30 Unbelievably Strange Encounters With Random Strangers That These People Just Can't Forget About

Dr. Stolk told Bored Panda that, assuming there are no pathological factors, the likely reason for why so many of us are terrified of striking a conversation with a stranger is that we have yet to build a shared context with them, and this constrains our communication.

To further illustrate his point, Dr. Stolk offered a quote from his recent article in Psychology Today: "When we produce words and other behaviors during a conversation, we are not just transmitting information. We are implicitly using those behaviors as a tool to organize and align our thoughts with one another to the extent they form a shared context. This is seen in how a barista's 'what size?' constitutes more than a counter-question regarding quantity. It additionally conveys the ability and willingness to process our coffee order, allowing us to update our shared context with that knowledge. By considering the current shared context, we can rapidly zero in on relevant details and possible interpretations of each other's utterances, as when we implicitly infer the barista is not asking for our shoe size."

Without shared context, Dr. Stolk believes "the possibilities are even more open-ended than usual, making the challenge of selecting an appropriate opener more daunting."

Dr. Stolk hopes the barista example shows that conversation is first and foremost an alignment challenge, "requiring people to continuously seek and provide evidence for their mutual understanding as they move through topics expanding their shared context." Therefore, he thinks that a good conversation is one in which people manage to do exactly that.

And hopefully, some of these not-so-good examples won't discourage you from putting yourself out there. In a series of studies titled 'Mistakenly seeking solitude', researchers Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked Chicago-area commuters to strike up a conversation with someone near them on the bus or train. Those participants who followed this instruction felt better than the ones who had been told to stand or sit in silence.

Epley and Schroeder argued that when we shy away from casual interactions with strangers, it is often due to misplaced anxiety that they might not want to talk to us, but as it turns out, many people are actually perfectly willing to have a chat, and might even enjoy receiving our attention.

confoozulment, who created this post out of boredom while they were just sitting around in their room, told Bored Panda they think that, as with most things in life, practice really does make perfect, and if someone wants to have better conversations, they should just keep at it.

This seems to be very true. According to Gillian Sandstrom, Ph.D., and senior lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Essex, there's some skill to it, but mostly socializing is a thing of confidence that comes from just doing it more often.

To encourage people to do it, she also led a workshop for individuals who wanted to learn how to get better at talking to strangers, and asked participants about those conversations — both before and after they happened.

The results revealed that both prior to and after having the conversation, people thought they would find their partners interesting but they didn't think that their partner would find them as interesting in return. However, the beautiful part is that Sandstrom reported "nearly everyone says the conversations actually went way better than they thought."

confoozulment thinks there's also a form of freedom in talking to people you don't know. You realize the stakes aren't that high. "When it's complete strangers, pretty much the worst you can do is have a little awkwardness and then not see them again," they said.

Dr. Stolk agreed that grounding yourself is one of the best things you can do in such scenarios. "Awareness of the fact that language is inherently ambiguous (words can have a number of - in fact, infinite - meanings), and that success of a conversation depends on more than just the opener, can help to downplay the perceived weight of the first words and consequences for one's self-image, overall lowering the threshold to approach strangers," he added.