Some people slide into a conversation with a stranger without any visible effort, while the same moment leaves others rehearsing an opening line that never quite gets said. The usual explanation is extraversion, but a specific line of psychological research points to a more precise, separate trait doing much of the work.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2013 study by Todd Kashdan, Ryne Sherman, Jeffrey Yarbro, and David Funder, published in the Journal of Personality. The researchers gathered self-reports, friend reports, and parent reports of curiosity from 220 college students, then had 167 of those students sit down with a stranger for a five-minute conversation with a single, minimal instruction: talk about whatever you’d like. Independent observers, who knew nothing about the participants beforehand, then coded what actually happened on camera. Students who scored high in trait curiosity showed more positive emotional expressiveness, more initiation of humor and playfulness, more unconventional thinking, and a distinctly non-defensive, noncritical attitude toward their conversation partner, compared with less curious students. Curiosity, in other words, wasn’t just something a person felt privately. It showed up as a specific, visible pattern of behavior that unacquainted observers could pick up on within minutes, which is part of why the researchers describe interpersonal curiosity as a trait that facilitates bonding almost immediately, before two strangers know anything else about each other.
A second study by an overlapping research team helps explain why that visible behavior translates into an actual felt sense of closeness. In a 2011 paper by Todd Kashdan, Patrick McKnight, Frank Fincham, and Paul Rose, published in the Journal of Personality, the researchers ran three separate studies specifically examining curiosity and closeness between strangers. The first study, with 98 college students, found something worth pausing on: curious people expected a deep, intimate conversation to build closeness, but didn’t expect the same from ordinary small talk. Less curious people expected poor outcomes from both kinds of conversation. But the second and third studies, involving 90 and 106 students respectively, measured what participants actually felt after the conversation happened, and the prediction from the first study turned out to be wrong. Curious people felt close to their partner during small talk just as much as during a deliberately intimate exchange, while less curious people only felt close when the conversation was structured specifically to build a relationship. Part of what explained curious people’s benefit, according to the researchers’ analysis, was surprise: they hadn’t expected mundane small talk to feel as good as it did, and that unexpected pleasure partially accounted for the boost in closeness. The researchers also checked whether the effect could be explained away by physical attraction or general positive mood, and found it couldn’t.
Put together, these two studies describe curiosity operating on two levels at once. Outwardly, it shapes how a person actually behaves in a conversation with a stranger, more humor, more openness, less defensiveness, in ways strangers can detect almost immediately. Inwardly, it changes how the same ordinary exchange is experienced, turning small talk that a less curious person might expect to be a letdown into something that genuinely feels closer to real connection. Neither study suggests this is really about being naturally fearless or unusually outgoing. It looks more like a specific orientation toward not already knowing how the conversation will go, and finding that uncertainty interesting rather than something to brace against.
Both studies come with real limits worth naming plainly. Their samples were college students, a group that differs from the general population in age, life stage, and the kinds of strangers they’re likely to encounter, so how well the pattern holds among older adults or across other cultural contexts remains an open question the data here can’t answer. The 2013 study’s five-minute, single-encounter conversations also can’t say much about how curiosity plays out in longer, higher-stakes interactions with strangers, a job interview or a first date, for instance, rather than a low-stakes lab exercise. And while the 2011 paper’s authors specifically ruled out physical attraction and general positive mood as explanations, correlational research like this can never fully close the door on some other unmeasured trait doing part of the work alongside curiosity.
Within those limits, what the research offers is a more specific answer than “some people are just naturally better with strangers.” The people who find it easy appear to share a fairly identifiable trait: an interest in not knowing yet how the conversation will unfold, treated as a draw rather than a threat, which shows up in how they act and shapes how good the exchange ends up actually feeling.