🧠 Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950): Proximity and Friendship Formation

✅ Aim:

To investigate whether physical proximity between individuals living in the same housing complex influences the formation of friendships, and if so, how repeated exposure contributes to interpersonal attraction.

🔬 Procedure:

The study was conducted in the Westgate Housing Complex at MIT, which was student housing built for married veterans returning from World War II. The housing units were randomly assigned, meaning people did not choose where they lived, which minimized selection bias.

There were 17 2-story apartment buildings arranged in U-shaped clusters, with each unit having a front and back entrance, and a shared stairwell. This design unintentionally created varying levels of proximity and visibility between residents — some had neighbors directly next door, while others lived upstairs, downstairs, or farther away within the same block.

The researchers:

• Conducted observations of interactions between neighbors over several months.
• Administered sociometric surveys to residents, asking them to name their three closest friends within the housing project.
• Carefully recorded which apartment each participant lived in and how far away their named friends lived.

The analysis focused on the relationship between physical distance (e.g., same floor, next door, different wing) and the frequency and closeness of reported friendships.

📊 Results:

The findings strongly supported the idea that physical proximity predicts interpersonal attraction:

• 41% of friendships occurred between next-door neighbors.
• Only 22% of friendships occurred between people who lived two doors apart.
• For people who lived at opposite ends of a hallway, only 10% named each other as friends.
• Residents living near stairwells (where more people passed by) had more friends both on their floor and on other floors — showing that functional distance (likelihood of casual encounters) mattered more than absolute distance.

Even brief, passive encounters, such as seeing someone walk past your door regularly, were enough to increase familiarity and promote positive feelings and friendship.