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The surprising benefits of talking to strangers
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A Case Of Missing Strangers
- In a decade-old novel written by neuroscientist David Eagleman, called A Circle Of Friends, a life without any strangers was envisioned, where only the people we know inhabit our world.
- There is a glaring void felt in life without strangers, the people we don’t know but still outline the periphery of our lives.
- An absence of strangers makes us understand their significance in our lives, as new research shows that engaging with and trusting people whom we don’t know has a significant effect on our wellbeing.
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Engaging With People From Outside Our Circle
Social isolation, as seen in many experiments, can have adverse effects on the mental health of a person, even leading to premature death.
Friendly behaviour with strangers makes us feel good about ourselves, and if strangers inhibit signs of trustworthiness, it leads to better overall health and individual wellbeing.
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The Anti-Social Paradox
Social interactions with strangers with a feeling of compassion, generosity and kindness has powerful and positive effects on the entire society.
In spite of the fact that wearing a mask makes our connections weaker due to less visibility of the face, one still needs the interrelation with others in these uncertain times of death, fear and loss.
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Barriers to reaching out
Even in times of isolation, you can do more good than you may think by reaching out to others. And before that, you have to get over the impulse to underestimate how positively others will ...
Shrinking the physical distance
Technology helps us to still be very close to others socially, as long as we use it to shrink our distance from others.
Engage in more deep and intimate conversation, or connect through a more intimate medium that uses your voice rather than text.
Underestimating the response of other people
Underestimating how others will respond to us reaching out does not end with more meaningful conversations; it extends to almost any action we perform to reach out and connect positively with others: expressing gratitude to another person, writing compliments, performing random acts of kindness, etc.
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A definition of empathy
The German word for empathy is "Einfühlung" and was coined in the late 1800s. It means "feeling into."
Empathy is about understanding other peoplee&#...
Misplaced empathy
In recent years, researchers have found that misplaced empathy can lead to exhaustion and apathy, and prevent you from helping the people who need you.
Worse, people's empathetic tendencies can be used to manipulate them into aggression and cruelty.
The identifiable victim effect
Psychologists point out that defining empathy as the act of stepping into someone's mind to experience their feeling can lead to some tricky moral dilemmas.
- We are moved to open our hearts (or wallet) when presented with a case such as a charity campaign where a single story of a named, suffering child is showcased to the exclusion of other suffering children. Psychologists call it the "identifiable victim effect."
- This can also help explain why many people become numb to the deaths of strangers, but be up in arms about the minor loss of personal freedoms they more directly experience.
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Dancin’ In The (Virtual) Streets
The lockdown has resulted in restricted movement but has led to a rise in dance, as people strive for physical movement for fitness, stress relief, healing and human connection.
Da...
Dancers and Social Communicators
They have a common set of genes, according to a recent study published in Genetics Journal, and the evolution of these genes dates back 1.5 million years.
Our ancestors were good orators and dancers, having specific skills for social bonding, where celebration, healing and rituals (like the Rain Dance in some cultures) were accompanied by dance.
African Dance As A Mean Of Communication
The Guadeloupe island inhabitants in West Africa used dance as the main means of communication, with the art form of ‘Big Drum’ called Gwoka, which had different beat rhythms for different emotions.