introduction

A fascinating thing about psychology and economic research is that we can easily relate them with our lives. This result in some works being ‘mentioned’ in general articles abusively to an extent that almost everyone knows it in some way.

It all started with a NY Times article of Mandy Len Carton, To Fall in Love With Anyone, DO THIS. The author discussed her experience in experimenting the ‘36-questions’ that, supposedly, would make people fall in love with one another. Mandy was in the midst of a breakup then, and, as an academic, she turned towards science—a 1997 psychology paper by Arthur Aron and his fellow coauthors:

the famous paper

The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings

Arthur Aron (Stony Brook University) et al., 1997

The paper explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. These 36 questions were initially designed to increase interpersonal closeness, not love. The original study was carried out in a lab where pairs would carry out this guided interaction by those questions over a monitored 45-minutes experiment.

original paper

“just check the original source!”

But that wasn’t the end, yet.

Ivan Vendrov, who is a software engineer and mathematician by training, traced all the way back to the origin of this experiment design, and unveiled the whole story—meaning he read the paper, traced down the citations, emailed the author for the scan of the old conference paper that is not available online, and posted the whole saga on Twitter.

The original paper, titled “Experimentally induced closeness, ego identity, and the opportunity to say no”, carried out an 1.5h experiment with 40 questions of self-disclosure and relationship-building conversation in a comfortable room, and traced the couple’s closeness over the next few months. Anecdotally, one of the pairs even get married.

As Ivan has found out:

Most of the questions [from the 1991 original paper] are the same as the famous 36, but the first 15 minutes start out strong with

“Q5. If you were going to have a personal relationship with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know”

— ivan @IvanVendrov Jan 7, 2023.

along with a few other more provocative questions.

reference

[1] Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4), 363-377. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167297234003

[2] Aron, A., Aron, E. N., Melinat, E., & Vallone, R. (1991, May). Experimentally induced closeness, ego identity, and the opportunity to say no. Paper presented at the Conference of the International Network on Personal Relationships, Normal, IL.

[3] Love, S. (2023, February 13). Love and the brain, part 1: The 36 questions, revisited. Scientific American. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Copyright 2023 Scientific American, Inc.

[4] Jones, D. (2015, January 9). Modern love: The 36 questions that lead to love. The New York Times.

[5] Vendrov, I. [@IvanVendrov]. (2023, January 7). [The famous “36 questions that lead to love”….]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/IvanVendrov/status/1611809676982910976