Walking the talk

Chatting to a wider variety of people in your life can have enormous benefits, researchers have found. But is that easier said than done?

- PAUL LITTLE

'You talking to me?" asked Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, in a question that has echoed down the decades since the 1976 movie. Bickle was an alienated loner who struggled to connect with others. "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world," noted Funny Girl's Fanny Brice a few years earlier.

But not all people are lucky. With one-person households comprising a quarter of the total, and various technological and epidemiological factors at work to keep us apart, people need people more than ever. Overseas, the trend is the same, with an American Enterprise Institute survey in 2021 reporting that 12% of Americans say they have no close friends (compared with 3% in 1990).

If Bickle and Brice had had the findings of an experiment by Harvard Business School doctoral student Hanne Collins and a team of researchers to hand, their thinking on the subject might have been a lot more results-oriented. The title of the researchers' paper is a rough paraphrase of Brice's words: "Relational Diversity in Social Portfolios Predicts Wellbeing".

So what exactly is "relational diversity"? It's academic speak for interacting with a wider variety of people in your life.

"There's two elements of relational portfolio diversity," Collins says. "One is the richness. That's the number of categories of relationships that you're talking to - family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, etc. And the other part is the evenness. Say you had 10 conversations yesterday. A very low relationally diverse situation would be if eight of those were with your romantic partner and two were with a friend."

A more even scenario would be if you had conversations with colleagues, friends, your romantic partner, strangers and parents. Talking with eight people in your open-plan office doesn't count.