This is an excerpt from the IIDA Industry Roundtable 27 report.

What if a reliable source of happiness was all around us — literally within arms’ reach? Imagine offices, healthcare centers, stores, airplanes, buses; each person sitting right next to a source of happiness.

It almost sounds too good to be true.

During his talk at Industry Roundtable, sponsored by Momentum Textiles and Wallcovering, Epley presented an intriguing opportunity for designers. As creators of experiences that are centered on human needs, interior designers have the unique ability to influence comfort, emotion and interaction. So how can we help foster those connections, and build the experiences that cultivate human happiness and wellbeing?

The Big Gamble

Epley’s work centers on a key disconnect between perception and reality. People perceive risk in reaching out to engage another person in conversation — particularly someone they don’t know well. In a series of experiments that now have more than 3,000 participants, Epley’s data remains remarkably consistent: we grossly underestimate how pleasurable it will be to connect. “I’m not quite sure how you’re going to respond when I reach out to you,” he says. “That’s the barrier to a lot of conversations.” Epley, a leader in the study of human connection and wellbeing, began his best-known series of experiments while commuting from the south suburbs of Chicago to his office at the University of Chicago campus.

Riding the train, he noticed that everyone was sitting silently, not engaging with the people around them. “Here we were,” he says, “cheek by jowl with an ostensible source of happiness, and no one was using it.” Deciding to practice a little social science, he started a conversation with the woman sitting next to him, and discovered a happiness dividend that, in turn, launched years of research into human connection.

That trajectory, he points out, was made possible by his willingness to be vulnerable — something most people feel is risky, even when it comes to a simple conversation. The fear of being judged, even by a stranger, is strong enough to keep most of us from connecting. But that perceived risk, Epley’s research shows, is greatly exaggerated. Time after time, his research participants gave low rankings to their expectations around conversation — and in nearly every instance, post-conversation rankings rated the experience as much better than they thought it would be. “Life’s a gamble,” says Epley. “There’s risk in deciding what you’re going to do. [Connecting with others] is as close to a sure thing as you’re ever going to get. It’s not a risk.”

The Blank Slate

A skewed perception of risk isn’t too hard to understand: before you make a connection with someone, they are a blank slate — and fear of the unknown is perhaps the most common feature in the landscape of human emotions. Luckily, there is a beautifully designed tool to cut through those unknowns: conversation. “We have lots of experiences in our lives,” says Epley, “but conversation tends to pull us toward the things we have in common.”

Why? Because conversation is designed around one of the most powerful social norms, one that drives human behavior around the world, in every society: reciprocity. This powerful social force constrains what happens in conversation, and eliminates most of the risk in engaging with another person. Think about it, says Epley: “Nobody waves. Everybody waves back. We think [conversation] is a gamble. But reciprocity is super popular.”

The Bad Expectations

Conversation and connection are built to succeed. So what’s the problem? We are.

When asked to project their own reactions to talking and connecting with someone, Epley’s research subjects routinely underestimate how much they will have in common with the other person. People also overestimate how harshly they’ll be judged. Yet, those same research subjects are regularly amazed at how engaging in meaningful conversation with another person has a profound effect on their own emotional wellbeing.

Those pessimistic expectations are not grounded in reality, but they trap us anyway. Humans, Epley says, only learn from experiences. But in the absence of experience, we make decisions based on our expectations. “If you believe talking to someone will be unpleasant, you’ll never find out,” says Epley. “If I’m overly pessimistic about how it’s going to go, I’m not going to reach out. And how many conversations have you missed out on because you didn’t reach out?”

Understanding that people will not necessarily choose to connect, designers may reassess the way they gather information from clients and end users, or how they prioritize the information they are given. “We often choose isolation more than is for our own good,” says Epley. “So if you design a building and people say they need a lot of quiet space, they will choose to isolate more than is good for them.”

For years, designers have worked to create spaces that sparked serendipitous meetings — but what kind of space encourages and invites deeper conversation? Can design help people choose connection over isolation?

As we continue to create design that benefits humanity, these questions can prompt a new paradigm for the built environment. Informed by research like Epley’s, designers can navigate with a fresh point of view, and a vision of spaces that can bring us closer to a guaranteed source of happiness and wellbeing.

Read more Perspective: Designing for Joy here or the full Industry Roundtable 27 Report here