Rung 4 · Graded exposure
A sentence to a stranger, daily
Say one thing to a stranger today that serves no purpose. The weather, the queue, the dog. Expect nothing back.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
The problem is almost never the sentence. It is that the mouth will not produce it. This trains the mouth rather than the script, and a cashier counts.
What it buys — Every rung above this is a sentence with something riding on it. This is where you find out the hard part was never the words.
In nine experiments with more than 800 commuters, those randomly assigned to talk to a stranger reported a more positive journey than those who sat in solitude — while a separate group predicted precisely the opposite.
What it cannot show — Commuters on Chicago trains and buses. Nothing in it tests other cultures, other settings, or repeated exposure.
Here — Conducted largely on Chicago commuter trains and buses; how far it travels to other cultures is untested here.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under. Speaking first should be unremarkable before you ask it to carry anything.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 5 — Open on the room, not the personSource
Epley & Schroeder (2014). Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5).
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 02 of that lesson.