This I can comprehend. Yet, it is a myth to think that nurturing curiosity about strangers requires an extrovert personality. As Susan Cain shows in her book Quiet, it is precisely the more introverted types who often develop into especially skilled listeners, and who make others feel at ease by not overwhelming them with force of character. They also tend to avoid the superficial chatter of parties and favour one to one conversations, which are much more likely to result in interesting and emphatic discussion. But what ever your personality type, it is essential to realise that most people actually want to talk about the things that matter to them. Offer them the space, and they will open themselves to you.
While we can nurture our curiosity as individuals we need to invent new social institutions to spread conversational curiosity far and wide. Luckily some of them already exist. Have you ever been to a human library? The human library movement was founded in Denmark in 2000, to erode prejudices and create dialogues across social divides, and has now spread to over twenty countries. Here is how it works. The libraries typically take place at a local public library, for example one saturday morning per month. If you go along, instead of borrowing a book you can borrow a person for conversation. The human library is full of volunteers who you can take out for around half an hour discussion on any topic you like - they might be a naval officer, an asylum seeker, or night club bouncer. The point is to talk to people who never normally come into contact within your every day life.
Theodore Zaldin, at the organisation he founded called the oxford muse, which shares the human library movement's faith in the power of talking to strangers. Zaldin's belief - one that fully subscribe to - is that if you can bring two people together from different backgrounds, and encourage them to have a one to one conversation in which they take off their mask and share parts of their lives and look through each other's eyes, then you have created a small moment of equality and mutual understanding and by multiplying these kinds of conversation you can produce a micro cosmic yet potent form of social change. Think of it as changing the world one conversation at a time.
