Thread by @IvanVendrov

The famous "36 questions that lead to love"... don't. The NYT and everyone else reported a different set of questions from the same authors, modified to be less romantic! The original set of *40* questions wasn't online, but I emailed the authors and got a copy. Details in 🧵

I was trying to reproduce the original study as closely as possible (you know, like a normal person) and stumbled on this paragraph in the famous 1997 paper that everyone cites (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…)

So the original procedure, the one that actually led to a marriage between strangers, was 1.5 hours long and different in some other ways. The cited 1991 paper was presented at some conference in Illinois, now defunct, that left no traces on the web.

I emailed Arthur Aron, who replied and graciously sent me scans of the original 40 questions that lead to "romantic closeness". Full scans down-thread, but two highlights:

Most of the questions are the same as the famous 36, but the first 15 minutes start out strong with

"Q5. If you were going to have a personal relationship with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know"

And then this immortal sequence that gets you to
1. imagine your partner looking very sexy
2. role play asking them out
3. *star in a play in which you pretend to fall in love with them* 🤯
4. THEN spend 3 minutes in silent eye contact.

...study results make a lot more sense now

Here's the full scanned set of questions.

And here's the abstract of the paper describing some of the experimental procedure. Sadly this is all prof. Aron had on hand; if anyone knows how to get a copy of the full dissertation from the (now apparently defunct) California Graduate School of Family Psychology, please DM!

I continue to be amazed at the incredibly high returns to "just check the original source". Thanks to @alexeyguzey, @slatestarcodex, @ArtirKel and the o.g. Noam Chomsky for hammering this lesson over and over again until it stuck with me.