Creating closeness with another person (and maybe even love!)
This blog is a departure from my usual as it is about building deeper, more positive connections with other people. I worked as a psychologist for over 40 years and the studies that I want to describe here are among the most powerful and effective at building such connections. The original studies have faded from public memory, so this seems like a good time to revive them, given how powerfully effective they were at building closeness between people. So… back in 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron developed a set of 36 questions as part of a study titled, ‘The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,’ (full citation below). These questions were designed to be asked alternately by two people in a structured way, with each set becoming progressively more searching and personal. The goal was to accelerate feelings of closeness and intimacy through mutual self-disclosure, rather than specifically to make people fall in love. However, ...