The shortcut to close bonds? Asking meaningful questions

The right questions can help us connect with strangers – and create closer bonds between parents and children.

In 2024, a team of psychologists at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested a deceptively simple idea: could being asked 14 specially designed questions by their parents help children feel more loved?

The experiment was based on some well-evidenced psychological insights: as the researchers pointed out in their paper, feeling loved by their parents is known to be "critical for children's health and well-being." Finding ways to nurture that feeling could therefore potentially benefit families in many ways. 

Previous experiments with adults by other researchers had suggested that asking the right questions can help people feel closer to each other. Known as the "fast-friends procedure", this process gained global attention far beyond research departments some years ago after a journalist tested the questions on a romantic date.

In its classic format, the fast-friends procedure involves pairs of adults asking each other profound, thought-provoking, personal questions such as: "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?" This encourages the participants to reveal more about their innermost feelings, which can foster a sense of connection. In adults, the procedure has been successfully replicated in many different contexts. But would it work for the bond between parents and children? 

Eddie Brummelman, a developmental and social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his colleagues, tested this by adapting the questions in the classic fast-friends procedure to make them suitable for children aged eight to 13 and their parents. Then they got the parents and children chatting, with the parents asking their kids questions such as:

If you could travel anywhere in the world, which country would you like to visit? And why?

What is the strangest thing that you have ever experienced?

What is the last time you felt alone? What made you feel that way?

The children then took a simple questionnaire to rate how loved and supported they felt before and after they had discussed the questions with their parents. The discussions took just nine minutes, but the children's ratings were significantly higher at the end of the experiment – suggesting that the procedure does increase their feeling of being loved. It wasn't just the chance to have a chat as such that made the difference: small talk, such as the parents asking about the children's favourite ice cream or movie for example, was less likely to produce such a change.

Brummelman found some of the interactions extremely moving. "I really got goose bumps," he says. "They were very, very meaningful." He found that in many instances, the families had not explored these topics before. "We touched on topics that people apparently don't talk about spontaneously."

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He suggests that people – and particularly parents, when talking to their kids – often shy away from negative or painful topics. These questions, however, prompt family members to show their fears and vulnerabilities. "Rather than just talking about leisure and work, the parents and kids spoke about death, for instance," he says. "It encouraged them to talk about topics that really matter."

The results chime with earlier findings in psychological research regarding the impact of "self-disclosure" – the exchange of personal or private information that one person reveals to another person during a conversation. Going back decades, studies have found that self-disclosure can create feelings of closeness between strangers, students and colleagues.

A shortcut to intimacy?

If this sounds vaguely familiar, that may be thanks to a viral New York Times article that explored self-disclosure in dating focused on 36 specific questions. Asking them could help people fall in love, the journalist argued. But the principle can in fact be applied to any conversation, without ever referring to the original prompts, says Brummelman: "It's more a shift of mindset than a list of questions."

The original study – titled "the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness", and published in the late 1990s – did not even measure participants' feelings of romantic love. From the very start, the fast-friends procedure was designed to enhance social connection in general, as I explain in my book on friendship, The Laws of Connection.

The experiment was the brainchild of Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University in New York. He and his colleagues suspected that people's feelings of closeness in any given conversation would depend on their level of self-disclosure. To test this hypothesis, they prepared two different sets of discussion points. One set were more general questions which stimulated small talk; the other focused on more profound, personal, transformational moments or thoughts. 

The participants were sorted into pairs, who were given a series of questions to discuss over the next 45 minutes. Half the pairs saw the questions that stimulated small talk, such as:

How did you celebrate last Halloween?

Where did you go to high school?

Do you think left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people?

What was the last concert you saw? How many of that band's albums do you own? Had you seen them before? Where?

They were perfectly reasonable questions, but they weren't necessarily delving into someone's inner life.

The rest of the participants were given more probing prompts, such as: 

What would constitute a perfect day for you?

Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

This was the high self-disclosure condition, designed to encourage conversations about more personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

After 45 minutes, the participants were given a series of questions that asked them to describe how close they felt to their partner on a scale of one to seven, which were then averaged to give a final score.

On this scale, people who had engaged in high self-disclosure rated their closeness at around four, while those shooting the breeze with small talk rated their closeness at around three. The finding is particularly notable when you compare the new friendships with their existing social circle, many of which only achieved similar levels of intimacy after many years of acquaintance.

"The subjects rated their relationships to their partners of less than an hour to be about as close as the average relationship in their lives, and in other people's lives," Aron and his colleagues concluded. An informal follow-up, after seven weeks, found that many remained in contact after the experiment.

In the original paper, Aron and his colleagues warned that the procedure should be treated with caution, and that people shouldn't assume that simply going through the questions would result in a lasting friendship.

The "fast-friends procedure" was born, and its effects on social connection have now been replicated in many other studies. Susan Sprecher at Illinois State University, for instance, recently tested the fast-friends procedure with more than 100 pairs of students, some of whom met for face-to-face conversations while others spoke online. "People felt closer when using the regardless of whether they were communicating over video or in person," she says.

The opioid effect

The effects can be seen within the body. The warm buzz we feel when connecting with others arises from our opioid system. It's the same part of the brain that responds to the drug morphine, but the brain also has its own supply of chemicals, known as endorphins, that dock into these receptors. When it is activated, the opioid system produces enjoyable feelings such as euphoria, as well as a sense of social connection and bonding. Studies on non-human animals suggest that social activities such as play and grooming can induce the release of these neurotransmitters, creating a feedback loop of growing attachment. And it seems that self-disclosure has the same effect.

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To explore that potential link between natural opioids, self-disclosure and social connection in humans, Kristina Tchalova at the University of Toronto, and Geoff MacDonald at McGill University first gave one group of participants a tablet of naltrexone, which prevents the brain's natural opioids from docking to their receptors. Another group were given a placebo. Both groups were then organised into pairs and put through the "fast-friendship procedure", asking each other questions from the list.

The closeness-building exercise did not work as well for the group whose opioid receptors were blocked. Compared to the people who had taken an inert placebo, the group receiving naltrexone found it harder to share their intimate feelings in the conversations, and did not enjoy the conversations nearly as much. Such physiological pathways help to explain why it feels so good to have deep and meaningful conversations, which should in turn increase bonding over time.

Healing the divide

A handful of recent studies have explored whether the fast-friends conversations can increase connection among people from different social groups – and even work across physical separation.

For instance, team of researchers from the University of Hagen, a remote-learning university in Germany, studied whether the procedure could help students stick with their course – as distance education often struggles with high drop-out rates. The researchers gave an online version of the task to 855 remote learners enrolled in the undergraduate psychology degree.

As the researchers had hoped, the fast-friends procedure not only increased the feelings of social connection between the virtual classmates, but also resulted in more of the students continuing the course until the final exam, rather than dropping out. This greater sense of closeness between the students was found regardless of differences in demographic factors, such as age or immigration status.

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Along similar lines, scientists at Stony Brook University in New York have shown that the procedure helps foster social connection between people of different sexual orientations. After going through the 36 self-disclosure questions with a gay or lesbian participant, straight people revealed less prejudiced attitudes on a survey, and greater feelings of closeness towards that person.

A major lesson of the fast-friends procedure may simply be that we can often afford to be a bit braver than we might assume. A recent study by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago and colleagues, for instance, found that people are generally reluctant to engage in self-disclosure since they assume the other person will not be interested in what they have to say. Those fears were mostly unfounded.

Making conversation

In her online classes, Sprecher often encourages her students to apply it with someone who is already in their life – "their mother, their roommate, their current boyfriend" – and then asks them to report back about how it went. "And that anecdotal evidence, too, indicates that people just enjoy doing it," she says. To some, it may indeed bring more luck in love. "I know a friend whose daughter did this on their first date. Now they're married," says Sprecher.

More like this:

• The power of cross-cultural friendship

• How to forge friendships to improve your life

• Why we become better friends as we age

In everyday interactions, we might not want to rigidly stick to the specific questions – but instead, apply the principle of self-disclosure more generally, the researchers suggest.

"Keep in mind that it's not only about the parent asking questions, but also allowing your child to ask the questions, and you giving honest answers," Brummelman says. "Adopt a position of equality and trust, and don't be afraid to touch on things that might elicit negative emotions."

For those unsure how to strike the right balance between sharing, and over-sharing, the questions in Brummelman's and Aron's studies might however provide a helpful start – and perhaps, lead to a lifetime of better conversations, and closer bonds.

* David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author. His latest book, The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life, was published by Canongate (UK) and Pegasus Books (USA & Canada) in June 2024. He is @davidarobson onInstagram and Threads and writes the 60-Second Psychology newsletter on Substack.

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