How To Talk To Someone You Have Nothing In Common With

Nothing fills some of us with more anticipatory dread than having to talk to someone new.

We figure we’ll have nothing in common with the person. We’ll bumble through the conversation like Hugh Grant in a ’90s rom-com or say something that could be perceived as offensive, especially if the person seems outwardly different from us (a different generation, religion, socioeconomic status or education level, for instance).

The fear is commonplace, according to Juliana Schroeder, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business whose research explores how people make social inferences about others. Many assume they’ll be ill-equipped to chat up the person sitting next to them at a dinner party, at a networking function or on public transportation, she told HuffPost.

“Many of us think we’ll run out of things to say more quickly than we actually do, and that makes us misestimate the hedonic trajectory of the conversation,” Schroeder said. (That’s a Ph.D.-y way of saying how enjoyable the conversation will be over time.)

When it comes to conversations with strangers, Schroeder knows her stuff. A 2014 study she co-authored used bus and train interactions to understand why people routinely ignore each other rather than look for common ground. (A crowded bus is filled with people from all walks of life, so it’s a particularly good place to study interactions.)

“We tested several possible psychological reasons for why people believe that talking to strangers will be unpleasant and found the most evidence for two reasons: concerns about social rejection and pluralistic ignorance,” she said.

In the study, pluralistic ignorance is defined as the belief that others are less interested in