Design your daily environment to create repeated exposure

You cannot become friends with people you never run into — engineer the run-ins.

Why it works

The mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) establishes that repeated exposure to a stimulus — including a person — increases liking for it. Propinquity operationalizes this: living near someone creates repeated, passive exposure that the brain processes as familiarity, which it interprets as safety and trust. Because the exposure is passive, it bypasses the social anxiety that active approaches often trigger, allowing liking to build before deliberate effort is required.

How to do it

1. Identify the physical spaces where you want to meet people and arrange to be in those spaces regularly and predictably.
2. Choose a specific seat, desk, or spot that maximizes the chance of seeing the same people repeatedly rather than rotating through novelty.
3. When relocating, prioritize proximity to community spaces (parks, markets, gathering spots) over private amenity.
4. In remote or hybrid work, use synchronous channels (video calls, shared office time) to replicate the passive-exposure function that office proximity used to provide automatically.

Evidence

Festinger, Schachter, and Back's (1950) Westgate housing study found that the strongest predictor of friendship was the distance between apartment doors and staircase proximity, not shared interests or demographics. Zajonc's (1968) mere-exposure experiments supply the mechanism: repeated exposure to a stimulus reliably increases liking for it, independent of any reasoned judgment. (observational)

The Westgate study was conducted in a homogeneous sample (married graduate students); generalization to diverse populations and modern environments involves inference. Digital proximity likely creates some exposure but less reliably than physical.

Sources

• Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Harper.
• Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1–27.
• Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Harper.
• Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt.2), 1–27.

Common mistake

Trying to make friends by identifying people you like and then approaching them, without first creating a structure that provides repeated passive exposure — the approach often feels awkward because familiarity hasn't yet built.