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Podcast Episode

Talking to Strangers: The Economics of Social Connection

The Pie: An Economics Podcast·Becker Friedman Institute at UChicago·6 August 2026·53 min

About this episode

New research shows that people are strikingly bad at predicting how good it feels to connect with a stranger. In this episode of The Pie, Nick Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and author of A Little More Social, discusses what more than 120 experiments reveal about why we avoid reaching out to others, and what that avoidance may be costing us.