We Brace for Awkwardness With Strangers. The Research Says We Are Usually Wrong

Picture the scene on a train, in a waiting room, at the edge of a party where you know almost no one. The person beside you is a stranger, and some part of your mind runs a quick, pessimistic forecast: if I say something real, it will land badly, they will not care, the whole thing will curdle into awkwardness. So you say nothing, or you keep it to the weather. A large body of experiments suggests that this forecast is not just gloomy but systematically inaccurate, and that the small daily choice it produces, to stay shallow or stay silent, costs us more connection than we realize.

The research, led by Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ran across twelve experiments involving more than 1,800 participants [1][2]. The basic setup was disarmingly direct. People were paired, frequently with someone they had just met, and handed conversation prompts of varying depth. Some were light; others reached for something more intimate, like describing a time they had cried in front of another person or reflecting on a meaningful relationship. Before talking, participants predicted how the exchange would feel, how awkward, how connected, how happy. Afterward, they reported how it had actually gone. The design turns a vague social hunch into two numbers you can lay side by side: what we expect, and what we get.

The gap between those two numbers is the whole story. People braced for the deep conversations to be uncomfortable and were routinely surprised [1]. The intimate exchanges felt far less awkward than anticipated and produced more happiness and a stronger sense of connection than participants had predicted going in. When people had the chance to compare, many who had experienced both a shallow and a deep conversation ended up preferring the deep one, despite having expected the opposite. The warmth was there; it was our anticipation of it that was miscalibrated.

Why do we get this so wrong? The researchers point to a particular blind spot. When we imagine opening up to a stranger, we tend to picture their indifference. We assume the other person will not be interested, will not want to hear it, will be quietly counting the minutes. That assumption ignores something obvious in hindsight, which is that the stranger is a person too, generally just as capable of curiosity and care as we are, and often just as braced for awkwardness themselves. Two people can sit side by side, each underestimating the other's appetite for a real conversation, and the result is a shared retreat into pleasantries that neither actually prefers. The barrier is not the conversation. It is the mutual, mistaken forecast about it.

There is a tidy irony in the pattern. The very thing we fear will drive people apart, sincerity, is closer to the thing that draws them together. And because the misprediction is so reliable, it acts like a small tax on social life, levied over and over in the ordinary moments when we could reach out and decide not to. The stakes of any single instance are low, which is exactly why the habit is easy to keep. Nothing dramatic happens when you stick to small talk. You simply never find out what the other conversation would have been.

As with any research, the boundaries matter. These were structured interactions, arranged by experimenters who supplied the questions and, in many cases, the willing partner, which is not quite the same as striking up a real exchange on your own initiative in the wild [1]. That distinction leaves open how well the findings transfer to a cold approach with a genuine stranger who has not signed up for anything. The studies also concentrated on the moments during and just after a conversation, so they say less about longer arcs, whether these encounters ripen into anything or simply pass. And while the sample was large and varied across the twelve experiments, cultural norms around talking to strangers differ, so the size of the effect may shift from place to place. What the work establishes convincingly is the direction of our error, not a guarantee about any particular chat.

Even bounded that way, the takeaway is quietly liberating. If the main thing standing between us and a warmer exchange is a prediction that tends to be wrong, then the fix is less about courage than about recalibration, trusting that the other person is probably more open than our anxious forecast insists. Connection, on this evidence, is frequently one slightly braver sentence away, and the awkwardness we dread rarely shows up to collect. That interplay between what we expect from others and what we actually receive also shapes how we recover in other corners of life, including how unwanted help at work quietly follows you home. For more on connection and everyday wellbeing, browse more mental health coverage.

Sources

1. Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367-398. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000281
2. American Psychological Association, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp
3. University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.