Gillian Sandstrom
speaker
124 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 15 Apr
Gillian Sandstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I discovered that he thought that the pandemic was a hoax and, you know, that the government was making up stories. And, you know, that's not my view. I couldn't understand why someone would think that way. You know, why would the government do that? And so, you know, I started to think, you know, I don't... who is this person and what's going on here? Here they are, a fish hero.
How is a fish hero also having these, you just never know someone, do you?
You know, I just think that we can serve a benefit to other people by talking to them and by listening to them. So I think it's pretty rare, at least in my own experience. I don't tend to get into any kind of heated topics when I'm talking to a complete stranger. It's usually fairly innocuous and fun.
It doesn't get into politics and religion and all the heavy stuff that we avoid at the Thanksgiving dinner table. a fun interaction. So I just let him talk a little bit, but yeah, it just sort of drew to a natural close and I moved on.
So, yeah, I've run a bunch of studies in the lab where I've asked people to predict how a conversation will go. Then they actually have a conversation with a stranger, and then they tell me how it went. And the people's worries before the conversation are quite high, but after having the conversation, they say, you know, none of those things actually happened.
But if you ask them to predict what would happen if they had another conversation right now, those fears sort of creep back up, not all the way to the level that they were at before the study, but definitely higher than they should be based on having just had a pleasant conversation. So it seems that people have trouble generalizing.
And, you know, it makes some sense because every human is unique, right? So it'd be easy to think, well, just because I had a nice conversation with this person, why would I expect to have a nice conversation with the next person?
The only way I can think of to fix this would be to get people to have a lot of conversations so they can start to see a pattern, start to see that most of these conversations are pleasant. But how am I going to do that when people don't even want to have one conversation with a stranger, let alone lots? And so I kind of stole an idea.
I was thinking, you know, I need people to, I need to turn it into a game. I need to make it fun somehow. And so I was thinking, maybe I could turn it into a bingo game or something. But a researcher in my department had placed posters around the building. They were recruiting people for a study involving a scavenger hunt. And it was a study about memory. But I thought, oh, scavenger hunt.
I could get people to do a scavenger hunt game that involves finding and talking to strangers.
Well, people and conversations with strangers are a treasure. Come on. So, yeah, I came up with a list of missions that were things like, you know, find someone who's wearing a hat or find someone who's drinking a coffee. I came up with a whole list of missions, about 30 of them. And, you know, I wanted them to be easy.
I didn't, you know, most scavenger hunts, you're trying to make it a little tricky so people can't find everything, right? But I wanted people to be able to accomplish every single mission.
We found that over the course of the study, every day people reported being less and less worried about being rejected by the people they approached and more and more confident in their ability to start and maintain and end the conversation. And so it really did seem that there was this gradual improvement and that repeated practice was important. Just having one conversation was not enough.
It was this gradual improvement over time that stuck even a week after the scavenger hunt had ended. People still had more positive feelings towards talking to strangers.
The workshops sort of became research and then the research fed back into the workshops. But really, it's just a big practice session. You know, you're bringing in a bunch of people who think they'd like to learn more how to talk to strangers. And so before the workshop starts, it's very quiet in the room.
There's crickets because everyone feels a bit awkward and they don't know what to do, what's going to happen. And so I always start the workshop by just saying, okay, you have to turn to someone sitting next to you and just say, have a conversation right now. And then it's just this beautiful moment because there's this buzz in the room and it's just like, oh my God, people are talking.
And then it's really hard to shut people up.
Yeah, I have a few different go-to methods now. So maybe it's especially an English thing. They joke about it all the time, but it's talk about the weather, right? And I think the reason we do that is because it's a shared circumstance, right? It's something we're both experiencing at the same time. So I think that principle can be used more broadly. So
If you're in the same place as this person at the same time, then you have various things in common with them already. So you can comment on the shared situation that you happen to be in. If you're on a bus or something and something unusual happens, then all of a sudden you're all on the same team, aren't you?
Everybody talks when they never would have talked before because you've experienced this situation together. But sometimes I do it in a different way, which is by pointing out something that I'm seeing in the environment. Sometimes I'll point out happy, playful dogs to someone else that's walking past me in the park and just draw their attention to it.
Showing 81–100 of 124 · page 5 of 7
← Previous
Next →