A Social Experiment: Can Complete Strangers Fool You?

This is really interesting because when you think about it, we’ve all seen movies where the actors and actresses had chemistry. It doesn’t even have to be a sexual chemistry, it could just be a chemistry that sucks us in and makes us believe what they are saying. If a movie is good, we’ll get lost in it for two hours and forget that it’s just that, a movie.

Does it take years of acting classes to learn how to do that? Can two complete strangers meet on the street and in an instant, fool everyone into believing that they know each other well? What kind of body language would a person have to have in order to pull that off? These are all questions that I’m sure photographer Richard Renaldi asked himself when he started his “Touching Strangers” project. When he sees two or more people on the street, he will often ask them to pose together in a photograph, but they must touch each other. He watches as they uncomfortably figure out how to co-mingle their personal space.

If needed, he will help them decide how and where to touch each other. On his website he writes, “… the emotions captured are both genuine and honest. Touching Strangers encourages viewers to think about how we relate physically to one another, and to entertain the possibility that there is unlimited potential for new relationships with almost everybody passing by.” As you can see in these pictures, some of these people really do look like they know each other, and they even kind of look alike. In others, it looks like they are being tortured to make it all work. What an interesting social experiment.