How do you play the 36 questions?
- Sit together with about 45 minutes free. Put other phones away. Use this one as the question deck.
- Take turns reading aloud. Whoever reads a question answers it first, then the other person answers it too. Swap readers on every question. The game shows whose turn it is.
- Move through the three sets in order. Set I is light, Set II goes deeper, Set III is the most personal. The study moved pairs on every 15 minutes even if they hadn’t finished a set.
- Finish with four minutes of eye contact if you both want to. The built-in timer counts it down.
Turn on pass-the-phone mode if you’re sitting apart or playing over dinner. It hides each question behind a “pass the phone to…” screen, so the next reader sees it first. Your place is saved on this device, and the share progress link lets you pick up on another phone.
Where do the 36 questions come from?
Psychologist Arthur Aron, Elaine Aron and colleagues designed the questions to create closeness between strangers in a lab, so they could study relationships experimentally. In their first study, student pairs who worked through these questions reported more closeness afterwards than pairs given small-talk prompts such as describing the last pet they owned. The researchers wrote that the effect was large. Later studies in the same paper found it held whether or not the pair agreed on important attitudes, or had been told to try to get close.
The questions became famous in 2015, when Mandy Len Catron wrote about trying them with an acquaintance in the New York Times “Modern Love” column. She added the four minutes of eye contact at the end. Read what the study did and didn’t show, or print the full list of 36 questions.
Is it safe to answer every question?
Some questions touch on death, family and painful memories (for example question 18, “What is your most terrible memory?”). Agree before you start that either of you can pass on any question, no explanation needed. You’re there to get closer, so nobody should have to push through something that hurts.
More games for after the 36 questions
Want something lighter? Try the truth or dare and deep questions deck with 160 original cards for couples, friends, family and work, or play two truths and a lie and send a friend a challenge link.