Fast Friends Procedure

What it is

The procedure was designed as a research tool. Aron and colleagues wanted a reliable way to create closeness between strangers so that closeness itself could be studied. Their paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin describes 45 minutes of escalating self-disclosure and relationship-building tasks, with partners taking turns to answer. The first questions are light, such as who you would choose as a dinner guest, and the later ones ask about feelings, memories and the relationship itself.

In effect

In the first study, pairs who completed the procedure reported feeling closer than pairs who spent the same time on small-talk questions. The procedure works through two features that later research has examined separately. One is escalation: disclosures become more personal gradually, so each arrives in a setting where it fits. The other is reciprocity: partners take turns. Susan Sprecher and Stanislav Treger found in 2015 that turn-taking disclosure builds more attraction than one person disclosing and then the other.

What it does not say

The procedure does not create a relationship. It creates a feeling of closeness in a laboratory session, measured shortly afterwards. It also does not show that deep disclosure is always welcome: Nancy Collins and Lynn Carol Miller's 1994 meta-analysis found that disclosure to a stranger in public, without the structure the procedure provides, can make the discloser less liked.

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