Arthur C. Brooks argues that talking to strangers makes you happier than you expect. Research by Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder found that people who chatted with strangers reported higher happiness afterward, even though they predicted the opposite beforehand. It's especially hard for introverts, but the awkwardness you imagine is worse than what actually happens.
If you want to become more comfortable with different kinds of people, all kinds of diversity, including the easier types like race and gender and religion, but the harder types as well, like ideology, talk more to strangers. Just that, talk to strangers. That's actually hard for a lot of people. And if you're an introvert, that's excruciating. But here's the interesting thing from the research. There's 2 very distinguished social psychologists, Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder. They've demonstrated that we tend to overestimate how awkward or unpleasant it will be to talk to strangers. And they've done all these experiments in which Half the people are not induced to talk to strangers. They do whatever they want. And half of them are assigned to a group where they have to talk to strangers no matter how hard it is for them. And then they figure out who's happier afterward. And they look at how bad you thought it was going to be compared to how bad it really was talking to strangers. What they find is that almost everyone thought beforehand that not talking to strangers would be more pleasant than talking to strangers. The results are the opposite. The opposite was true. The people who talked to strangers, talk to them about ideas, whatever, that they actually were happier afterward than the people who didn't do so.
