Somewhere in the first half second of meeting someone new, your brain runs a background check faster than any conference badge scanner. It looks at the face, the outfit, the accent, and makes exactly one decision. Friend or threat. Nothing personal. It is the oldest app on your internal operating system, and it has never once asked for a software update.
I got a live demo of this at Ai4 in Las Vegas, sitting next to a woman named Cassie Williams at the keynote for "AI's Race to Reinvent Medicine." Within about ninety seconds of talking to her, my ancient brain had cleared her as friend, and my present day brain had learned more about what her company Bambora actually does than I would have gotten out of reading three AI generated summaries back to back. I told her exactly that. She laughed. I do not think it was a compliment she was expecting to hear at a conference about artificial intelligence, but there we were.
That was the pattern for the whole week. A woman mentioned, almost as a throwaway line while we waited for a keynote to start, that she used to work at the White House. Another seatmate turned out to be a data scientist who could have talked for an hour about the headaches of building good evaluation sets, and very nearly did. None of these people needed an opening line from me. A conference badge and five idle minutes were opening enough. My half second brain had already filed each of them under friend before my conscious mind caught up and started asking actual questions.
The Days Before the Phones
I grew up on train journeys that lasted days, not hours, and the whole social order of the compartment worked itself out around that fact. You either traveled with the same handful of people for the entire stretch, in which case you actually bonded with them the way you would with people at a long dinner, or someone got off at a station in the middle of the night and by morning a completely different person had taken their berth, and the whole conversation started over. This was before mobile phones, so the news you had came from the newsstand on the platform at whatever station you happened to be stopped at, and comparing notes on what was in that day's paper was its own kind of conversation starter.
I remember a woman explaining the Kashmiri Hindu exodus to me in more human detail than any news report ever managed, because she had lived through some version of it herself. I remember a family visiting from the UK, parents trying to show their kids the India they remembered, working out loud which stop was closest to which relative. I remember executives who had clearly done this route a hundred times, the small talk arriving easily because it was really just shorthand for people who already knew how the ritual worked. Nobody there was thinking about weak ties or social psychology. They were just doing what seemed obvious when two people are stuck in the same compartment for two or three days, with nothing but each other and whatever the last newsstand had to offer.
A conference badge and five idle minutes were opening enough.
I bring this up because a Wall Street Journal piece I read recently gave the whole habit a proper name. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychology professor at the University of Sussex, has spent years studying exactly this kind of conversation, the ones with people we will likely never see again. She points out that a stranger comes with a real advantage over a close friend. They can be more objective. You don't have to manage their emotions. And they can see things in a different way than you do. There is no history to manage and no relationship to protect, so you get an oddly clear conversation out of someone who owes you nothing.
Here is the part that made me feel better about every slightly awkward hello I have ever offered a stranger. New research shows that even when people talk about a topic that's boring, they enjoy the conversation more than they expected. The topic, it turns out, is almost beside the point. The enjoyment comes from two people actually paying attention to each other for a few minutes, whatever they happen to be talking about. Weather, wifi passwords, the questionable coffee. It does not matter. It works anyway.
The Quiet Flight Home
What does not work, apparently, is silence, and we are getting a lot more practice at that than we used to. A recent study shows that we are speaking an average of 338 fewer words a day, starting in 2005 when researchers started tracking this, which according to the same research adds up to roughly 120,000 fewer words a year that used to go to an actual person and now mostly do not go anywhere at all. I felt that number personally on the flight home. Vegas to Chicago, Chicago to Washington, and both legs were nearly silent. Not rude, just spent. Everyone on that plane had used up their weekly word count somewhere else, possibly at Ai4, possibly at Black Hat down the strip, and had nothing left over for the person one armrest away. Even the flight attendants got mostly nods.
If you want a genuinely useful trick out of all this, Sandstrom has one, and it fits neatly into an elevator, a boarding line, or the ninety seconds before a keynote starts. Ask a question, since people generally enjoy talking about themselves more than they let on. Find something in common, even something as thin as the length of the line you are both standing in. And offer a small compliment, because a compliment from a total stranger carries a kind of sincerity a compliment from your coworker never quite manages, since you clearly have nothing to gain by giving it.
None of the best conversations I had that week involved anyone complaining about anything. Cassie was excited about Bambora. The data scientist was excited about her evaluation problem, headaches and all. The woman from the White House was mostly just enjoying being asked a question that was not about the White House. That seems to be the actual secret, if there is one. People are not looking for someone to fix their week. They are looking for someone to be curious about it, for about the length of time it takes a keynote speaker to find the clicker.
So the next time your ancient brain runs its half second friend or threat scan on someone in a lanyard, and it comes back friend, do the polite thing and say something. Worst case, you learn what Bambora does. Best case, you get 338 words back that you were never going to spend on your phone anyway.
