We all know the MTA's rule: If you see something suspicious, say something.

But we also know the unwritten rule of being a good commuter: Lower your headphone volume, and don't talk to anyone.

Which is why a recent interview with NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam made us do a double take. Buried in this segment about men becoming socially isolated in middle-age, he mentions a University of Chicago study that found people have a more pleasant commute when they connect with the person sitting next to them.

So we reached out to Nick Epley, the professor who co-authored the study, to ask, are you serious? And he said the takeaway here is really about flipping your expectations. In the experiment, he asked some commuters to strike up a conversation and told others to keep quiet, and it turned out that talking to a fellow commuter was more pleasant than people thought it'd be.

So, his advice is just to be a little more open-minded. "Look for opportunities," he told us. "[Talk to] somebody you've seen before on the train a lot but haven't ever engaged in conversation with. Or, if you're stuck underground for an extra 20 minutes, maybe that's the time to ask somebody else what important thing in their life are they missing because we're all stuck together underground."

And, yes, that advice applies to everyone, across race and gender lines. "We didn't find that people were having a more pleasant conversation with people who were of the same race," Epley said. "We also didn't find that people had systematically more pleasant conversations when they were talking to somebody of the same gender."

In the very unscientific forum that is the We The Commuters Facebook group, Marygrace Ponzio reached out to say she regularly chats up her LIRR train, but back when she lived in Queens, she was part of a commuter group she called The Bus Ladies.

"We were all so different," Ponzio told us, "but we all sat together and we formed like a little circle. When something bad happened, we'd look for each other and would help each other get home. We shared each other's lives."

Her advice to commuters: "Take off your headphones, look around, and if you see somebody every single day, it's kind of rude not to say hi."

What do you think? Have you had a good experience—or not—with chatting up strangers on your commute? Let us know in our We The Commuters Facebook Group.