Why Loving Moments With Strangers Carry Lasting Benefits

By Taylor N. West, Barbara Fredrickson

On a typical day, you experience numerous fleeting exchanges with people you don’t know, often without a word: a quick smile of acknowledgement as someone holds the door, a moment of eye contact to navigate a crowded aisle at the grocery store, or even a brief chat with a total stranger.

Are these interactions with strangers simply an artifact of daily life — pleasant enough, but inconsequential? It can be easy to assume so, especially as people increasingly find ways to avoid casual contact with strangers. But our current research suggests that these small moments matter deeply.

As social psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we work together in the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab led by Barbara Fredrickson. Taylor’s core argument is that interactions with strangers not only matter, but may actually be among the most transcendent parts of public life. With each fleeting interaction, strangers tie us to the collective, stitching us into the broader fabric of society and subtly shaping our sense of humanity. These easily overlooked moments matter for well-being and provide a sense of belonging. But beyond well-being, these brief moments may play a quiet but powerful role in fostering a kind and cooperative society.

Today, as social and technological shifts increasingly isolate us from strangers, understanding the importance of micro-moments of connection in daily life has never felt more urgent. What we’ve uncovered is that connections with strangers do far more than boost our mood — they may be essential for building and repairing social cohesion.

Strangers Matter for Well-being
Despite people’s fears or expectations, research consistently finds that connecting with a stranger boosts our mood. When two people share a sense of uplift, mutual warmth, and care, even in a brief moment, those moments accumulate into meaningful psychological benefits. Importantly, such moments can arise between any two people, not just romantic partners or close friends.

To test this idea, we studied 335 young adults and examined whether the quality of their interactions with close others and with non-close others (strangers and acquaintances) related to their well-being. First, we asked them to reflect on the quality of recent interactions and then answer questions such as how much of the time they felt “in sync” with the other. What we found was striking, and frankly exceeded our expectations: The quality of people’s interactions with strangers and acquaintances predicted their reported loneliness, sense of belonging, and mental health symptoms just as strongly as the quality of their close relationships. 

A common question we hear is whether interacting with strangers matters for people satisfied with their current relationships — people who aren’t looking for new friends. Our results, and those of other researchers, suggest our fundamental “need to belong” cannot be met by close relationships alone. For example, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that people report higher well-being when they interact with a diverse range of relationship partners. This can include friends, coworkers, neighbors, or strangers, as compared to people who interact with relatively fewer relationship types. When that happens, recent research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds that on days when close relationships fall short, brief interactions with strangers play an important role in sustaining well-being. But although most of the research so far has focused on individual benefits, the potential impact of interacting with strangers reaches far beyond personal well-being.

Strangers Bind Us to Community
One intriguing thing about strangers is that they are a source of novelty. Because strangers are often different from us and the people we regularly interact with in age, ethnicity, culture, life experience, or social class, conversations with them can be surprisingly perspective-changing. Even in a 10-minute chat with an Uber driver on the way to the airport, you can leave with a transformative lesson in the variety of human experience.

With support from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, we recently conducted a large three-week intervention in both the U.S. and the U.K. in which nearly 600 people were randomized to connect with strangers or with close others, or were assigned to a control group. A few early insights are already clear.

First, people who spent three weeks connecting with strangers showed meaningful increases in intellectual humility — or respect for and openness toward people with different views. Those who connected with close others or were in the control group showed no such improvements. Put simply, when we connect with strangers, we are more open to difference. Second, connecting with strangers strengthened people’s belief that people are generally kind and helpful, compared to those who connected with close others or the control group. These small interactions can shape, and perhaps restore, our faith in humanity.

In the meantime, here is the core insight we hope stays with you:

Our loneliness epidemic will not be solved solely by having deeper friendships or finding a romantic partner, but by being integrated with community and society. Our social divisions will not be resolved by avoiding strangers, but being open to and connecting with them. The remedy begins with the fleeting interactions you have every day.

So, those seemingly inconsequential interactions you have throughout the day? They matter. They are consequential, more than you may know. Each smile, shared glance, or kind exchange knits us into something larger than ourselves. These micro-moments of connection, however ordinary or brief, in cumulation, are powerful shapers of belonging and of our belief in the goodness of humanity. In many ways, they are the building blocks of a kinder and more cooperative society many of us hope for. Each small interaction with a stranger is a step toward the kind of society we say we want. So when the moment arises, choose connection.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.