The Power of Person-to-Person Contact

Review of Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person. By Andy Field. W.W. Norton & Co. 304 pp. $17.95.

Some years ago, psychologists Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley designed experiments involving participants initiating conversations with strangers on their daily commute. Despite fears of rejection, the experience of participants was overwhelmingly positive.

These days, Andy Field indicates, an increasingly stratified, segregated society; our “headphone culture"; and COVID-19 and its aftermath have reduced opportunities for people to meet and mingle with strangers.

A writer, artist, and curator based in London, Field acknowledges that “micro-incursions” in other people’s lives, especially in the context of increasing inequality and injustice, can be stressful or even violent. Nonetheless, in Encounterism, Field celebrates seemingly ordinary, but sometimes creative, connections between strangers, acquaintances, friends, and lovers, in a series of vignettes involving, among other things, trips to the hairdresser, dancing, snowball fights, pizza parties, taxicab rides, and the Harlem Cultural Festival. His reflections are engaging, idiosyncratic, and insightful.

Automobiles, Field points out, were the ideal size for 1950s nuclear families. The seating “re-inscribed” the conventional structure of those families: dad in the driver’s seat, mom next to him, the kids in the back. Even these days, women drivers sometimes feel uncomfortable when their male partner is in the car. For young people, Field writes, the car’s spatial architecture, minimizing eye contact, which can be intimidating, “is like a beginner’s class in conversation,” by putting nervous people in close proximity without “the awkwardness that might otherwise ensue.” As “the closest thing to a lockable bedroom,” free from the rules enforced at home, the car also provides space for smoking, drinking, emotional intimacy, and sex.

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Sharing meals, Field reminds us, “is a social ritual with a million different histories.” The most common of them, of course, involves families. Surprisingly, perhaps, Field does not mention recent studies that indicate that over the last 20 years, the number of weekly family dinners in the United States has declined by about 33 percent. And the typical family dinner now lasts only 15 to 30 minutes.

Psychologists at the University of Warwick, Field reveals, recently measured a dog’s impact on sociability by recording human encounters when subjects were on their own, compared to those when they were accompanied by a Labrador. Five days alone yielded three encounters with strangers; five days with the dog, 65 of them. The unpretentious, unprejudiced curiosity of dogs, Field indicates, leads to conversations “with people we might otherwise dismiss or ignore.”

Social interaction, Field demonstrates, can and does occur in dark movie theaters, where the real and imaginary meet. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is, of course, his paradigmatic example. Laughter, screams, kisses, and heads on shoulders are ways of constructing shared experiences, without talking. Drawing on a study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany, of the chemical composition inside a movie theater, Field suggests, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, that “we are literally breathing each other in, absorbing the feelings of the strangers around us.”

Field recognizes that the meaning of holding hands differs in countries throughout the world, no doubt because it is a public declaration of longing and love. That said, to prove the behavior is hardwired in the brain, he cites a finding by psychologists at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin that holding a loved one’s hand when confronted with danger reduces neural activity associated with emotional and behavioral threat responses, giving individuals a “comfort blanket” when they need it. And psychologists in California found that 90 percent of males in heterosexual couples, the parent in parent–child pairs, and older siblings put their hands on top, in displays of dominance.

Encounterism ends with a study conducted at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo that found that kindergarten students who played with a robot after they held hands and walked across the classroom were more open to the connection. In the future, the researchers predicted, “robots will come to be recognized as friend-like entities, neither machines nor complete strangers.”

When, Field wonders, will the robots learn “how to hold hands not as an exertion of power, but as an act of empathy, or an act of solidarity?”