The Friendship Lottery

Leave a comment and I may buy you a meal or even a vacation—yes, I’m serious

A week and a half ago a stranger approached me and asked for a hug. In response I did what any normal person would do—wrote a 2,400 word essay about prosocial and antisocial behavior that ends with an offer to buy two strangers a meal. You’ll have to stick with me to see if you can be one of the strangers that wins said free meal.

So back to the encounter with a stranger that kicked all this off. 

I start almost every morning with a quick one mile walk around my neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The walk isn’t serene or particularly interesting—it takes me east, directly into the morning sun, through a few blocks of row houses and low-rise apartments, north for one block on a wide commercial avenue, then back west through another block of slightly different row houses and low-rise apartments. I don’t rise particularly early, so these morning loops usually occur between 7:45-8:30 am. I’ve lived in my current apartment for almost two years and would guess that I have done this particular loop at least 500 times. There’s almost always a contingent of people out and about, but, for nearly two years, these morning walks have been solitary affairs, in which I catch up on podcasts or my thoughts. 

But on April 29, as I walked north along Georgia Avenue on a cool and cloudy morning, a stranger called out. 

“I find you attractive.”

It took me a moment to process that this line was directed at me. Like I said, I’ve walked along this stretch of road hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times in the 13 years that I’ve lived in DC. My neocortex has a pretty accurate model of this little patch of the world, but this bid for connection from a stranger really threw off my internal model. And while this isn’t the first time in my life that a stranger has made some sort of comment or gesture towards my appearance, it is a rare enough occurrence that my brain didn’t immediately assume that I was the subject¹. 

But after I snapped out of my head and into the world, I saw a pair of deep brown eyes staring at me with a single-minded intensity. The eyes belonged to a 20-something woman with curly shoulder length black hair. I couldn’t tell if this stranger was smiling or not, because she had a mask covering everything below her eyes. She was dressed in the style that I associate simultaneously with my late 90s/early 00s middle school years and with Gen Z—she had large acid washed jeans, an accompanying oversized jacket, and a bag. The combination of her hair and eyes were reminiscent of the actress that plays Ellaria Sand on Game of Thrones.  

As we walked towards each other, I started to pick up a strong hint of cigarettes and a mild hint of alcohol. I made a plausible guess that she was still out from a raucous night and thus disinhibited enough to spill her internal monologue out into the world. 

A combination of politeness and flattery drove me to thank her for the compliment. I thought the interaction would end there, but as we approached each other she asked me if she could have a hug. 

This request for a hug is what sent me down a rabbit hole that ended up with me writing this piece. Because I said yes to the hug, even as I was acutely aware that the only rational and truly acceptable response in contemporary American society would be to say no. 

Here’s why. 

Contemporary America is a weak-link society. With low social trust, there is every reason to treat strangers with high degrees of skepticism and avoidance—the downside of a negative interaction is bounded only by death and the upside is both hard to fathom and also highly unlikely. And then we have availability bias to further sear into our brains that strangers=danger. 

And yet, despite me being keenly aware of the fact that I should politely say no to the hug, I said yes. I can make a reasoned guess as to why—with obvious factors like: I didn’t feel physically threatened as this person was smaller than me; this person, despite being partially obscured by a mask, seemed quite attractive; I personally have a bias towards sociability and politeness—but the bottom line is that these are all ex post facto explanations for an action that was honestly automatic. Someone asked me for a hug, I gave them a hug. 

But during the hug, my rational brain snapped into the picture. I scanned my surroundings to check and see if other strangers were approaching us, I angled my body in such a way so that if she tried to reach into her bag I could’ve driven my shoulder and hips to toss her to the ground and make a hasty exit, I took stock of everything I had in my pockets. With the rational brain in control, I broke off the hug rather quickly. 

But as soon as I broke it off, the stranger looked up at me with pleading eyes.  

“That was a really nice hug. Can I have another?”

And again my prosocial bias took over and I said yes. 

At the end of the hug the stranger asked me if I thought she was pretty. I said yes and realized that the only thing this stranger wanted from me was a small amount of connection and affirmation from another human being. And I sort of granted her that, but I was also constantly running my own antivirus software—trying to ascertain what this stranger wanted from me, what threat level she possessed, what I could do to keep her out. 

After the second hug, we walked in opposite directions. I turned west and walked the remaining half mile to my house. During the rest of that walk I started to think about strong-link and weak-link societies; about prosocial and antisocial behavior; about the world we live in and whether a different world is possible. 

What if I was Amish

I continued to think even more about all these questions later that day, as I drove with a couple of friends through Amish country. 

I conducted a mini thought experiment. 

Imagine the same scenario I laid out earlier, but in Amish country. A lone Amish man walks in the morning hours on a road near his house. An Amish woman passes and makes a complimentary observation about his appearance. I don’t know the social mores of the Amish and have no idea whether this would be outside the bounds of acceptable stranger interaction. I presume the answer is that it would be frowned upon to make such forward romantic advances, particularly with the gender roles as such in this thought experiment. But I’m also pretty confident that neither party would think that there was a potential degree of danger or violence in play. The community, being as small and tight-knit as I understand the Amish to be, is such that any stranger is likely only one or two degrees of separation away. Under these circumstances, I think it is reasonable to assume that the incentives to avoid a reputation as an asshole would be the strongest motivator of behavior. 

And since we were in the car, I injected another thought experiment—what if this interaction had occurred in the 1960s in the United States. By most measurable statistics, American life has gotten less dangerous than it was when my dad took a VW bus on a cross country road trip, making friends and staying with strangers on nights that he didn’t want to sleep in the pop up sleeping area of his VW bus. The likelihood of being harmed by a stranger, though still small overall, was higher in the 1960s than it is today—and yet there are so many stories of people hitchhiking across the country. 

I’m not the type of person with a romantic reverence for 1960s America. I wasn’t around, though I have studied the period more than most my age. I’m fully convinced that in almost every measurable way, America today is a better place. But I do wonder whether, in some pockets of the past and also in different societies today, we can find strong-link societies—places where the social dynamics are such that the rational move is to cooperate, not to defect, to look at a stranger as a person more likely to improve your wellbeing than to harm you. 

What’s the deal with strong-links and weak-links?

What exactly are strong-link and weak-link societies? Well, first I have to give credit to the two people that I stole this framing from: Malcolm Gladwell, who first introduced the idea of strong-link and weak-link games in a podcast I listened to years ago, and also Adam Mastroianni, who recently published a wonderful essay on Substack exploring the concept of strong-link and weak-link problems in the context of science. So here’s how I started applying strong-links and weak-links to societies and to social interactions. 

Let’s start with weak-link societies. I’m most familiar with weak-link societies because I live in one. Evidence of America’s weak-links are plastered daily in our headlines, social media posts, and lamentations. In a weak-link society you are conditioned to be hypervigilant. This is both easy to do on one one level—after all if most of our ancestors hadn’t possessed the hypervigilant gene then they wouldn’t have survived long enough to pass any genes on to us today—and also mentally taxing to maintain. 

The phrase stranger danger is probably the best encapsulation of what it means to live in a weak-link society. Stranger danger, as I remember it from my 1990s childhood, tells you, innocent elementary aged child, that the world is a scary place, that strangers are the scariest of these many scary place threats, and that you must avoid scary strangers in a scary world or else you’ll be turned into a scary ghost. 

Stranger danger is actually a bad heuristic—any single person, especially any child, is far more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger—but I think it is so deeply ingrained because it does speak to the reality of our weak-link society. The U.S. today is a low-trust society and while the odds of being harmed by a stranger are small, they aren’t zero. This weak-link society then incentivizes antisocial behavior. It also really atomizes each and every person in the society, distorting the binds that tie us by magnifying the obvious differences that do, in fact, distinguish us. 

Strong-link societies—well, I’m not really sure about strong-link societies. I’ve never lived in one. I’m also aware that I very much want to believe that strong-link societies are out there. To give a grounding, I spent most of my life as a cynical pessimist (though I viewed myself as a clear-eyed realist), but in the last 5 or so years I’ve been swayed to the position that, excepting the small percentage of the world that had the misfortune of being dealt the genetic hand of a sociopath or psychopath, humans have an evolved bias towards cooperation and prosocial behavior. I’d say that Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind: A Hopeful History is the clearest encapsulation of my views, though I’d like to hope that my thinking is a bit more than simply a cheap imitation. 

At any rate, I’m very interested in strong-link societies. I’d like to study them—both past and present—to see how they came to be, how they are maintained, and, in some cases, how they ceased to be. 

Here’s the part about the free meal

I tend to get very excited and attached to ideas² and when I started to formulate this strong-link/weak-link society idea I did what I normally do—barraged my partner and some close friends with my ideas in an unabated stream until they yielded. At that point I did what I’ve increasingly started to do, which is to go to ChatGPT to springboard things into a different place.

ChatGPT is usually more of an assistant, simply helping me to fill in blanks and explain myself more concisely, though in the course of the chat window conversation on strong-link and weak-link societies, ChatGPT suggested what I think is a pretty novel idea to foster connection and incentivize a more strong-link way of interacting with our neighbors. ChatGPT labeled this idea The Friendship Lottery. The Friendship Lottery is a random matching of strangers who are given some incentive—monetary or otherwise—to spend a bit of time together. 

I want to kick off my own version of The Friendship Lottery for readers of this post. Here’s the plan: I want to study strong-link societies, but I’m unsure where to start. So if you, dear reader, leave a comment of a possible strong-link society, from the past or present, then you will be entered (if you so desire) into our first ever Brown Barge Friendship Lottery. I’ll randomly select two of the comments and match those two strangers together. In the unlikely event that these two commenters are in the same city, I’ll pay for a meal, outing to a museum, outdoor activity, or other friendship activity of their choosing. In the more likely event that these two commenters are in different parts of the globe, I’ll pay for a meal delivery of their choice and the friendship encounter will be handled via Zoom. And actually, I wasn’t planning on this, but if these two strangers are close enough, motivated enough, and brave enough to meet in a location of interest somewhere between their places of residence I’ll cover some reasonable amount of their travel expenses. 

So if you’re up for The Friendship Lottery, if you’re interested in building a more prosocial society, or if you think this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard of, leave a comment. 

1. I understand that this is almost completely explained by the fact that I am a man and that men are very rarely catcalled. I know this is not the experience of most women in the world and in fact at this very moment I am recalling an occurrence from 5 or so years ago when a stranger made a lewd comment in another language to my partner. My best friend happened to both speak that language, and also be exactly the type of fearless person that, in that exact scenario, turns around and makes a beeline to viciously dress down the catcaller.

2. In a move stolen from an Argentine author and scientist named Gerry Garbulsky, I keep a note where I jot down every idea I have that seems novel (to me).