Arthur Aron's 1997 study generated 36 questions that escalate in intimacy, and two strangers who worked through all of them in the lab reported feeling closer than many people do with lifelong friends

Arthur Aron's 1997 study generated 36 questions that escalate in intimacy, and two strangers who worked through all of them in the lab reported feeling closer than many people do with lifelong friends

Arthur Aron sat two strangers across from each other in a Stony Brook University psychology lab, handed them a list of 36 questions that climbed from small talk to raw confession, and 45 minutes later some of them were reporting a sense of closeness they described as matching or exceeding their closest lifelong relationships. One pair from the original experiment ended up married, and invited the whole lab to the wedding. The paper was titled “T…