New research suggests that even the simplest forms of social interaction, like greeting or thanking someone, can significantly boost our life satisfaction. The findings, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, highlight the often-overlooked value of everyday, minimal social interactions.
The motivation behind this study stemmed from decades of scientific research on the impact of close relationships, like family and friends, on psychological well-being. However, interactions with acquaintances and strangers – the people we might casually greet on our morning walk, thank a bus driver, or exchange a few words with at the supermarket – had not been as thoroughly explored. This gap in understanding prompted researchers to investigate whether these minimal interactions could be just as crucial to our overall happiness as the deeper connections we share with close ones.
“I’ve been involved in relationship research for almost ten years but I focused solely on close relationships until recently,” said study author Esra Aşçıgil, a postdoctoral researcher at Sabanci University in Istanbul. “It was the pandemic that made me realize how much the people outside of our close social circle mattered for our well-being.”
“Many of us were sheltering in place with our families and tried to keep in touch with close others, but our minimal social interactions were mostly gone. I know I missed saying good morning to the bus driver and making small talk with people I don’t know well by the coffee machine at work. This was a big motivation for me to join some great researchers, my coauthors in this study, in studying brief interactions with strangers and weak ties.”
To investigate this, the researchers employed two distinct groups of participants. The first group, referred to as Sample A, consisted of 3,266 adults from Turkey, gathered through face-to-face interviews by KONDA, a leading public opinion research company. This sample was representative of the Turkish population, covering all 12 regions of the country.
The second group, Sample B, was much larger, with 60,141 adult participants. This group was primarily composed of individuals from the United Kingdom, but also included English-speaking participants from various other countries. The data for Sample B was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire as part of The Kindness Test, a project conducted by the University of Sussex in partnership with the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Participants in the study were asked to report on different types of social interactions. In the Turkish sample, the focus was on ‘weak-tie’ interactions – those casual exchanges with acquaintances. Participants rated how often they engaged in greeting, thanking, or initiating conversations with people they knew but weren’t close to. In both samples, participants were also asked about their interactions with complete strangers, specifically how many social conversations they had started in the past week.
To understand the broader social context of participants, the study also included measures of relational mobility, gauging the ease with which people in their environment meet and establish new relationships. Life satisfaction was assessed through a straightforward question in both samples, asking participants to rate their overall satisfaction with life.
In Sample A, individuals who frequently greeted, thanked, or conversed with acquaintances reported greater life satisfaction. This correlation was also observed in Sample B, where participants who engaged in more conversations with strangers also indicated higher life satisfaction. To further strengthen these findings, the researchers used an instrumental variable analysis, a sophisticated statistical method that suggested these associations were not just correlations, but likely causal.
“Everyday life involves numerous opportunities to interact with strangers and people we don’t know well,” Aşçıgil told PsyPost. “We can greet and thank the cashier at the grocery store, we can start a conversation with the person sitting next to us on the bus, and so on. Our findings suggest that interactions like these can increase our life satisfaction.”
Interestingly, the research found that these minimal interactions had a positive effect on life satisfaction across both Western and non-Western cultural contexts. This suggests that the benefits of simple social interactions are universal, transcending cultural boundaries. The effect was even more pronounced among English-speaking participants, hinting at possible cultural differences in how social interactions are valued and experienced.
“One of the main questions we wanted to address in this research was whether very brief social interactions, such as simply saying hello or thank you to people we don’t know well, could contribute to well-being,” Aşçıgil said. “On the one hand, there was some prior research suggesting that only deeper interactions (e.g., a conversation where one self-discloses) could contribute to well-being. On the other hand, there was some other prior research suggesting that even very brief interactions with strangers could make people feel more connected to others. We were pleased to find that greeting and thanking contributed to well-being in a large nationally-representative sample.”
While the study’s results are compelling, it’s important to note its limitations. The reliance on self-reports for measuring social interactions could lead to recall bias, where participants might not accurately remember or report their interactions. Furthermore, the study did not directly measure the quality of close relationships, which are known to significantly impact well-being. Future research could explore this aspect more deeply, perhaps using direct measures of relationship quality to understand how close and minimal interactions interplay to affect our overall happiness.
The study also points towards potential directions for future research. One intriguing area could be to investigate how these findings apply to other non-Western countries, especially those not represented in the current study. Additionally, future studies could look into how to effectively track every momentary interaction to reduce recall bias, although this might be challenging in large-scale or nationally representative samples.
“Although we had two samples from two different cultural contexts (one from Turkey, and the other mostly from the UK), whether our findings would generalize to other countries remains an open question,” Aşçıgil explained. “We hope to conduct more cross-cultural studies in this topic in the future.”
The study, “Minimal Social Interactions and Life Satisfaction: The Role of Greeting, Thanking, and Conversing“, was authored by Esra Ascigil, Gul Gunaydin, Emre Selcuk, Gillian M. Sandstrom, and Erdal Aydin.
