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Meeting strangers blindfolded
How the night runs
Victor Jeffries, the host, invites 25 people and makes sure no two of them know each other. A friend of his greets each arrival at the apartment door and puts a blindfold on them. The friend leads the guest by the hands to a seat, sets the guest's hand on a stranger's knee, and introduces the two by first names. Anyone who wants a drink raises a hand.
Without sight, the conversation skips the basic questions and heads toward feelings. A bell rings every 10 minutes or so, and a helper rotates the pairs, so each guest meets a new stranger about three times.
The reveal
Then the blindfolds come off, and the guest sees only the person from the most recent conversation. Much of the rest of the evening goes to working out who the first two people were.
He likes to push guests right up to the line of discomfort while keeping it as safe as possible.
Why does a blindfold change what strangers say?
Sight supplies instant social cues such as age, clothing, and status, and people lean on them to decide what to say. A blindfold removes those cues, so a voice and a hand on a knee are all that is left. A 2006 Princeton study by Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov found that people form judgments of a stranger's trustworthiness from a face in as little as a tenth of a second.
Can strangers read emotions through touch alone?
In a 2006 study led by Matthew Hertenstein at DePauw University, a blindfolded stranger was touched on the forearm by someone trying to convey an emotion without speaking. The blindfolded strangers identified anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy at rates well above chance. Neither person used words, and the touches were limited to the forearm.
Do deep questions really speed up closeness?
Psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues at Stony Brook University tested this in 1997. Pairs of strangers spent 45 minutes answering questions that grew steadily more personal, while control pairs made small talk. The question-answering pairs reported significantly more closeness afterward. Aron's set of 36 questions later became widely known as the 36 questions to fall in love.
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