Do you recall meeting someone for barely fifteen minutes and then trying to remember what he/she said three hours later, even though it doesn’t matter? Was it that stranger you met at the coffee shop? Or the person you accidentally bumped into at the railway station? Unknowingly, you start replaying the encounter in your mind and thinking about what kind of person he/she is. And secretly, wonder if that person is also thinking about you. According to research on spontaneous trait inferences, we often draw conclusions about people’s personalities, behaviour and the kind of people they might be without consciously intending to do so. And all on the basis of a mere fifteen-minute interaction that probably tells us less than their Instagram account.

 

We take a handful of information about them and start assembling an entire person out of it. And things get weird when, you are having a conversation with your friends and family and you bring ‘that person’ into the conversation, randomly, unmindful of the fact that the others have no clue who are you talking about. In psychology, this is called social sharing. More specifically, social sharing of experiences and impressions. When you meet someone, form an impression of them, and later tell your friends or family about them, you’re essentially recounting and processing a social experience through conversation.

 

A related, more specific concept is social sharing of emotion, studied by psychologist Bernard Rimé. It describes how people talk to others about emotionally significant experiences. However, if you’re simply narrating an interesting encounter, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve a strong emotion. Now, the most interesting part. You’re probably also wondering if ‘he/she’ is thinking about you the same way. Your expectation or assumptions may not be the reality at all. Somewhere, you’re carrying a teeny-tiny piece of a person you might never meet again. And maybe you could be that teeny-tiny piece for someone else, too. You could be a thought in someone’s mind, a story told at dinner, or just a face he/she would vaguely remember but not place. We spend so much time wondering what people think of us when we are around them. Maybe we all go home thinking about each other. Maybe we don’t. And we could spend our entire lives never finding out.