JD Hancock

This article was featured in Times Magazine, 5 November. There's a shorter version in the Ideas Bank section on the current Wired magazine.

Thanks to WPP's Stream for making my little experiment possible...


Can you make someone become intimately close to you -- even fall in love with you -- in less than an hour? Just ask Arthur Aron.

Dr Aron -- known to friends as Art -- runs the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University on the north shore of Long Island, east of New York City, and he has love on his mind.

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Passionate love, unreciprocated love, romantic attraction, unexpected arousal, pure lust -- all aspects of human intimacy that fascinate this much-published psychology professor specialising in what causes people to fall in and out of love and form other deep relationships ("the self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in personal relationships", as his CV puts it). He has built his reputation on papers with titles such as "The neural basis of long-term romantic love", "Motivations for unreciprocated love" and "A prototype of relationship boredom". But such dry academic language belies the shockingly powerful nature of some of his team's lab work.

Back in 1997, Aron and colleagues published a paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness". They wanted to know if they could create lab conditions that would make strangers quickly bond and form close friendships, even romantic engagements, after just a few minutes.


They arranged volunteers in pairs, and gave them a list of 36 questions that, one by one, they were both asked to answer openly over an hour "in a kind of sharing game". Even before the hour was up, respondents typically said they felt unusually close to the person they had shared questions with.

But would the "fast friends" experiment also work with more worldly senior executives and entrepreneurs? Ever since I discovered the experiment three years ago, I have been looking for an opportunity to put it into practice among a group of curious and open-minded strangers.

I found my opportunity at WPP's recent Stream conference in Athens -- or, rather, its "unconference", where the programme is created on the hoof entirely by the participants.

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Get together four-hundred top creatives, business founders, investors and makers -- the thinking goes -- and the resulting inspiration and idea-sharing will be not only a ton of fun, but will also benefit Martin Sorrell's WPP by keeping its employees and clients impeccably informed. The formula works beautifully - talents such as Esther Dyson,


Rory Sutherland and the team behind the Vice media empire ran sessions on topics ranging from personal data-tracking and the future of the book to the secrets of lucid dreaming. "Take part in a psychological experiment, and make friends fast," I scribbled on the whiteboard where session hosts competed for delegates' attention. The brave 18 people curious enough to show up discovered that this was no false advertising: the experiment really did promote incredibly fast bonding.

Like Aron, I paired the high-achieving entrepreneurs, investors, editors and executives to answer 36 questions. And like Dr Aron's participants, mine were told that their task, which sounded fun, was "simply to get close to your partner" over an hour. They were given the questions, printed out in order, and told that both partners should answer each of them in turn.

The questions began simply enough: - Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? - Would you like to be famous? In what way? - Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? - What would constitute a "perfect" day for you? - When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? - If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want? - Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? - Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. - For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

Gradually, the questions became more probing and personal: - If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? - Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible. - If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? - If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know? - Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it? - What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

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Finally, as the hour approached, the questions pressed the pair on their deeper life values: - What do you value most in a friendship? - What is your most treasured memory? - What is your most terrible memory? - If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why? - What does friendship mean to you? - What roles do love and affection play in your life? - Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items. - How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's? - How do you feel about your relationship with your mother? - Make three true "we" statements each. For instance "We are both in this room feeling..." - Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share..." - If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know. - Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met. - Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life. - When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? - Tell your partner something that you like about them already. - What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about? - If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet? - Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why? - Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why? - Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

I also used a few deliciously probing variants on the original questions, including these from a similar study: - If you could choose the sex and physical appearance of your soon-to-be-born child, would you do it? - Would you be willing to have horrible nightmares for a year if you would be rewarded with extraordinary wealth? - While on a trip to another city, your spouse (or lover) meets and spends a night w/ an exciting stranger. Given they will never meet again, and you will not otherwise learn of the incident, would you want your partner to tell you about it?

In the original experiment, researchers created a control group where questions were based around small-talk -- far less emotionally probing questions such as: - What gifts did you receive last Christmas/Hanukkah? - What foreign country would you most like to visit? What attracts you to this place?

In the original 1997 "fast friends" experiment, even before the hour was up, participants in the main group typically identified strong feelings of closeness with their partner, often exchanging contact details and indicating a wish to meet up again. This was far pronounced than members of the control group that paired up to engage in small-talk.

Lo and behold, most participants in my Stream study reported experiencing an intense feeling of having bonded with their experiment partner within 45 minutes. "We certainly became very close in an extremely short period of time," one participant said; another said with surprise that she had revealed things that not even her boyfriend knew. Some pairs of new friends were still taking two hours later. "I'm glad it worked so well, and I was happy to hear the procedure has been applied in such a real world setting," Arthur Aron said when I shared the results with him. "The effect is based not just on reciprocal self-disclosure, but on gradually escalating reciprocal self-disclosure." In the original experiment, he said, "we also tested an intense version of this with cross-sex couples - and the first ones we tested fell in love and got married. And as of last year, when I last had contact with them, they were still together."

The study also produces similar results when pairs are of different races and people in professional groups you might think would struggle to find much in common, he said. "We've used the method with cross-race groups, and other cross-group pairs like community members and police, with great effects -- not just at creating closeness within each pair, but that closeness extending to more positive attitudes towards the partner's group as a whole."


The original 1997 paper pondered what was happening. "So are we producing real closeness? Yes and no," the authors wrote. "We think that the closeness produced in these studies is experienced as similar in many important ways to felt closeness in naturally occurring relationships that develop over time. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the procedure produces loyalty, dependence, commitment, or other relationship aspects that might take longer to develop."

Guess I'll have to catch up with my research group in a few months to see how their relationships have developed. My unscientific preliminary conclusion: gradually escalating reciprocal self-disclosure, under conditions that frame personal vulnerability as a social norm, can have dangerous consequences.

But as a way to friend a stranger, it leaves Facebook trailing. How to find true friends (and love) in 45 minutes.