Jay Shetty

Hopefully you're trying to just connect with someone, make a friend, make a new connection.

And there's a beautiful piece of research from Dr. Arthur Aron at Stony Brook University.

The same researcher behind the famous 36 questions to fall in love study, showing that sustained mutual eye contact between strangers significantly increases feelings of closeness and affection even in the absence of conversation.

Eye contact isn't a social nicety.

It's a bonding mechanism.

It triggers oxytocin release.

It tells the other person's brain you exist to me.

Obviously, don't stare at them like a creep.

I'm not recommending that.

Shift five, use the power of proximity and positioning.

This one is going to sound too simple, and then I'm going to give you the science, and you're going to realize it's one of the most powerful social tools that exists.

In the 1950s, social psychologists Dr. Leon Festinger and Dr. Stanley Schechter and Dr. Kurt Bach studied friendship formation in a housing complex at MIT.

They wanted to know what predicted who became friends.

Was it shared interests, similar personalities, compatible backgrounds?

None of those.

The single strongest predictor of friendship formation was physical proximity.

People who lived closer to the stairwell, meaning more people passed by their door, had significantly more friends.

People who lived next to each other were far more likely to become closer friends than people who lived even two doors apart.

They called this the propinquity effect.

Subsequent research has confirmed this over and over.