People Dread This Type Of Social Interaction — But It Has Surprising Benefits

The close relationships we have with romantic partners, family, friends and even co-workers enrich our lives in countless ways. But there’s another type of connection that’s meaningful but often overlooked: the interactions we share with strangers.

Think about the Trader Joe’s cashier you chat with while they bag your groceries or the neighbor you always exchange ’good morning’s with while walking your dogs. These brief interactions may seem insignificant to you, but research has shown that’s just not true.

Hanne Collins, a Harvard Business School Ph.D. student who studies conversation, said that while close relationships provide intimacy, trust, support and emotional depth, “weak ties,” like casual acquaintances, are also an important part of our social lives.

“Weak ties connect us to other people, resources, and information that we might not have access to otherwise,” Collins told HuffPost. “Further, people confide more than we would expect in weak ties, and people actually enjoyed conversations with strangers much more than they expected to.”

Collins co-authored a 2022 study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about the link between our happiness and how many different kinds of relationships we maintain.

“We wanted to understand which portfolio of interactions — with which types of relationship partners, and how many interactions with each type — is most predictive of well-being,” she said.

In the study, relational diversity was measured across two metrics: richness and evenness. Richness is the number of relationship categories you converse with (family members, co-workers, strangers etc.), and evenness refers to how those conversations are distributed across different