Hello, stranger? Pleasant conversations are preceded by concerns about starting one.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Connecting with others makes people happier, but strangers in close proximity often ignore each other. Prior research (Epley & Schroeder, 2014) suggested this social disconnection stems from people misunderstanding how pleasant it would be to talk with strangers. Extending these prior results, in a field experiment with London-area train commuters, those assigned to talk with a stranger reported having a significantly more positive experience, and learning significantly more, than those assigned to a solitude or control condition. Commuters also expected a more positive experience if they talked to a stranger than in the solitude or control conditions. A second experiment explored why commuters nevertheless avoid conversation even when it is generally pleasant. Commuters predicted that trying to have a conversation would be less pleasant than actually having one because they anticipated that others would be uninterested in talking. These experiments clarify the precise aspects of social interaction that may be misunderstood. People may avoid pleasant conversations with strangers because of miscalibrated concerns about starting them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".