Questions to Ask to Get to Know Someone: 120, Easy to Close
Questions to ask to get to know someone are prompts that move past name, job and weather and into how a person actually lives and thinks. There are 120 below in five tiers, usable with a new friend, a colleague, a date or a relative you have never really talked to, plus what the research says about how closeness builds.
Reviewed byMichael Callans, MSWEasy openers
- What takes up most of your week at the moment?
- How long have you been in this city?
- What were you doing this time last year?
- How do you know the people here?
- What is the first thing you do in the morning?
- What have you been meaning to start?
- Where did you grow up, and what was it like there?
- What is the best thing that happened to you this week?
- Do you have brothers or sisters?
- What do you do on a day with nothing in the calendar?
- What are you reading or watching at the moment?
- How did you get into what you do?
- Which meal could you eat every week without getting bored?
- Are you a morning person or a late-night person?
- Where was the last place you traveled to?
- What are you looking forward to?
- Do you cook, and what do you make when you cannot be bothered?
- What was your first job?
- What music have you had on repeat lately?
- Do you have animals at home, or want to?
- What did you study, and did you end up using it?
- What is your commute like?
- What do you do to switch off?
- What small thing have you treated yourself to recently?
- What is a question you enjoy being asked?
Their world
- Who are the people you see most often?
- What does your family look like these days?
- What was the street you grew up on like?
- Which of your friendships goes back furthest?
- What does your work actually involve, day to day?
- Who do you talk to when something goes wrong?
- Which family traditions have you kept?
- What does a good weekend look like in your life right now?
- Which group or community do you feel part of?
- Who has been in your life longest outside your family?
- What is the hardest part of your week?
- How did you end up living where you live?
- What are you responsible for that nobody sees?
- What do you like most about your home?
- Who in your life makes things easier?
- Where did your parents grow up?
- What is an ordinary Thursday evening like for you?
- What are you saving for, if anything?
- What has been the last big change in your life?
- Who taught you the thing you are best at?
- What do you miss about an earlier part of your life?
- Which languages are spoken in your family?
- What is the longest you have lived in one place?
- What do you usually do on your birthday?
- Who would you call from an airport at midnight?
How they think
- How do you decide when a decision is genuinely close?
- What do you do when you disagree with everyone in the room?
- What did you believe at twenty that you have quietly dropped?
- Do you think out loud, or work it out alone first?
- What is overrated in your field?
- What do you do with advice you did not ask for?
- How do you know when you are wrong?
- What do you believe that you cannot fully defend?
- What do you notice that other people seem to miss?
- How do you handle being bored?
- What makes you trust someone quickly?
- What makes you lose trust in someone?
- What do you do when you are stuck on a problem?
- Do you plan your year, or does it happen to you?
- Which kind of person do you find hardest to work with?
- What is a rule you live by that you have never written down?
- How do you tell the difference between a feeling and a fact?
- Which question do you ask yourself most often?
- What do you think is worth being strict about?
- How much does other people's opinion of you weigh on you?
- What have you learned from someone you disagreed with?
- Where do you get your information from?
- What do you do when you cannot decide?
- What have you been talked out of that you should have done?
- What do you think you are usually right about?
What they care about
- What are you putting your spare time into at the moment?
- What would you fight for if it came to that?
- Which problem would you work on if you were paid to solve anything?
- Which cause actually gets your time or your money?
- Who do you admire, and for what specifically?
- What do you refuse to compromise on?
- What do you want more of in your life?
- What makes work feel worth doing to you?
- What do you want to be better at as a person?
- What matters to you now that did not matter at twenty?
- What do you want to be doing in five years?
- Who are you trying to make proud?
- What do you wish more people took seriously?
- What do you give money to without thinking twice?
- What is the most meaningful thing you have done?
- What do you want to pass on to whoever comes after you?
- What kind of help are you always willing to give?
- What are you glad you spent your twenties on?
- Which practice or ritual do you keep because it matters to you?
- What do you want your home and family to be like?
- What work would you do for free?
- What standard do you hold yourself to that nobody checks?
- What would you want to be remembered for?
- What makes you angry on other people's behalf?
- What do you want to learn before it feels too late to start?
Closer
- What is the hardest thing you have come through?
- What do you need from people when you are struggling?
- What are you proudest of that is hard to explain to anyone?
- What do you worry about late at night?
- Who do you miss most?
- Which kind of help do you struggle to ask for?
- What do people misunderstand about you?
- What are you still carrying from your family?
- When have you felt most alone?
- What are you hoping will be different in a year?
- What would you want said about you by someone who knows you well?
- What did you forgive that you thought you never would?
- What does being close to someone feel like to you?
- What are you afraid of being seen as?
- What have you given up that you still think about?
- What would you do with your life if nobody were watching?
- What have you never said out loud?
- What do you want more of from the people around you?
- What have you learned about yourself this year?
- What should I know about you if we are going to be friends?
How to use these
Climb the tiers slowly and only as far as the other person climbs with you. Three or four easy openers, one question from the next tier, then check whether they are also volunteering more. If they are not, stay where you are: a question two tiers above the conversation gets a careful answer, which teaches you nothing.
One rule covers most of it: never ask a question you are not willing to answer in the same detail. Studies of disclosure find that people like each other more when disclosure alternates than when one person provides all of it, so give your own answer before asking the next question. Then follow up on the smallest detail in what they said. That is what turns a list of questions into a conversation worth having.
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About this tool
Questions to ask to get to know someone are useful in a narrow, practical way: they give you somewhere to go when you have met a person you want to know and the conversation has run out of road. The 120 below are grouped in five tiers, from openers that cost nothing to answer through to questions you would only ask someone you already like. They are written for adults and they work on anyone you are trying to know better: a new friend, a colleague you only know professionally, someone you are dating, or the relative you have sat beside for twenty years without ever asking anything real.
The sequence is the part worth taking seriously. In 1997 Arthur Aron and colleagues published a procedure in which pairs of strangers worked through prompts that grew steadily more personal over about 45 minutes. Pairs who did that reported feeling closer at the end than pairs who spent the same time on small talk. The prompt set is Aron's copyrighted research material, so it is not reproduced here; what we have borrowed is the structure, which is that closeness tends to follow disclosure that escalates in steps rather than disclosure that arrives all at once.
What that study does not show is worth stating. The pairs were strangers in a laboratory, closeness was measured straight after, and no part of the design tells you whether the feeling lasts, whether it leads to a friendship, or whether it works the same way outside a research setting where both people have agreed to the exercise. Treat the escalating structure as a sensible way to run a conversation, not as a technique for producing intimacy on demand. Anyone who promises a guaranteed connection in 45 minutes is selling something.
Turn-taking is the second structural rule, and it is easy to get wrong with a list in your hand. Susan Sprecher and colleagues compared pairs who alternated their disclosures with pairs where one person talked for the whole first half and then swapped. The alternating pairs liked each other more. Nancy Collins and Lynn Miller's earlier meta-analysis helps explain why: people like those who disclose to them, and they also like others more after they themselves have disclosed. Both of those routes need you to answer too. One rule covers it: never ask a question you are not willing to answer in the same detail.
The third rule is the follow-up. Karen Huang and colleagues found across lab studies and a speed-dating study that asking more questions made people better liked, with follow-up questions doing most of the work. A follow-up is proof that you listened, and it moves the conversation deeper without you having to choose a heavier question. If someone says they moved here two years ago for work, you have four threads in one sentence: the move, the work, the timing, and the place they left. Pick the smallest one.
It also helps to know that your read on how it went is probably unfair to you. Erica Boothby and colleagues described the liking gap: after conversations with strangers, people consistently underestimated how much their partner liked them and enjoyed the exchange. Both sides left thinking they had been the less interesting one. Many people stop asking questions because they decide afterwards that they came across badly, and the research suggests that verdict is systematically too harsh. Judge the conversation by what the other person said and did, not by your own post-match report.
How to use the tiers. Three or four easy openers, then one question from the next tier, and stop climbing the moment the other person stops climbing with you. Match their level rather than leading two tiers ahead of it. Keep an eye on setting: walking, driving, cooking and washing up all make personal questions easier than a table with nothing to look at. And ask about situations rather than summaries, because what does your Thursday evening look like is answerable where describe yourself is a chore.
There are two common mistakes. The first is the interview, where one person works down a list and the other person provides material; it feels like a screening call and it ends politely. The second is skipping tiers, where a question from the closer block arrives ten minutes in and the answer is understandably careful. Also worth saying: a deck of questions does not score how well matched you are or assess character. Interesting answers are not a reason to trust someone quickly, and awkward answers are not a reason to write them off. What people do over time tells you more than what they say in one evening.
Finally, questions are only one ingredient in getting to know someone. Jeffrey Hall's research on how friendships form suggests that closeness takes accumulated hours of time spent together, which is a slower and less glamorous mechanism than a good question. If the real problem is that there is nobody to ask, the fix is repeated contact: the same class, the same team, the same table every week. The Loneliness Test screen can help you see how much this is weighing on you, and Conversation Starters covers the earlier moment, getting a conversation going at all.
References
- Aron A, Melinat E, Aron EN, Vallone RD, Bator RJ. The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: a procedure and some preliminary findings. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 1997;23(4):363-377.
- Sprecher S, Treger S, Wondra JD, Hilaire N, Wallpe K. Taking turns: reciprocal self-disclosure promotes liking in initial interactions. J Exp Soc Psychol. 2013;49(5):860-866.
- Collins NL, Miller LC. Self-disclosure and liking: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull. 1994;116(3):457-475.
- Huang K, Yeomans M, Brooks AW, Minson J, Gino F. It doesn't hurt to ask: question-asking increases liking. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2017;113(3):430-452.
- Boothby EJ, Cooney G, Sandstrom GM, Clark MS. The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think? Psychol Sci. 2018;29(11):1742-1756.
- Hall JA. How many hours does it take to make a friend? J Soc Pers Relat. 2019.
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, November 6). Questions to Get to Know Someone. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/questions-to-get-to-know-someone
Questions to Get to Know Someone FAQ
What are the best questions to get to know someone?
The best questions to get to know someone point at a situation rather than asking for a summary. What is an ordinary Thursday evening like for you tells you more than describe yourself, because the first one is easy to answer honestly and the second is a chore. Start with questions that cost nothing, move one tier at a time, and follow up on the detail they mention in passing. Research on question-asking suggests follow-up questions do more for how liked you are than the opening question does.
How do you get to know someone without being nosy?
Match their level and answer your own questions. Nosiness is really a mismatch: a question that arrives two tiers above where the conversation is, or a question from someone who is giving nothing back. If you answer first, or at least in equal detail, the same question reads as an exchange rather than an inquiry. Watch for the signals that someone has reached their limit, which are short answers, a change of subject or a joke, and take the hint the first time rather than the third.
What questions get past small talk?
Questions about how someone spends their time, what they have changed their mind about, and what they are responsible for tend to open things up, because all three are specific and none of them require a confession. The How they think and What they care about tiers on this page are built for exactly that moment. The move is not to ask something heavier, it is to ask something narrower. Small talk stays small mostly because the questions are too broad to answer with anything interesting.
Can these questions help me make friends as an adult?
They help with the conversation, which is only part of it. Jeffrey Hall's work on friendship formation suggests closeness accumulates through hours spent together, so the limiting factor for most adults is repeated contact rather than conversational skill. Good questions make the hours count: they are why a weekly class turns into a friendship rather than a nodding acquaintance. If the harder problem is that there is nobody to ask these questions of, the Loneliness Test page screen is a reasonable place to look at that honestly.
What is a good question to ask on a first date?
Something from the Easy openers or Their world tiers, asked with genuine interest in the answer. What takes up most of your week, how they got into their work, or what a good weekend looks like in their life right now will tell you more about whether you fit than a list of favorites. Save the Closer tier. A heavy question on a first date reads as a test, and the careful answer you get back is not information about the person, only about the pressure you applied.
How many questions should I ask in one conversation?
Fewer than you think, with more follow-ups than you expect. Working down a list produces an interview, and interviews end politely and go nowhere. Four or five questions over an evening, each followed up twice and each answered by you as well, is a good conversation. If you notice you have asked six things in a row without saying anything about yourself, stop and volunteer something: disclosure that runs both ways is what the liking research actually supports.
Do these work with family and colleagues?
Yes, and they are often most useful there. People tend to know the facts about a relative or a colleague while never having asked anything that produces a new answer, which is why a question about the street someone grew up on or what they are responsible for that nobody sees can land unexpectedly hard. Be more careful with the Closer tier at work, where the power difference makes declining harder, and keep anything you are told there to yourself.