Moving From Stranger to Friend: 3 Tips

How do you make friends if you're not a natural extrovert?

In a recent post, I discussed 3 separate problems involved in making friends – how to move from being a stranger to acquaintance, how to move from acquaintance to friend, and how to maintain or manage a friendship once it is established.

If you are one of those extraverted people who finds it easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger on the street, you probably don’t need advice about how to take that first step. But I’ll offer three simple suggestions about how the rest of us might more easily move from stranger to acquaintance.

People Like People Who Are Like Themselves

Looking back on the friendships I have had during my life, most have been with people who shared some central characteristic with me. My good friend in elementary school was Steven Stuart, who, like me, was an intellectual nerd obsessed with science. While our classmates were fascinated by baseball statistics and automobiles, we shared books about Louis Pasteur, gaped at Herbert Zim’s classic little guides to “Reptiles and Amphibians” and “Rocks and Minerals,” and visited the anthropology and paleontology exhibits in the Museum of Natural History. My more recently acquired friend Luis Gomez Jacinto (pictured) is a professor at the University of Malaga in Spain, far from where I live, but we share a deep passion about understanding human beings and their cultures in evolutionary perspective (Kenrick & Gomez Jacinto, 2014) – an obvious extension of my childhood interests in biology and anthropology.

The author with his friend Luis Gomez Jacinto, who share a central characteristic despite living on different continents.

Source: Original by author Doug Kenrick, used with permission.

Decades of research have demonstrated that we strongly prefer people who share our interests and values (Byrne & Clore, 1970; Montoya & Horton, 2012). When it comes to values with political or moral implications, it also works in reverse, we find it emotionally unpleasant to be around other people who don't share our political and moral values (Rosenbaum, 1986). The preference for people with similar values is enough to overcome other differences; several classic studies (conducted back when parts of the U.S. were still not desegregated), found that White participants, even those living in the segregated South, preferred someone of a different race who shared their political values to someone of their own race who did not (Hendrick, Bixenstine, Hawkins, 1971; Insko & Robinson, 1967).

A study I did with Fang Fang Chen found that if a Democrat or Republican found out that a member of the other party agreed with them on controversial issues, that similarity boosted liking -- significantly more than finding out that a member of their own party agreed with them. On the other hand, disagreement led to more of a drop in liking if a member of your own party disagreed with you (Chen & Kenrick, 2002).

This research has an important lesson – we are similar to, and different from, almost everyone we meet. The trick is to find the commonalities, and emphasize them rather than immediately searching for the points on which you disagree.

If you are a stranger in a new place, you don’t know who shares your interests and values. Maybe someone is wearing a t-shirt from your favorite band, or reading a book you’ve enjoyed, though; in which case, that stranger would likely welcome your positive comment. But there’s a better tactic to increase the odds of connecting with people who are similar to you, which I’ll discuss below.

Make yourself useful

Daniel Kahneman was reputedly an introverted child without real friends, but as an adult he developed a deep friendship with Amos Tversky. Their friendship was based on their shared love of psychology, but was fueled by the fact that they loved working together. That collaborative work eventually led to a Nobel Prize.

When one Nobel Laureate in biology was asked to list Ten Simple Rules to Win a Nobel Prize, he included: “3. Collaborate with Other Scientists…” “5. Work in the laboratory of a previous Nobel Prize winner” and “6. Even better than rule 5, try to work in the laboratory of a future Nobel Prize winner.” (Roberts, 2015).

In thinking about the friendships I have forged as an adult, almost all of them involved working together on joint projects. Those projects resulted in hundreds of publications, books, and invitations to travel to various universities around the world, not to mention a lot of delightful conversations about fascinating topics.

Proximity Revisited: Not all Locations are Equal

One simple tactic is to go where the people are, noting classical findings that apartment residents with apartments near common gathering areas make more friends than those whose apartments face out onto the street. One benefit of living in such locations is that you become a familiar face, and decades of research indicates that familiarity breeds liking (e.g., Moreland & Beach, 1992).

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But some locations are better than others. For example, there are crowds of people hanging out in city parks, and other crowds drinking in bars, probably not far from where you live. But although you may occasionally strike up a conversation in such a setting, you are less likely to form a lasting friendship there. I say this based not on empirical research, but I have spent plenty of time during my 76 years of life walking around in public places, and hanging out in cafes and bars. And I have never formed a lasting friendship in one of those crowded public places.

Instead, you are better off going to a place where you can capitalize on similarity and shared goals: Taking a class in something you’re interested in, for example, or volunteering for an organization whose members share important common goals with you. It’s also useful to simply hang out with people you already know and like, who can introduce you to other people who know and like those people. And if you can collaborate on assignments or community projects, so much the better.

None of this is surprising, but if you are an introvert, it helps to remind yourself that to make friends, you don’t need to act like an extraverted party animal. But you do need to regularly challenge yourself to leave the comforts of your quiet cave and spend time in places where you stand a chance of meeting other people similar to you, preferably where you are doing something useful and can become a familiar face. And don’t forget to use the best known conversation opener: “Hello, how are your doing today?”

Footnote: In my last post, I suggested that our ancestors were born into lifelong groups of friends, so didn't need the social skills required in modern society, where the average person moves 12 times during their lifespan. This is not to say our ancestors never needed to form alliances with new people; they traded with people from other villages, for example, and often moved when they got married.

Even if they never relocated their residences, our ancestors would have profited from knowing how to get along with the people with whom they collaborated every day. In the next posts, I’ll talk about research on deepening and maintaining existing friendships, tasks requiring somewhat different skills from befriending strangers.