I know I risk having my British citizenship revoked for saying this, but I admired how Jonathan Dunne – the American behind those “Tube chat” badges, encouraging conversation on the London Underground – responded to the hostility his project provoked. He ordered twice as many badges, recruited volunteers, and plunged back into the fray. Don’t get me wrong: true to my nationality, my first instinct is that anyone proposing more conversation between strangers should be imprisoned without trial. But on reflection, that reaction’s odd. After all, Tube chat isn’t encouraging unwanted conversation (if you aren’t up for talking, don’t wear a badge). The main objection seemed to be how excruciating it would be to have to listen to other passengers’ stumbling attempts at dialogue. And when you’re that horrified by the prospect of humans willingly engaging in mundane activities in public, isn’t it possible the problem isn’t with them?

Because the truth – according to an accumulating body of research, and now a book, When Strangers Meet, by the American educator Kio Stark – is that people really are happier when they talk to strangers, even when they predict they’ll hate it. This topic quickly gets derailed by questions of street harassment, but Stark is clear she’s not excusing that. (Nobody who thinks it’s OK to pester a woman to remove her headphones, as per that sleazy blogpost that went viral this summer, will find solace in Stark’s argument.)

But her book suggests that the right way to combat a culture of obnoxious interactions between strangers is to foster a culture of sensitive, empathetic ones instead – not to shut down the whole idea, which feels rather like capitulating to the creeps. Done right, she says, encounters between strangers create “beautiful and surprising interruptions in the expected narrative of your daily life… You find questions whose answers you thought you knew”.

Legitimate fears of harassment aside, we probably hate the idea of striking up such conversations because it combines two ubiquitous stumbling blocks on the path to happiness. One is how bad we are at “affective forecasting”, or predicting what will make us happy: when asked by researchers to imagine talking to someone on the train or bus, plenty of people are appalled; when asked actually to do it, they report enjoying the journey more. The other problem is “pluralistic ignorance”, whereby we follow a rule because we assume everyone else supports it, when really they’re assuming likewise. And so the carriage remains mute, even though many might be secretly yearning to talk.

I don’t expect the curmudgeons reading this to buy the argument. I barely buy it myself, which is why my recent attempts to talk more to strangers have been so faltering. (Also, I’m still traumatised by trying it on a recent trip to Sweden, apparently the only country worse at public small talk than the Brits.) But that’s the thing about affective forecasting: we can’t trust our own predictions. So you’re certain you’d never wear a Tube chat badge? Maybe that’s just a sign you should.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com