finds it really difficult.

And I talked about how while I was a student, I also switched my major, and it was a really big, difficult decision for me. And through that experience, I talked about how I switched from computer science to psychology, something that I was more interested in, and I really enjoy the work that I do. And I shared that I think taking a gap year is really smart, and I hope that it works out for him, and he finds something that he really enjoys doing.

SHUKA KALANTARI: How did you feel coming out of that conversation?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: It was really nice. We had a really good conversation, and again, I feel like I learned so much about this person in such a short amount of time, and I walked away having another positive experience.

SHUKA KALANTARI: We know from research that people feel more connected to deep conversations than small talk about the weather or something like that and so how was it for you to get past that surface level during your conversations?

Did it just kind of unfold naturally? What did it look like?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Well, with my first conversation, it was so short. I wasn't expecting the conversation to be as deep or personal as it had been, and it really did happen naturally. I think my takeaway was that people are experiencing very real-life things, and although this is a really personal subject for this lady, it's also just her day-to-day reality. And I was surprised that they were willing to share that with me, but also made me realize that people are going through their own struggles.

SHUKA KALANTARI: I mean, to me it shows that people have this, like, deep desire to connect.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Hm.

SHUKA KALANTARI: And all they need is a little provocation, a smile, or a question. What does that tell you about the human condition or community?

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Yeah. In both of these situations, the person I was talking to was on their phone, and it's like a signal to everyone around you that maybe you're busy, you don't wanna talk. And I do the same thing too for like a, kind of like a defense mechanism. But in reality, these people really do want to talk and share things that are very personal to them, things that they're experiencing every single day. 

And even in my experiences outside of BART and public transport, talking to people, they are also really open, for the most part, really open to telling me about things that are on the top of their mind, the problems that they're having at work, and how they're feeling about things that are more personal to them, and it's just starting that conversation and asking follow-up questions and sharing about myself too.

I want to keep building that muscle and just learning about what's happening in the lives of the people that are in my community.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Chris, thank you so much for trying this practice, and thank you for joining us on The Science of Happiness.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: Thank you so much, I had a great time.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Up next, we explore the science behind why we're so hesitant to connect.

CHRIS FUJINAKA HEIN: I tend to think about myself in terms of “Am I getting the words right? Am I gonna look like an idiot? Are they gonna think I'm weak?” Other people, mostly what they care about is our warmth. Are we friendly, kind, honest, trustworthy? And that really carries the day.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley shares how to move past our fear of social rejection after these ads.

Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Nicholas Epley has spent decades studying the science of social connection. He's a behavioral scientist and a professor at the University of Chicago. He co-authored a study about strangers socializing in Chicago trains, and he wrote about it in his new book, A little more social: How small choices can make us happier, healthier, and better connected.

Here's Dacher's conversation with Nick.

DACHER KELTNER: Nick, welcome to the show.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Thank you, Dacher. It's wonderful to be here.

DACHER KELTNER:  So tell us, why in the world did you decide to study people on trains?

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Well, that one is super close to home, 'cause I ride the train into the University of Chicago every single day. So I was on the train one morning, and I had this sort of eureka, “What the swear word are we all doing here?”

And here we all were, highly social animals made happier and healthier by connecting with other people, and we were all ignoring each other. Like, treating each other like a lampshade. And those are the moments where I think, as social psychologists, our gears start turning. What is going on here?

DACHER KELTNER: Tell us what happened in the study.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Yeah, so we went back to my train line. We went to the train station, and we recruited people for a commuter study where we told them we would like them to do one of three things. One condition, we told them, "We would like you to do whatever you normally do on your commute this morning." Another condition we told them, this is our solitude condition, we told them, "We'd like to just keep to yourself. Enjoy your solitude on the ride today." Third condition, we told them to do something radical — which is when somebody comes and sits down next to you, just try to have a conversation with them. Try to get to know him or her a little bit, right? Try to connect. 

We then gave them a survey. At the end of the survey, they reported how the commute actually went, how positive they felt, how pleasant it was compared to normal, how happy and how sad they felt.

In another experiment, we recruited people from the same platform, same place, and instead of telling us how it actually went to do these things, instead we asked them to tell us how they thought they would feel if they were in each of these things. And as researchers, as psychologists, if we wanna know what people are gonna do, we don't wanna know how they actually feel about stuff. We wanna know how they think they'll feel, 'cause it's those expectations that guide our choice. 

How do people think they would feel? They thought they would be happier keeping to themselves, and they thought they would be the least happy in the condition where they were asked to connect with people, which is exactly what people do on the train. They seem to be behaving in line with their expectations. 

But the people who we actually went out with and had do this, they reported exactly the opposite experience. They reported having a more positive commute in the connection condition than in the solitude condition. So their expectations weren't just wrong, they were precisely backwards.

DACHER KELTNER: I wonder how you think more broadly about where those expectations come from, why we're missing out on the benefits of social interaction. We just need a little bit, like your title in your book, but why are we missing out?

NICHOLAS EPLEY:  I think there are three things. So one thing that happens is we view ourselves differently than other people view us.

So I tend to think about myself in terms of my competency, so “Am I getting the words right? Am I gonna look like an idiot? Are they gonna think I'm weak?” Other people, they care about our competency, but mostly what they care about is our warmth. Are we friendly, kind, honest, trustworthy? And that really carries the day.

So when you reach out to somebody in a kind, civil, positive way, the kinds of actions that connect us with other people in positive ways, that's interpreted positively. But if we're worried about our competency, we're gonna underestimate how positively this is gonna go. So that's one. 

Also, our expectations are necessarily impoverished representations of what an actual experience is like. It's like our expectations are pictures while our lives are movies. So what's captured in a picture is not necessarily what unfolds in a movie. In a picture, what we're focused on are things that we can represent easily about an interaction, like “Who am I talking to? What are we gonna talk about?” Experience, though, unfolds in a dynamic way, with all kinds of things that just a simple static snapshot doesn't capture. So when you and I are talking, you're back channeling to me. You're uh-huhing. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. 

NICHOLAS EPLEY:  There you go. You just gave me a yeah, right? You're laughing, right? You're doing all of it right now. It's not a static exchange.

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. 

NICHOLAS EPLEY: It's dynamic. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. 

NICHOLAS EPLEY: But people don't appreciate those dynamic processes or the strength of them, and so they don't factor them into the nature of the social interaction. 

And then the third thing is that we would learn these things if we lived in a kind learning environment, like a perfect classroom. The world, though, is not a perfect classroom. It's not a kind teacher, it is an unkind teacher. 

DACHER KELTNER: Especially online.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Yes, especially online. The feedback we get is driven by our own beliefs or expectations, and that's the world we live in. If I believe you are unpleasant to talk to, if I didn't think you wanted to talk to me, I'd never talk to you and I'd never find out I was wrong. So pessimism is self-fulfilling in a way that optimism is not.

DACHER KELTNER: I want you to get tactical for our audience. What are some ways that people can find these little micro moments of social connection?

NICHOLAS EPLEY: There are lots of points in the course of your day where you're choosing avoidance. Sometimes it's thoughtful, sometimes it's just kinda mindless.

When I walk into my office in the morning in the business school, I got about a 250-yard walk up to my office. I could just walk up there silently, or I could say hello to Keith, and Nigel, and Mario on the way up to my office and make that mood a little bit brighter. 

Look over the course of your day and look for those choice moments. You might start finding opportunities that you can test, and then you don't have to believe my data. Run the experiment on yourself. Not just once, right? An experiment with one data point is not an experiment. Try it multiple times. You'll get better and you'll learn

DACHER KELTNER: One of my favorite sciences is the science of greeting gestures. You know, people have all these different ways of fist bumping and chest bumping and, you know, head locking and so forth, and it's remarkable. There's work showing those greeting gestures activate the release of dopamine. You know, there's touch involved, and we've studied the benefits of touch and eye contact, which we know releases oxytocin.

What are some of your favorite acts that we can do?

NICHOLAS EPLEY:  So I think the simplest one is complimenting people. We don't give all the compliments we have. So if we ask people, "Estimate what percentage of kind thoughts do you have that you don't share," they estimate about 40% of the kind thoughts they have, they don't share.

The other thing we find is that people think that the person's reaction is gonna have kind of a dose response. The bigger the thing I do for you, the more positive you'll feel. The dose response on the recipient is actually much flatter. The big return on investment are the little things that you can sprinkle around, right?

“You've got awesome glasses.” There's so many opportunities for that. It's so easy, and we just don't look for them and don't do them. And, you know, bigger things do matter. You wanna be doing big things, but the opportunities we avoid where we can really enrich our lives and lift other people up in a surprisingly positive way are often the little things that we just walk past in our life or think it's not gonna matter.

DACHER KELTNER: You know, we have to talk about the new social media, smartphones. 

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Yeah. Yeah.

DACHER KELTNER: Transformative effects on this next generation. Three to four hours a day. Social life's moved online. I mean, it's so profound, and in your book, you write, you know, it's just fundamentally better that we talk rather than type.

Tell us how you think about online social connection, your thoughts about what we need to do in light of how it's changed our lives.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: One thing that is interesting is that if the psychological research is suggesting this is kind of bad for us, it does raise the question, then why are we doing it? And I do think that our research on the barriers to reaching out and engaging with others and the anxiety that people have and the misplaced fears that people have that produces under-sociality, you know, in conversations and things, I think also helps to explain the appeal of social media.

But it is clear that it is creating more avoidance, more time alone, less time in actual social interaction, more time on the couch. Modern life even allows us to be more isolated than ever before. You can, on any given day, wake up and live your whole day completely alone without ever engaging with anybody and survive.

For most of human history, that wasn't true. Now it is.

DACHER KELTNER: What do you say to the person who's like, “Yeah, that's all good, but I really suffer from social anxiety”? How do you guide them?

NICHOLAS EPLEY: So some of it can be reframing in your own mind. We're often worried when we reach out to other people what other people will think about us.

If instead you're thinking, “What I'm gonna try to do is to make somebody else's day” — so not focusing on myself, but I'm focusing on you. Like, a compliment can really do that. I'm just gonna try to lift you up a little bit. I think that can make it a little easier, 'cause now it's not the focus on me or myself, the focus is on you.

The most powerful words that pretty much any of us has is, "Hi, my name is…" and you put out your hand, right? That's the most powerful words you've got, because it can start a lot. But it doesn't take a lot to do that. And so it's the practice that works, being willing to get over the hump at the top with that small act.

That's what gets you on the path to easing some of that anxiety that I think people will find to be misplaced once they try it.

DACHER KELTNER: Test it out.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Hm.

DACHER KELTNER: Well, Nick, as always, it's great to [00:23:00] talk to you.

NICHOLAS EPLEY: Thank you so much, Dacher. It was great fun, as always, talking with you.

SHUKA KALANTARI: What if we actually have more control over how our brains age than we think?

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Just because you get older, it doesn't mean your brain will fade, and if you take specific actions, you can indeed maintain your brain function at a reasonable level or improve it — and that's what we did in my brain center.

SHUKA KALANTARI: We learn what science tells us about memory, the hippocampus, and the everyday habits that can keep our brains healthy.

That's on our next episode of The Science of Happiness.

Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Anna Zou. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our host is Dacher Keltner. I'm the executive producer, Shuka Kalantari. Thanks for listening to The Science of Happiness.