Best Friends in 45 Minutes

But one of the tools that we found in connection is there's a very interesting social psychologist named Art Aaron, and he went through a procedure. He created a procedure to bond people and make them best of friends in 45 minutes. And so you take two randomly selected undergrads, and they go into a room and they start answering questions. And the first questions are simple. You ever sing in the shower? Yeah, I do that. You know, if you could have lunch with anybody in the world, who would you have lunch with and why? And so the questions start out easy, but 15 minutes later, there's another envelope of questions, and you start drawing from that envelope, and the questions are a little bit deeper. In the third 15 minute segment, the questions are, you draw a question like, if you were to die today, what would you regret not having said to someone? And why haven't you said it? And so these two randomly selected undergrads are going through this process of gradually revealing more and more of themselves. And if you ask them after 45 minutes in this exercise, you say, how close do you feel to this person that you just met 45 minutes ago? And you compare their responses on a scale to another group of students who are asked to rate the most powerful, closest relationship in their lives. And so people in another sample are rating their best friend since high school, their mom, their significant other. People that have just met each other for 45 minutes score about a third of the way into the distribution of the most powerful relationships that people have in the other sample. And I find that remarkable. What it says is that we're only 45 minutes away from really close connections with lots of people in our life. But what we never do in most situations is take that step of getting beyond the weather, getting beyond the sports, getting beyond to something more meaningful.