Taking Volunteers Now

Can you make someone fall in love with you? Social scientists have seriously examined closeness in the last few decades, and studies suggest that yes, there are specific factors that can induce interpersonal closeness.

Dr. Art Aron's research shows that it's possible to bring people together through a procedure focused on escalating self-disclosure and intimacy-associated behaviors. In a recent project, TBD set out to further the scientific research in this field.

We devised 36 short, self-disclosure tasks arranged in increasing intensity. We plan on testing the hypothesis that even more aggressively intimate questions can evoke an even stronger feeling of closeness. To do this, we need your help!

If you have a few hours to kill and a friend or significant other, we'll send you the 36 questions to heighten intimacy and a short survey to measure the effect of the questions. Whether or not you've done the original 36 questions to fall in love, we believe our TBD questions can take your relationship or friendship to the next level.

History

In this 1997 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Dr. Arthur Aron and his team introduced 3 sets of 12 tasks that could generate interpersonal closeness. The research group tested the questions with a group of students. Some pairs were assigned mundane questions like "Do you subscribe to any magazines?" while other couples answered deeper, more intense questions like "How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?" Couples who answered the intimate questions reported feeling closer to each other.

In 2015, the New York Times article "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This" popularized these 36 questions to fall in love. Friends and couples around the world took the challenge, but Tom, Bailey, and Dalmo decided to fall in love as a trio. We credit Dr. Aron's 36 questions for our deep love of each other.

In 2016, we set out to create another set of 36 questions—to fall deeper in love! Based on limited experiments, we think our new questions work, but we we need more data. Will you answer the 36 questions help us understand the science of love? Sign up to participate!