How to Talk - forget that you have the answers

Just a couple of snippets this time.

Done right, she says, encounters between strangers create “beautiful and surprising interruptions in the expected narrative of your daily life… You find questions whose answers you thought you knew”.

we probably hate the idea of striking up such conversations because it combines two ubiquitous stumbling blocks on the path to happiness. One is how bad we are at “affective forecasting”, or predicting what will make us happy. The other problem is “pluralistic ignorance”, whereby we follow a rule because we assume everyone else supports it, when really they’re assuming likewise.