In our contemporary culture, the prospect of communicating with—or even looking at—a stranger is virtually unbearable. Everyone around us seems to agree by the way they cling to their phones, even without a (1)_____ on a subway.
It’s a sad reality—our desire to avoid interacting with other human beings—because there’s (2)_____ to be gained from talking to the stranger standing by you. But you wouldn’t know it, (3)_____ into your phone. This universal protection sends the (4)_____ : “Please don’t approach me.”
What is it that makes us feel we need to hide (5)_____ our screens?
One answer is fear, according to Jon Wortmann, an executive mental coach. We fear rejection, or that our innocent social advances will be (6)_____ as “weird.” We fear we’ll be (7)_____. We fear we’ll be disruptive.
Strangers are inherently (8)_____ to us, so we are more likely to feel (9)_____ when communicating with them compared with our friends and acquaintances. To avoid this uneasiness, we (10)_____ to our phones. “Phones become our security blanket,” Wortmann says. “They are our happy glasses that protect us from what we perceive is going to be more (11)_____.”
But once we rip off the band-aid, tuck our smartphones in our pockets and look up, it doesn’t (12)_____ so bad. In one 2011 experiment, behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to do the unthinkable: Start a (13)_____. They had Chicago train commuters talk to their fellow (14)_____. “When Dr. Epley and Ms. Schroeder asked other people in the same train station to (15)_____ how they would feel after talking to a stranger, the commuters thought their (16)_____ would be more pleasant if they sat on their own,” The New York Times summarizes. Though the participants didn’t expect a positive experience, after they (17)_____ with the experiment, “not a single person reported having been embarrassed.”
(18)_____ , these commutes were reportedly more enjoyable compared with those without communication, which makes absolute sense, (19)_____ human beings thrive off of social connections. It’s that (20)_____ : Talking to strangers can make you feel connected.
