Psychology Today | 07.02.2026 02:18
In the late 1990s, psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues developed a simple experiment to see whether intimacy could be created through conversation. They brought college students into the lab, paired them up with people they did not know, and asked them to take turns answering a series of 36 questions that became increasingly personal, followed by four minutes of sustained eye contact. The goal was to understand whether it was possible to use self-disclosure as a tool for building intimacy between strangers.
