Familiar Strangers
Written by Sarah Klym
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, “The Mysterious Garden” 1911
Do you remember the last person you walked past on the street?
Chances are, that fleeting encounter has already faded from your memory. In a world brimming with faces, our ability to forget the people we meet is a curious aspect of modern urban life. In the busy landscape of cities, the average person crosses paths with countless others on a daily basis. Walking past strangers on the sidewalk, standing next to strangers on the train, sitting beside strangers in their cars in traffic. Despite the physical closeness of these encounters, most leave no lasting imprint on our minds. In all likelihood, you’d struggle to pick yesterday’s stranger out of a lineup.
The degree to which we not only forget but go out of our way to avoid encounters is turned up to eleven in overcrowded spaces. Walking down a busy street or cramming into a subway car highlights our instinctive tendency to disconnect from those around us. Many of us cast our eyes up, down, or onto our phones to avoid making eye contact with strangers. This is especially true when intruding on one another's personal space; studies show that the closer we are physically to other people, the less we engage in elements of connection like eye contact [1]. These conscious efforts to disengage create the familiar scenario in which we are surrounded by people, yet isolated in our own worlds.
Research suggests this is a defence mechanism, that we default to cognitive strategies of avoidance and forgetting to navigate the overwhelming density of interactions in our lives [2]. Intentionally avoiding these brief encounters is our way to cope with the sheer volume of faces we come by daily. To our brains, this feels like a rational response; it’s best not to waste valuable memory real estate on information that holds no bearing on our lives. The dense city paradoxically offers a sense of anonymity that encourages disconnection. This anonymity serves as a defence mechanism against the emotional labour that consistent engagement with fellow inhabitants might entail.
The ways in which we avoid encounters with strangers are also place-based and socially constructed. Many cities can feel much friendlier due to cultural norms and mores of smiling/waving to passers-by or common practices of striking up conversation with people at the bus stop. In Vancouver, however, well-known as a “cold” and “unfriendly” city, there is a clear and widely followed practice of avoiding acknowledging others. Big “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” energy. The degree to which we cling to these unfriendly cultural norms and coping strategies can negatively affect our quality of life, playing a role in the “loneliness epidemic” emerging in many societies.
Occasionally, amid the sea of forgettable faces, there emerges an exception—a person with a unique trait that captures our attention. It could be a quirky accessory, an adorable pet, or an unfortunate haircut. These details break through the veil of anonymity, offering a brief connection that challenges our propensity to forget. You may notice this stranger more frequently. Once they’re stored in your long-term memory, their unique presence takes on meaning to you. Most people can identify this kind of half-stranger in their lives; someone they encounter regularly and know from a distance, maybe even talk about to their friends and family or give funny aliases (” Did you see Baguette Larry with his baguette this morning? Classic.”). Over time, they transition from another face in the crowd to a distinct figure in our mental landscape.
Research in the 1970s began to label these kinds of characters as “Familiar Strangers”; those we repeatedly observe and are affected by, but don’t engage directly with [3]. Despite a lack of direct connection with these individuals, studies suggest they nonetheless offer a sense of comfort and connection to place [4]. We are also much more likely to strike up a conversation or ask a Familiar Stranger for help than a complete stranger. The level of familiarity established by simply noticing and remembering is enough to start to erode the walls we build to insulate ourselves from others.
This phenomenon illustrates the delicate balance between the mundane and the remarkable in our daily interactions. As we continue to navigate the dance between anonymity and connection, keeping an eye out for Familiar Strangers sheds light on the fleeting encounters that shape our urban lives, and the potential to connect.
Stay tuned for more journal entries about the everyday magic of social connection in cities, and how we centre sociability in our design ethos.
[1] Argyle, Michael and Janice Ellen. Dean. “Eye-Contact, Distance, and Affiliation.” Sociometry 28 (1965): 289-304 .
[2] McCauley, Clark, Geoffrey Coleman and Patricia Fusco. “Commuters' eye contact with strangers in city and suburban train stations: Evidence of short-term adaptation to interpersonal overload in the city.” Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior 2 (1978): 215-225.
[3] Goffman, Erving. “Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order.” (1971).
[4] Paulos, Eric and Elizabeth Goodman. “The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004)