Fleeting Generalization: How Unstable Belief Updating Keeps People Overly Pessimistic About Talking to Strangers

Abstract: Conversation with strangers and weak ties tend to be positive, yet people hold overly pessimistic expectations about them. We examine why pessimistic expectations persist despite good outcomes. Across three longitudinal experiments, having a conversation immediately increased optimism and calibration about a future conversation, especially when the future partner was the same person. But updating was fleeting: within one to two weeks, expectations reverted toward a pessimistic baseline, resembling those who had no conversation to learn from. This fleeting generalization was specific to conversation (relative to noninteractive controls), emerged for future interactions with the same or a different person, occurred whether or not participants made explicit forecasts beforehand, and held across both shallow and deeper conversations. Reversion was partly explained by remembering conversations as less positive than they felt immediately afterward. These findings suggest that miscalibrated social beliefs can persist even with unbiased experience to learn from.

Keywords: conversation, social interaction, belief updating, miscalibration, learning