Case Study 17.1: The 36 Questions — What the Research Actually Shows

Background

In January 2015, a New York Times "Modern Love" column by journalist Mandy Len Catron went viral. Titled "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," it described how Catron had used a set of 36 questions — taken from a 1997 academic psychology paper — in an evening with an acquaintance. The column ended with Catron and the man staring into each other's eyes on a bridge. Reader: she married him.

The article was shared millions of times. The 36 questions became a cultural phenomenon — reproduced in apps, laminated on date-night cards, featured in the Atlantic, the Guardian, and virtually every lifestyle publication with an internet presence. The original researchers, psychologists Arthur Aron and colleagues at Stony Brook University, received more media attention than most academic social psychologists ever experience. The experiment became synonymous, in popular culture, with a kind of algorithmic intimacy: follow the protocol, generate the feelings.

The actual study is worth examining closely, because it is simultaneously more modest and more interesting than its popular framing suggests.

The Original Study

Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone, and Bator (1997) published "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings" in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The study had 96 participants (paired as 48 dyads of previously unacquainted students) who were randomly assigned to one of two conditions:

Condition 1 — Sustained closeness task: Pairs worked through 36 questions arranged in three sets of increasing intimacy. Set I contains relatively innocuous questions ("What would constitute a 'perfect' day for you?"). Set II increases the personal depth ("If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?"). Set III goes further ("Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life" and "When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?"). After the questions, pairs spent four minutes in silent mutual gaze.

Condition 2 — Small talk: Pairs engaged in standard get-acquainted conversation using prompts designed to keep the discussion at a surface level.

Measure: Closeness was assessed using the Inclusion of Other in Self (IOS) scale, a pictorial measure of felt closeness developed by Aron and colleagues, plus a battery of self-report closeness items.

Finding: Pairs in the closeness condition reported significantly higher closeness on all measures compared to small-talk pairs. The effect was substantial enough that one pair in the closeness condition reportedly got married — a footnote the authors included somewhat ruefully in the paper.

What the Research Actually Establishes — and What It Doesn't

The popular framing — "36 questions to fall in love" — involves a series of interpretive steps that the original research does not support:

1. The measure was closeness, not love. The IOS scale and self-report closeness items measure felt interpersonal closeness, which is related to but not identical with romantic love. Being close to someone and being in love with someone are related but distinguishable states. The study showed that the procedure generates unusual closeness for a single conversation; it did not track whether this closeness converted into love, was sustained over time, or predicted relationship formation.

2. The effect is about the process, not the specific questions. The 36 questions generate closeness not because they are magical formulas but because they structure a conversation that progressively deepens self-disclosure. Any conversation that moved through a similar progression — from moderate to genuinely personal revelation, with mutual reciprocation — would likely produce similar results. Aron himself has been clear about this: the questions are a vehicle, not a cause.

3. Context and consent are not incidental. The original study took place between participants who had explicitly agreed to participate in an intimacy-generating experiment. They came prepared for disclosure. Using the questions on an unsuspecting person — without their knowledge that this is a structured intimacy procedure — is a fundamentally different communicative act. The willingness to be vulnerable is not separable from the vulnerability itself.

4. The 36 questions and LSM. An interesting question the original study didn't examine is what happens to LSM scores over the course of the 36-question conversation. Given that the questions systematically generate disclosure and reciprocation, we would predict that LSM would increase across the three sets as both speakers' linguistic style converges in the space of mutual engagement. This would be an interesting follow-up study.

The Commodification of Intimacy Through Protocol

The cultural afterlife of the 36 questions is itself a case study in the commodification of intimacy. When intimacy-generating research gets translated into a consumer product — an app, a card set, a date-night kit — something shifts. The research has been packaged as a technique, a transferable procedure that can be applied by anyone in any context to produce a specified emotional output.

This is the "intimacy as technology" framing that social theorist Eva Illouz has analyzed in her work on the commercialization of romantic love (Cold Intimacies, 2007). Illouz argues that contemporary intimate life is increasingly organized around therapeutic and self-help frameworks that promise systematic, producible emotional states — as if intimacy were something you could manufacture by following instructions.

The 36 questions, in this reading, are not just a research finding but a cultural artifact: they reveal a particular contemporary anxiety about the unreliability of organic connection, and a corresponding desire for a protocol that can guarantee it.

Discussion Questions

1. Aron's study found that closeness was higher in the structured-disclosure condition. Does this mean that all intimate conversations should be structured? What would be lost if all early-courtship conversations followed a script?

2. The 36 questions have been packaged and sold as a consumer product. At what point, if any, does applying a research-derived intimacy procedure become manipulative rather than simply effective?

3. How does the Aron finding relate to the LSM research from Section 17.2? What would you predict happens to LSM scores over the course of a 36-questions conversation?

4. Mandy Len Catron's viral essay included a caveat in a later piece: the questions don't make you fall in love with anyone; they make you fall in love with the experience of being truly seen. What is the difference, and why does it matter?

Sources: 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. Catron, M. L. (2015, January 9). To fall in love with anyone, do this. The New York Times.