Let the 36 Love Questions Chatbot Help you Fall in Love!
Stuck in a 4 hour exam supervision with a single candidate sitting in front of me, without a novel to read nor any corrections to complete, I cast my net out in the world of chatbots for entertainment. I was on the lookout for a fun chatbot and I found 36 Love Questions: a Messenger bot that guides you through 36 questions to help you understand your partner better and eventually fall in love (if you aren’t there already!) with him/her.
Sounds like fun, right? Like one of those things you do when you’re in high school and trying to chat up the cute new classmate? That’s what I thought — so I gave it a try.
36 Love Questions on-boarded me with some serious stuff — turns out these questions are based on a scientific study by psychologist Arthur Aron.
Curious, I dug a bit and discovered that the questions were originally formulated for a study in 1997 called “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness.” They’ve since then been used in many study including studies on cross-race friendships. Popularised recently by a column in the New York Times, the test has also been the basis for a Valentine’s Day segment on NBC’sToday Show.
Satisfied that this wasn’t the kind of stuff you see in teen magazines, but a test based on some serious studies, I started the test.
My first reaction to question #1 (or 6, since that was the number I chose) was to answer. I was chatting with a bot, right? As you see the bot promptly put me in place and reminded to talk to the person in front of me, not the robot.
So I tried a few more questions before deciding to test the questions later that day with my husband and see if it brings us closer.
My thought at the end of this “exchange” with the love bot: What did the bot do?
The 36 Love Questions exist as an independent test, easily available on the Internet. I could have obtained the questions from one of the sites that enumerates them and we could have done the same thing without a bot’s intervention.
But then I’m not that young anymore and I did have 4 hours to kill, so I looked up Arthur Aron and read about his work. Perhaps a younger person wouldn’t bother with the (unnecessary) research. An under-graduate or even a post-graduate student out on a date would definitely find this cool.
My conclusion: 36 Love Questions is definitely a bot for the (younger) millennials !
As for me, I’m going to fix a romantic dinner for two and see if Arthur Aron is right about bringing people closer and deepening existing connections.
