The Beauty and Practice of Human Bonding
Why do we love? What brings us together? How to heal ethnic hatred? According to Arthur Aron, the answer lies in the human desire to grow ourselves through connecting with others.
We are social animals. This much we all know. But humans strive for more than a life inside a pack. From friendships to marriages, we seek bonds with specific others, even if these bonds, by definition, bind us. Why?
Arthur Aron is a psychologist who studies human bonding in all its forms. He has studied topics from connecting with strangers to maintaining romance in life-long marriages. And many of his findings are ultimately hopeful.
You are reading the On Humans newsletter. This piece is a breakdown of my conversation with psychologist Arthur Aron. You can listen to our chat on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows—just search for “On Humans” and Episode 35. Or you can continue to read the episode highlights with some reflections.
Our conversation touched upon many questions, from why we love to how we connect with ethnic “others”.
1. Why We Love
Love hurts. It binds us to another like no other force in our emotional repertoire. And ultimately, every romance ends in divorce or death.
So why do we love? For many reasons, of course. There are practical benefits, especially for those who want children. There is comfort in a trustworthy companion. This is all true. But these hardly explain the excitement and the adventurous part of the romantic heart. Aron’s decade-long research attempts to fill in this gap. His work centres around the “self-expansion model”. As Aron explained the model to me:
“One of the basic human motivations is to survive, but the other one is to grow, expand, to increase your knowledge, to explore. And when you connect closely with someone else—and that's where you feel love often—you include them in the self; they become part of who you are. That enriches your life.” 1
The supporting research took me by surprise. Here is Aron’s explanation of one of the classic studies on the matter:
“We asked people at the beginning to fill out a list of who are you—you know, a bunch of traits—and then also fill this out for another person and for their partner. … Then later in another context we show them each of the traits and we ask: how true is this of you.”
Unsurprisingly, people do completely fine in this task. If the trait is true of them, they say “yes”. If not, they say “no”. For example, I would always say ”yes” to the question “Are you Finnish?” But here comes the interesting part.
“If that trait is one that's true of themself and their partner, they're faster to say it's true of me. Similarly, if it's not true of me and it is true of my partner, I still say it's not true, but I'm slower.”
The effect is small, around 20 ms, but it’s consistent across studies. It only shows up with traits of significant others. And it is but one of the many paradigms showing that there is something like a “merging of identities” in romantic partnerships. For example, after falling in love there is a huge expansion in the domains included in spontaneous self-descriptions.
These are funky findings. But Aron sees them as but symptoms of a deeper truth: love is a way for us to expand, to explore, to almost literally grow ourselves.
I find this model very compelling. Incidentally, it explains why falling in love is so exciting and refreshing, but also why breakups can be so uniquely painful: splitting up almost literally rips something off from one’s very self.
The self-expansion model also has practical implications, too. Most directly, it has guided Aron’s research about relationship satisfaction.
“Our research focuses on doing exciting things with your partner. If you do new, novel, interesting, growthful things, you're self-expanding with the partner. It's a way to sort of reinvigorate that sense of rapid self expansion [from the beginning of the relationship].”
To give you an idea of these studies, Aron’s team once divided couples into two groups. One was asked to do joint activities that they had rated as “pleasant”. The other group was asked to do activities that they had rated as “novel” or “exciting”, even if not so pleasant. Only the latter group experienced robust improvements in their relationship satisfaction. Or to give another example, going on travel together is good for most relationships, but only when the travel includes genuine novelty and exploration.2 And no expensive vacations are needed: even silly novelty, such as a laboratory task of balancing a cylinder together, is beneficial to relationship satisfaction when done together (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Even pointless activities can improve relationships if they are novel and jointly performed. Source: Oxford Handbook of Close Relations (2013)
Aron is not the first of my guests to share his ideas about how to cultivate love in relationships. I’ve talked about this with Helen Fisher, Robert Sternberg, and Ruth Feldman. I am hoping to publish something of a synthesis soon. But for now, I will stay focused on Aron’s work. And it is not all about romance.
Some of Aron’s most inspiring work is around closeness and bonding in non-romantic settings.
2. Friendships & Contact With the Ethnic “Other”
I recently saw a touching video published by Amnesty International. I highly recommend watching it below.
In the video, refugees and native Europeans sit for 4 minutes maintaining uninterrupted eye contact—a protocol that Amnesty learned from Aron’s work.
The effects are striking. Intimacy and closeness appear almost immediately, almost out of nowhere. Many participants shed tears.
There is obvious hope in the video. Despite all the political divides between refugees and native Europeans, it takes very little to create intimacy and closeness between two individuals from each side.
Admittedly, we are not exactly witnessing a scientific experiment. We don’t know, for example, how the participants were selected. Were the native European participants those with existing pro-refugee attitudes? Perhaps. Yet serious research suggests a similar outcome.
In the popular media, Aron is perhaps most famous for developing the so-called 36 Questions. These are often advertised to make you “fall in love with anyone”. This hyperbolic description is inaccurate, not the least because the tool comes from studies on friendships, not romantic love. But it is true that the procedure can, in only 45 minutes, create genuine intimacy between almost any two strangers. When this is done for participants from two different ethnic groups, both participants have improved attitudes towards the other group. As a personal bonus, they also have less of a stress reaction when interacting with the other group.
I asked Aron about this:
“What does it tell you about humans to see the ease at which the boundaries between us can immediately fall down, and [how] intimacy can just appear almost anywhere?”
Aron responded:
“I think there's this desire to expand the self. And I think it has a history of not just applying to relationships, but applying to your community. … And we do know you include your ethnic group in the self to some extent, but I think we want to broaden that.”
In my eyes, this is an important jab at one of the most harmful cliches in social sciences.
Contemporary scholars often describe humans as “groupish” and “parochial altruists”. According to this dogma, we are kind to our own, but nasty to others. And there is certainly truth to this. News from Ukraine or Gaza gives us plenty of supporting anecdotes. Or more scientifically, we now know that even pre-verbal babies are kinder to those they think of as part of their group.
Yet I’ve never been convinced by the sweeping claims about humans simply liking “our own” and disliking “the other”. Reflecting on my childhood memories, I was always awkward with strangers. For example, I hesitated to approach groups of unknown children at the playground. Perhaps it was my Finnishness. Perhaps my temperament. Or perhaps it is something more universal. But I distinctly remember wanting to bond with the others. I was simply afraid of the consequences. I feared rejection. Sometimes I feared nastier things. But it was fear holding me back—not a generic dislike of strangers.
Aron’s research supports my introspective theorising. The cliches of social psychology assume that we want similar friends. Decades of research support this: people are drawn to befriend (or date) those similar to themselves. This is true. But Aron has highlighted that his effect disappears, even reverses, when we are told that a stranger will probably like us back. Differences can even become an asset. After all, befriending someone different is more self-expanding.
This is not to belittle the role of xenophobia in human affairs. It is simply a call to understand it with more nuance. As some of Aron’s collaborators put it in an article, we should understand inter-group dynamics as a push-and-pull between two drives:
“On one side, driven by security concerns and perhaps laziness (..), people may be motivated to avoid potentially problematic and more difficult interactions with outgroup members… However, driven by motives like curiosity and the need for growth and self-expansion, outgroup members may also become appealing opportunities and exciting alternatives to the more mundane ingroup.‘
Indeed, I asked Aron about the biggest “enemy” to reaching beyond our group identity. He answered along similar line:
“There are two fundamental human motivations, we argue. One is expansion. The other is survival. And if our survival seems threatened by another group or by some circumstance, then it's harder to try to expand in that direction.”
Ultimately, more research is needed. We still don’t understand when differences are a push and when a pull. But Aron’s work reminds us of something important: Xenophobia is not a hard-wired destiny of human nature, nor is tolerance its only antidote. In the right mindset, reaching out can stem from a deeper desire within us—the desire to grow ourselves by connecting with others.
These were the highlights from my conversation with Arthur Aron. To listen to the full conversation, head to On Humans Podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your shows. This was episode 35.
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Thank you, as always, for reading!
All good things,
Ilari
All quotations have been simplified by deleting filler words, filler phrases, and other parts not critical to the argument. Given the sheer number of such edits, I have decided to hide most of them to ensure legibility.
The study on travel is currently in press for the Annals of Tourism Research: Empirical Insights