1 . We’ve all been there: in a lift, in line at the bank or on an airplane, surrounded by people who are, like us, deeply focused on their smartphones or, worse, struggling with the uncomfortable silence.

What’s the problem? It’s possible that we all don’t have enough conversational ability. It’s more likely that none of us start a conversation because it’s embarrassing and challenging, or we think it’s annoying and unnecessary. But the next time you find yourself among strangers, consider that small talk is worth the trouble. Experts say it’s a valuable social practice that leads to big benefits.

It is easy to consider small talk as unimportant, but we can’t forget that deep relationships wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t casual conversations. Small talk is the grease (润滑剂) for social communication, says Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. “Almost every great love story and each big business deal begins with small talk,” he explains. “The secret to successful small talk is learning how to connect with others, not just communicate with them.”

In a 2014 study, Elizabeth Dunn, professor of psychology at UBC, invited people to a coffee shop. One group was asked to interact (互动) with its waiter; the other, to speak only when necessary. The results showed that those who chatted with their server reported significantly higher positive feelings and a better coffee shop experience. “It’s not that talking to the waiter is better than talking to your husband,” says Dunn. “But interactions with peripheral (边缘的) members of our social network is important for our happiness and health.”

Dunn believes that people who reach out to strangers feel a greater sense of belonging, a link with others. Carducci believes developing such a sense of belonging starts with small talk. “Small talk is the basis of good manners,” he says.

2 . Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely(相反地), our friends and family serve as conduits(渠道) for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. As part of a social network, we go beyond ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger.

Our connectedness carries with it fundamental implications(影响) for the way we understand the human condition. Social networks have value precisely because they can help us to achieve what we could not achieve on our own. Yet, social­network effects are not always positive. Depression, obesity, financial panic, and violence also spread. Social networks, it turns out, tend to magnify(放大) whatever they are seeded with.

Partly for this reason, social networks are creative. And what these networks create does not belong to any one individual—it is shared by all those in the network. In this way, a social network is like a commonly owned forest: We all stand to benefit from it, but we also must work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive. While social networks are fundamentally and distinctively human, and can be seen everywhere, they should not be taken for granted.

If you are happier or richer or healthier than others, it may have a lot to do with where you happen to be in the network, even if you cannot recognize your own location. And it may have a lot to do with the overall structure of the network, even if you cannot control that structure at all. And in some cases, the process feeds back to the network itself. A person with many friends may become rich and then attract even more friends. This rich­get­richer dynamic means social networks can dramatically reinforce two different kinds of inequality in our society: situational inequality and positional inequality.

Lawmakers have not yet considered the consequences of positional inequality. Still, understanding the way we are connected is an essential step in creating a more just society and in carrying out public policies affecting everything from public health to the economy. We might be better off vaccinating(接种疫苗) centrally located individuals rather than weak individuals. We might be better off helping interconnected groups of people to avoid criminal behaviour rather than preventing or punishing crimes one at a time.

If we want to understand how society works, we need to fill in the missing links between individuals. We need to understand how interconnections and interactions between people give rise to wholly new aspects of human experience that are not present in the individuals themselves. If we do not understand social networks, we cannot hope to fully understand either ourselves or the world we inhabit.

5 . LIFE is AWKWARD．What should you do when your parents are embarrassing(使尴尬)you in front of your friends？Or what if you see what looks like a classmate stealing someone else's headphones？ In our social Q's column(专栏)，the teenager Harper Ediger and the adult Philip Galances give their best advice to kids looking for help navigating real﹣life situations，Now it's your turn：Do you have a question about an uncomfortable social situation at school，at home, on social media or among friends？Email it to us at Kidsqs@njpost.com and Harper and Philip may answer it in a future issue. Please include your age and hometown. Come on, we know you have one．

To give you some idea about how to ask questions , here are reader﹣submitted questions we've published in previous issues：

My mom signs me up for camps and activities without asking what I want to do. I only learn what I'm doing at the last minute. I don't like being told what to do, and I feel that I should be able to help plan my time. How can I have more of a say？

At my school, fourth graders need to learn different dances, then dress up for a fancy party where we ask partners to dance with us. This makes me nervous, and I'm not looking forward to it.How should I handle this situation？

My sister is home for college break, and lucky me, she's my roommate.As I'm 12 and she's almost 19, we both want our own space. I know she doesn't mean it personally,but she always complains that she doesn't have a home, which makes me feel as if I'm intruding in my own room．Do I tell her how l feel or let it go？

6 . “Don’t tell anyone”. We hear these words when someone tells a secret to us. But it can be hard to keep a secret. We often tend to “spill the beans”, even if we regret it later.

According to Asim Shah, professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, US, keeping a secret may well “become a burden”. This is because people often have an “obsessive and anxious urge to share it with someone”.

An earlier study, led by Anita E. Kelly, a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, US, suggested that keeping a secret could cause stress. People entrusted (受委托的) with secrets can suffer from depression, anxiety, and body aches, reported the Daily Mail.

But with secrets so often getting out, why do people share them at all?Shah explained that people often feel that it will help them keep a person as a friend. Another reason people share secrets is guilt over keeping it from someone close to them. A sense of distrust can develop when people who are close do not share it with each other. “Keeping or sharing secrets often puts people in a position of either gaining or losing the trust of someone,” according to Shah.

He added that talkative people could let secrets slip out (泄露). But this doesn’t mean that it is a good idea only to share secrets with quiet people. A quiet person may be someone who keeps everything inside. To tell such a person a secret may cause them stress, and make them talk about the secret.

Shah said that to judge whether to tell someone a secret, you’d better put yourself in their position. Think about how you would feel to be told that you mustn’t give the information away. Shah also recommended that if you accidentally give up someone’s secret you should come clean about it. Let the person know that their secret isn’t so secret anymore.

8 . A day in the life of 18-year-old David Lanster is full of teenage activities: school, baseball practice, homework. And then he starts cooking. "Some nights I'm up until I am making pies, or even later if we're cooking beef," said the student at Ransom Everglades High School in Florida, US.

For the past year, Lanster and Kelly Moran, his classmate, have been hosting fancy dinner parties at Lanster's parents' home. Their meals have 17 courses and are all made by them. Their guests used to give them gifts to thank them, until the pair decided to do something nice for charity. "We got some really great Miami Heat tickets, a nice watch, and many kitchen machines," Lanster said. "But we wanted to make this something positive for people rather than us."

Lanster and Moran focused on Common Threads, a charity that helps to teach kids in poor neighbourhood to cook and make healthy eating choices. The young cooks ask their guests to give however much they want as payment for their meals. It all goes to Common Threads because Lanster's parents cover their food costs. After their last 12-person event, Lanster and Moran gave $1,600 to the charity. Now, they're taking their show out of the kitchen and on the road. Lanster and Moran have started to organise private dinner parties in a similar way: the host pays for the ingredients (食材), and the guests make a donation (捐赠) to a charity.

Outside the kitchen, the two are busy preparing their college applications. Neither is sure what they will do in the future, but they've promised their parents that they'll leave cooking alone until they finish high school.

9 . Even with wonderful friends, family and a partner, I don't always want to be surrounded by people. “Table for one? Or will someone else be joining you?” A dinner reservation for one person never fails to raise a few eyebrows. I actively choose to spend time alone when possible. But not everyone has the luxury of choosing to be alone, of course, many are forced into one-on-one time because they have no one.

But for those of us who spend our days surrounded by colleagues in the workplace, our evenings and weekends with family, friends and partners, all the while being constantly bombarded by WhatsApp,social media and email, time to ourselves can be a rare treat. Time to yourself not only gives you the chance to do practical things you don't normally get round to but also the activities your pals don't want to do. In a less real way, spending time alone also allows-or perhaps forces- you to sit with your own thoughts, to think about things that might normally be drowned out by conversation and the noise of companionship. When you're alone you get time to think without purpose.

It is worth noting that I'm a real introvert(性格内向者）,so perhaps sitting alone with my thoughts-refilling my energy reserves-might just be indulging personality traits that others don't have. But I believe more people could benefit from it.

Given this constant social conditioning since childhood that we should be surrounded by people , it's no wonder many hesitate to press forward at the idea of spending time alone-a sign we've failed at climbing that social ladder. And if you're an extrovert who gets their energy from other people, this must be even harder. But as someone who has come to love spending time alone, even when there are many wonderful souls in my life I can spend time with, I wish more people would give solo a go.

Reservation for one, please.

10 . A new study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology found that communication interactions that included voice, like a phone call or video chat, created stronger social bonds than communication through typing, like text messaging or email.

In the study, researchers used various experiments to gauge connectedness. In one, they asked 200 people to make predictions about what it would be like to reconnect with an old friend by email or by phone and then assigned people at random to do one or the other. Although people anticipated that a phone call would be more awkward, hearing someone's voice actually made the experience better. However, people who participated in the experiment reported that they did form a significantly stronger bond with their old friend on the phone versus email, and they did not feel more awkward.

In another experiment, the researchers had strangers connected by either texting, talking over video chat, or talking using only audio. They found that both forms of voice communication — whether video or audio only — made the strangers feel significantly more connected than when they communicated via text.

Sabrina Romanoff, a Harvard trained clinical psychologist based in New York City, says people tend to text or email instead of calling because of convenience, as they see it as a controlled form of communication where they can "correspond information exactly in the way they intend without unexpected additions by the other person."

Romanoff says that in reality, texting can make it hard to determine the true meaning behind a conversation. A phone call is actually more convenient when considering the net effects of the message. Each party is more present, and therefore, able to gauge the meaning behind the content without ruminating on the endless possible meanings behind words and punctuation.