① 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.
② 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.”
③ What is it that makes us feel we need to hide ____5____ our screens?
④ 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.
⑤ 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____.”
⑥ 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.”
⑦ ____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.
