Fleeting generalization: How unstable belief updating keeps people overly pessimistic about talking to strangers.

Conversations with strangers and weak ties tend to be positive experiences, and yet research suggests a reliable tendency to hold overly pessimistic expectations about such conversations. We examine how people update their beliefs after talking with strangers to understand how people's miscalibrated social expectations could persist even in the presence of more positive social experiences. In three longitudinal experiments, having a conversation led to more optimistic (and better calibrated) exp