how connection developsInterest in another person can develop through the experience of talking together. In two experiments published in 2011, Harry Reis and his colleagues found that strangers who had more opportunity to converse generally liked one another more. Their findings connect familiarity with experiences that make an acquaintance worth returning to, including feeling comfortable, enjoying the conversation, and feeling understood.
The researchers studied previously unacquainted people in same-sex pairs, focusing on the beginnings of friendship. Their measure of attraction combined liking, wanting the other person as a friend, perceived similarity, and a sense of closeness. Here, attraction meant being drawn to someone socially.
This distinction was central to the research. The authors were examining what happens when people interact, rather than simply receive a list of facts or personality traits about someone they will never meet. In a conversation, information arrives with an explanation, a response, and some sense of what the two people enjoy discussing together. Their experiments tested whether greater familiarity in that setting helped liking develop.
More time in a first conversation
The first experiment gave pairs of young adults either two or six questions to discuss face-to-face. Both people answered each question, taking turns. Topics included hobbies, future plans, and something about themselves that others might find surprising. The shorter conversations averaged about two minutes, while the longer ones averaged about six and a half.
Those assigned more questions reported greater attraction to the person they had spoken with. Because the researchers assigned the amount of conversation, the difference could not simply be explained by people choosing to talk longer with someone they already liked. Additional interaction gave the new acquaintance more opportunity to become appealing.
The longer-conversation group also rated the other person as more responsive, although that difference did not reach the conventional threshold for statistical significance. The clearer result in this experiment concerned attraction. To explore what might contribute to it, the researchers next studied repeated conversations with fewer restrictions on what people discussed.
Returning to the same person
In the second experiment, university students were randomly assigned to have one, two, four, six, or eight online chats with the same previously unknown student. Each chat was intended to last about ten to fifteen minutes. Participants used anonymous screen names and could discuss whatever arose naturally. The analysis covered 110 pairs.
Across these groups, more conversations generally brought greater attraction. Participants also reported knowing the other person better, feeling better known themselves, experiencing greater responsiveness, and feeling more comfortable and satisfied with their conversations. These were overall patterns across the assigned conditions, rather than an improvement at every additional chat.
The change in perceived knowledge was especially marked between the one-chat and two-chat groups. Later conversations did not add the same amount at each step. The participants were reporting how well they felt they knew each other, rather than taking a test of how accurately they understood the other person. Feeling familiar and having an accurate understanding are related questions that this experiment did not settle in the same way.
The experience of familiarity therefore involved more than accumulating facts. Participants were learning what it was like to spend time with this particular person. The responsiveness questions concerned experiences such as being listened to, understood, valued, and taken seriously. These qualities gave the researchers a way to examine how the exchange felt from within it.
What appeared in the conversations
Independent observers also read the conversations. They did not know which condition the students had been assigned to or the study’s hypotheses. In the final chats of pairs assigned more conversations, they generally found more signs of knowing one another, more expressed liking, and more personal and emotional disclosure.
The final chats contained similar numbers of words across conditions. What differed was what the students were saying to each other. Familiarity was visible in the content of the exchange, including references to things they had discussed before.
The researchers’ statistical analyses linked increased attraction with perceived responsiveness and with comfort and satisfaction. Feeling knowledgeable about one another also helped account for the pattern when examined separately, although its distinct contribution was less clear when all three explanations were considered together. These overlapping experiences suggest how liking may develop through conversation. The study did not isolate any one of them as a necessary ingredient. These experiences were measured after the conversations, so the analysis also leaves open how growing liking and feeling responded to may influence one another.
Wanting to continue beyond the study
After the assigned conversations, researchers asked whether participants wanted to learn the other person’s identity so they could stay in contact. After one chat, at least one person in roughly one in five pairs expressed that interest. After four chats, at least one person in just over half of the pairs did so.
That comparison describes interest expressed after different amounts of conversation. It does not identify a four-conversation threshold for friendship, or show that both people wanted further contact. Contact information was provided when both expressed interest.
The researchers also followed up two weeks later. Someone reported attempting further contact in about 11 percent of pairs assigned one chat, compared with 25 percent assigned four and 31 percent assigned eight. Wanting another conversation and actually reaching out were distinct outcomes, with more interaction generally associated with both.
Giving an acquaintance room to develop
The students had agreed to a set number of conversations, supported by course credit and participation incentives. In everyday life, people often decide whether to return after a single encounter. The study created opportunities for an acquaintance to continue before that decision was final.
Its findings apply most directly to early interactions among young peers with some shared university context. The authors also recognized that repeated unpleasant encounters can have a different effect. The quality of the time together remains part of the explanation.
For someone enjoying a new acquaintance, another conversation provides more experience on which to decide whether they want to continue. There may be something to follow up, something remembered from last time, or a growing ease in talking together. In these experiments, liking developed alongside those experiences.
Sources
Reis, H. T., Maniaci, M. R., Caprariello, P. A., Eastwick, P. W., & Finkel, E. J. (2011). Familiarity does indeed promote attraction in live interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(3), 557–570. University of Rochester PDF.