Clipped from www.futurity.org
Simply sharing a love for something—a favorite band or book—is enough to make you care about someone you’ve just met.
In a set of experiments, researchers found that when two people share just a few things in common, one can take on the feelings and physical reactions of the other who has been placed in an uncomfortable situation.
“When people have longstanding relationships, they have shared experiences and overlapping social networks,” says Greg Walton, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But we found that even when you strip those things away and create a sense of social connection in a lab with a five-minute conversation, that’s sufficient to build a relationship where you care about someone.”
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