How talking to strangers could save your life
I live in a building with 35 units, all of them studios, and have only spoken to two people for more than five minutes.
It's been over two years and I'm pretty sure one of those people still thinks my name is Craig. I figure it's too late to correct her. I am Craig.
It's a deeply New York paradox, this closeness without familiarity, and it's not a healthy one.
Save for annihilating a pack of Oreos or mainlining hard drugs, research suggests this isolation is just about the least healthy behavior I could engage in to keep future-Chris (er, Craig) disease-free.
A strong sense of community has been repeatedly tied to decreased heart attack risks, increased happiness, and longer lifespans.
Basically, people make you healthier.
In 2014, University of Michigan psychologists analyzed data on 5,276 people all over Canada. Four years prior, each of those people had responded to a survey that asked them how strong their sense of community was. The Michigan researchers were looking for who suffered heart attacks in that four-year period.
The answer: the socially isolated.
On the seven-point scale used in the survey, lead author Eric Kim told The Atlantic's James Hamblin, "each unit of increase in neighborhood social cohesion was associated with a 17 percent reduced risk of heart attacks."
In other words, you don't even need to have a strong community to reap the health benefits. You just need to feel like you do. If your brain is convinced you belong, your heart is likely to agree.
Chance encounters with strangers do more than stave off disease and disorder. Forging friendships out of thin air - that skill reserved for the first day of kindergarten and college orientation - can actually make you happier.
I take the subway every day, which means I'm no (ahem) stranger to the disapproving scowls of my fellow commuters. Even if they're listening to the eternally mood-boosting hit "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves, their face tells it all: Don't you dare talk to me.
Then again, research from the University of Chicago suggests I'm dead wrong.
Around the time the U of M psychologists were counting bodies, over at Chicago researchers Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley were asking people to strike up conversation with total strangers on the train and bus.
Past the initial (and one assumes, inevitable) discomfort of materializing small talk, the experiments turned out to be beneficial for everybody, even the stranger. People who struck up conversation reported elevated mood, as did those who they talked to.
So if being social makes people happier, at least in the short term, why aren't entire train cars buzzing with chatter?
Schroeder and Epley concluded there was a cognitive bias at play, known as the Abilene paradox.
Since each person falsely assumes initiating conversation would be totally disruptive and annoying, they mind their own business. Multiplied out over an entire train, the effect is a socially strict, though loosely enforced, "no talking" rule.
It's the same thing that happens when your friends all agree to go to some crappy restaurant even though none of them really wants to. They agree to appease - falsely - other members of the group.
And to the moms out there who, in the face of all that data, still get the urge to insulate their kids away from stranger danger, consider the pitfalls of Mean World Syndrome. Is your fear of the outside world legitimate, or is it a skewed result of violence-obsessed media?
In daily life, all this apprehension actually does more harm than good.
"Human beings are social animals," Schroeder and Epley write. "Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being."
If I have any hope of emulating the longevity of, say, the Japanese, who boast the world's highest proportion of people living over 100, the research encourages me to leave my one-room bubble.
I should pop in next door and ask Leslie for some sugar, even if I'm not baking. Or maybe I can ask Penny, the hoarder who lives one floor below, what the building was like in the 1970s. Even if she calls me Craig, I will be a healthier Craig for having said something.