A few years ago, this Modern Love column by Mandy Len Catron offered a step-by-step protocol for intimacy: It was titled, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The process was based on the work of psychologist Arthur Aron, who in this paper provides procedures for “the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness.” Aron’s aim was not to help people achieve intimacy; rather it was to “make being in a relationship accessible to laboratory study and experimental manipulation.” Apparently it is hard to isolate the “independent variables” in those relationships that manage to begin without lab technicians’ intervention and supervision. But by taking two strangers and speeding them through a standardized falling-in-love algorithm, psychologists can supply themselves with intimacy in a petri dish, “opening up previously impractical research horizons.” He mentions lab-induced “self-esteem-lowering methods” as inspiration. If we can make people feel artificially terrible about themselves in a lab, why can't we make them artificially intimate with a control-group subject? (The researchers behind the Facebook mood-manipulation study apparently had no such scruples, or perhaps they regarded all the relationships sustained by Facebook as essentially laboratory-created.)
True Love Ways
True Love Ways
True Love Ways
A few years ago, this Modern Love column by Mandy Len Catron offered a step-by-step protocol for intimacy: It was titled, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The process was based on the work of psychologist Arthur Aron, who in this paper provides procedures for “the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness.” Aron’s aim was not to help people achieve intimacy; rather it was to “make being in a relationship accessible to laboratory study and experimental manipulation.” Apparently it is hard to isolate the “independent variables” in those relationships that manage to begin without lab technicians’ intervention and supervision. But by taking two strangers and speeding them through a standardized falling-in-love algorithm, psychologists can supply themselves with intimacy in a petri dish, “opening up previously impractical research horizons.” He mentions lab-induced “self-esteem-lowering methods” as inspiration. If we can make people feel artificially terrible about themselves in a lab, why can't we make them artificially intimate with a control-group subject? (The researchers behind the Facebook mood-manipulation study apparently had no such scruples, or perhaps they regarded all the relationships sustained by Facebook as essentially laboratory-created.)