He suggests that people – and particularly parents, when talking to their kids – often shy away from negative or painful topics. These questions, however, prompt family members to show their fears and vulnerabilities. “Rather than just talking about leisure and work, the parents and kids spoke about death, for instance,” he says. “It encouraged them to talk about topics that really matter.”
The results chime with earlier findings in psychological research regarding the impact of “self-disclosure” – the exchange of personal or private information that one person reveals to another person during a conversation. Going back decades, studies have found that self-disclosure can create feelings of closeness between strangers, students and colleagues.
A shortcut to intimacy?
If this sounds vaguely familiar, that may be thanks to a viral New York Times article that explored self-disclosure in dating focused on 36 specific questions. Asking them could help people fall in love, the journalist argued. But the principle can in fact be applied to any conversation, without ever referring to the original prompts, says Brummelman: “It’s more a shift of mindset than a list of questions.”
The original study – titled “the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness“, and published in the late 1990s – did not even measure participants’ feelings of romantic love. From the very start, the fast-friends procedure was designed to enhance social connection in general, as I explain in my book on friendship, The Laws of Connection.
The experiment was the brainchild of Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University in New York. He and his colleagues suspected that people’s feelings of closeness in any given conversation would depend on their level of self-disclosure. To test this hypothesis, they prepared two different sets of discussion points. One set were more general questions which stimulated small talk; the other focused on more profound, personal, transformational moments or thoughts.
The participants were sorted into pairs, who were given a series of questions to discuss over the next 45 minutes. Half the pairs saw the questions that stimulated small talk, such as:
How did you celebrate last Halloween?
Where did you go to high school?
Do you think left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people?
What was the last concert you saw? How many of that band’s albums do you own? Had you seen them before? Where?
They were perfectly reasonable questions, but they weren’t necessarily delving into someone’s inner life.
The rest of the participants were given more probing prompts, such as:
What would constitute a perfect day for you?
Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
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?
This was the high self-disclosure condition, designed to encourage conversations about more personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
After 45 minutes, the participants were given a series of questions that asked them to describe how close they felt to their partner on a scale of one to seven, which were then averaged to give a final score.