Most of us have been there: you’re waiting for a meeting to start, standing at the coffee station, or riding the elevator with someone you vaguely recognize but have never spoken to. A part of you thinks, I could say something. And then another part of you talks you out of it. What if they don’t want to talk? What if I say something awkward? What if it just gets weird? So you pull out your smartphone, and the moment passes. (My wife would not have let the moment pass, but I’ll get to that later.)
As it turns out, those fears are not just common — they are also wildly irrational. That is one of the central arguments of Dr. Gillian Sandstrom’s compelling new book, Once Upon a Stranger: How “Small Talk” Can Add Up to a Big Life. Sandstrom is an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex, and she has spent years studying what happens when people connect, especially with those they don’t yet know.
Her conclusion? We dramatically overestimate the risks of reaching out and dramatically underestimate the rewards. And nowhere are those rewards more consequential than in the workplace.
A book I wish I had read sooner
I wish I had encountered Sandstrom’s work much earlier in my career. As an introvert who struggled with social anxiety when I was younger, I often retreated inward when I might have reached out. Over time and through experience, I came to understand what Sandstrom now documents with rigorous research: that being friendly boosted my positive emotions, lifted my mood and opened doors to ideas, to relationships and to opportunities I never would have found by staying in my lane and sticking to what I already knew.
Reading Once Upon a Stranger felt, in many ways, like having my professional experience explained and validated. But it also taught me things I didn’t know, and those lessons are worth sharing with anyone who works alongside other people — which is to say, nearly all of us.
Friendliness opens career doors
One of Sandstrom’s most important contributions is her evidence that being friendly and engaging with strangers is not just pleasant — it is professionally consequential. Careers are not built on resumes alone. They are built on relationships, referrals and the kind of trust that only comes from human connection. The colleague you chatted with in the hallway, the conference acquaintance you spoke to during a coffee break, the vendor you treated like a person rather than a transaction — these interactions compound over time into a professional network that no LinkedIn algorithm can replicate.
Sandstrom’s research makes clear that the conversational moments we tend to dismiss as trivial are anything but. They are, in fact, the raw material from which opportunities are made.
Talking to strangers fuels creativity and innovation
Beyond career advancement, Sandstrom presents evidence for something even more profound: that speaking with people outside our immediate circle fundamentally changes how we think.
When we talk only with the people we already know — our team, our department, our usual lunch group — we tend to reinforce what we already believe. Our thinking becomes narrow and self-confirming. But when we engage with strangers, we encounter different experiences, different frames of reference and different ways of seeing the same problem. The result opens up the possibility of what researchers call convergent thinking, which is the ability to draw connections across seemingly unrelated domains and synthesize them into something new.
I think of this as “mosaic thinking.” Picture a mosaic, a piece of art composed of small fragments such as colored glass, stone or ceramic tiles. Mosaics dating back to ancient times can still be found in houses of worship in Italy, vibrant and whimsical mosaics created in the 20th century by the Spanish architect and designer Antoni Gaudí adorn buildings and park benches in Barcelona, and you’ll find mosaics on the walls of subway stations in Manhattan and the renovated LaGuardia Airport. Individually, the fragments seem unrelated, but when assembled, they form an image none of the individual pieces could have produced alone. This is precisely what happens in the mind of someone who is genuinely curious about the people they meet.
Every conversation with a stranger, therefore, has the potential to produce a “tile” — a small piece of new knowledge or perspective that, over time, accumulates into a richer, more creative, more innovative way of thinking. There may also be times when a seemingly innocuous comment someone else makes is the “aha moment” for you, and you recognize why a certain tile won’t fit, or you finally see how the tiles can come together.
In an era when organizations are desperate for creativity and innovation, this is not a soft benefit. It is a competitive advantage — and it starts with being willing to say hello.
The “liking gap” — and why we underestimate ourselves
So why don’t more people do it? Sandstrom traces our reluctance to a well-documented psychological phenomenon she calls the “liking gap.” In virtually every conversation between people who don’t know each other well, there is a consistent gap between how positively we rate our conversation partners and how positively they actually rate us. In other words, we walk away from interactions thinking we came across worse than we did, while the other person likely thought quite well of us. As Sandstrom puts it, “we see the best in our partner and the worst in ourselves.”
She traces our tendency to feel it didn’t go as well as it could have or won’t go well, so just skip it, to a catalog of familiar anxieties: that we might talk too much, overshare, say something insensitive, bore the other person or fail to find common ground. These worries feel very real in the moment. In the workplace, the stakes of getting this wrong feel even higher, which may explain why the liking gap is actually harder to close in professional relationships. Research suggests it takes more than six months to eliminate the gap in friendships. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes even longer at work. The discomfort of self-doubt, in other words, is not a first-impression problem — it is a persistent drag on the kind of trust that makes teams and organizations thrive.
Perhaps the most striking data point in the book concerns a study of American and British college students who had 1,336 conversations with strangers over one week. Before those conversations, the students were asked to predict how many attempts would be successful. Their average guess: 40%.
But the data tells a different story. The actual success rate? 90%. Nine out of every ten conversations went well.
That gap — between what we fear and what actually happens — is the heart of Sandstrom’s argument. We are not bad at talking to people we don’t know. We are simply convinced that we are, and that conviction holds us back far more than any real social shortcoming ever could. In a professional context, that misplaced fear may be costing us more than we realize.
Openness builds trust and credibility
One more counterintuitive finding worth noting: sharing more about ourselves — something many of us instinctively avoid in professional settings out of fear of appearing weak or unprofessional — actually makes people like us more and view us as more trustworthy and honest. Sandstrom cites an analysis of more than 100 studies that consistently identified this pattern. The very thing we guard against, self-disclosure, turns out to be one of our most powerful tools for building the kind of trust that underpins effective teams, productive client relationships, and lasting professional reputations. That said, self-disclosure isn’t a license to overshare. The key is “reading the room” — matching the depth and nature of what you reveal to the context, the relationship, and the moment.
In interactive workshops, I teach clients how to create and sustain a Connection Culture that brings out the best in people. I discuss Professor Ashley Hardin’s findings on the benefits of greater personal knowledge of a colleague. Learning more about a person, including their life outside of work, leads to a more humanized view, which in turn increases responsiveness and reduces social undermining. Invariably, people want to know how to put this into practice, and I recommend having a few open-ended questions up their sleeve if they want to get a conversation started. My “go-to” question is “What are your interests outside of work?” I include a few other practices in an article I wrote about connecting with remote team members.
Introverts benefit too
One of the book’s most reassuring findings is that the benefits of friendly, extroverted behavior are not reserved for naturally outgoing people. Both introverts and extroverts, Sandstrom reports, are happier when they act in a more extroverted way and less happy when they withdraw into more introverted behavior. For introverts in the workplace, this is not a call to become someone you’re not. It is a reminder that the discomfort of initiating a conversation is almost always worth it — and that the reward tends to outlast the awkwardness.
The challenge
There is much more wisdom in Once Upon a Stranger than I can do justice to in a short article. These are just a handful of the insights Sandstrom offers, each backed by compelling research and brought to life with vivid examples. I appreciate that Dr. Sandstrom devotes an entire appendix to her practical tips and tricks for talking to strangers.
If any of the above resonates with you, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Once Upon a Stranger. And if you care about someone who is lonely, professionally isolated or struggling to find their footing, this might be the right book at the right time to recommend to them (or even give to them as a gift). More than half of Americans are, by some research measures, lonely — and the workplace is often where that loneliness quietly takes root.
I live in a community in the Northeast where people tend to be reserved. Over the course of my career, I have worked in professions in which the pressure to appear polished and purposeful can sometimes crowd out the simple act of genuine human connection. After reading this book, I’m going to lean in even more to being friendly when I’m out in my community, especially in a work context. Sandstrom has convinced me, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I will be better for it — and that the ripple effects of friendliness extend outward to my colleagues, my clients and the broader community I’m part of.
My wife brought her Midwestern friendliness with her when we moved to the New York City area years ago. Yes, she will engage with people while waiting in line at the grocery store, yes, she is often that person who breaks the silence while riding in an elevator with strangers. Her aim is to offer some kindness, an affirming or encouraging word or to draw out a smile or a laugh, to make a connection, however brief the interaction may be. While I might previously have felt inwardly uncomfortable standing beside her during these encounters, I will view her proactive gestures in a new light going forward.
At its core, Dr. Sandstrom has written a book that is an invitation: to be a little braver, a little warmer and a little more present with the people who cross our paths every day. It turns out that small talk with the stranger you often see during your commute, or the person you’ve never spoken to at work, might be exactly the conversation — and the connection — you needed … and they needed too.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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