The Familiar Stranger

The ever-cogent Christopher Allen brought the idea of the “Familiar Stranger” to my attention in a comment on yesterday’s “Werewolves…” post. Chris writes:

“One concept related to progressive trust that you might be interested in is the “familiar stranger”. When you see someone in the hall that you’ve seen before, maybe nodded to, but don’t actually know, that is a “familiar stranger”. Our sense of comfort in social situations is often bounded by the percentage of people that are familiar strangers, as well as our sense of safety in our communities. There is quite a bit of interesting research on this topic.

How it relates to progressive trust is that even before you get to the point where you are consciously moving forward on gaining mutual trust, you may have already established some by already being a familiar stranger. You are also more likely to default trust someone more if there are lots of familar strangers around.”

The folks at Intel Research @ Berkeley bring us this further definition:

“The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility. A good example is a person that one sees on the subway every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice.

Familiar Strangers form a border zone between people we know and the completely unknown strangers we encounter once and never see again. While we are bound to the people we know by a circle of social reciprocity, no such bond exists between us and complete strangers. Familiar Strangers buffer the middle ground between these two relationships. Because we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, they establish our connection to individual places.”

I love this concept of the “familiar stranger,” especially when it’s linked up with Kathy Sierra’s recent thoughts (she calls it “the-guy-from-the-train phenomenon“). Kathy writes:

“You know the story: you take the same train to work every day. One Saturday afternoon you’re in a cafe when you spot a familiar face at the next table. “Hey, it’s the guy from the train!” you think, with a smile. Then the guy from the train notices you, and his eyes light up. You start a lively conversation moving from weather to espresso to geopolitical forces. You exchange URLs.

The thing is, you took the train with this guy for the last 18 months and never gave him a moment’s thought…until you saw him at the cafe.

That’s the power of unexpected context.”

Not only does the familiar stranger bring trust to a public place, but placing the familiar stranger in an out-of-context environment may be the catalyst that converts the “familiar stranger” into a friend and catalyzes the trust relationship between two individuals.

I like the symmetry in that.

(photo credit: toronto_lex)