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) expectations about a future conversation, especially with the same person, but updating was fleeting. Within 1 or 2 weeks, expectations reverted to a more pessimistic baseline similar to those who had no conversation to learn from in the first place. This fleeting generalization was unique to conversation (compared to a noninteractive control condition). It emerged both when a future conversation was with the same person and when it was with a different person, when people were explicitly asked to predict their experience before having it and when they were not, and across both relatively shallow and deeper conversations. Fleeting generalization stems partly (but not entirely) from recalling conversations as less positive than they felt immediately after having them. These findings suggest that miscalibrated social beliefs can persist even with unbiased experience to learn from. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).