The science

Why you click with some people and not others

Resonance is a matching algorithm built on decades of research into what predicts whether two people will get along.

First, the myth

Shared hobbies don't make friendships

Most matching tools pair people by common interests, hobbies, or traditional personality tests. The research says those things don't actually predict whether two people will connect.

If the only thing you share with someone is a love of skiing, you're just two people on a ski lift without much to talk about. The same goes for being in the same major, liking the same shows, or both being "an ENFJ." Surface similarities are easy to measure, but they don't predict much.

What actually works

Compatibility is how you see the world

The friendships that click are between people who see, experience, and make sense of the world in similar ways.

Three people watch the same scene in a dining hall. One notices the social dynamics right away: who's in charge and who's uncomfortable. Another notices that someone needs help. A third notices whether things are orderly or chaotic. We call these "lenses": the mental filters you use hundreds of times a day without thinking about them.

When someone shares your lenses, everything gets easier: conversation flows, jokes land, you feel understood rather than merely tolerated. Researchers can now measure that feeling of "this person just gets it," and Resonance is built to find it.

The evidence comes from two directions. Carolyn Parkinson and her colleagues put friends and strangers in a scanner and showed them all the same videos: friends' brains responded in strikingly similar ways , so similar that researchers could tell who was friends with whom from brain responses alone. A 2022 paper in Psychological Review explains the theory behind that finding: when two people see the world in similar ways, they understand each other more easily.

What you notice How you interpret it What matters to you How you make sense of people

To be clear, compatibility is not simply seeing things the same way as other people but it is an important part of the equation.

Under the hood

From survey to compatibility score

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Your lenses, measured

The fifteen-minute survey measures what you notice and how you interpret the world. Research shows these dimensions matter for connection.

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Every pair, scored

The AI backend computes a compatibility score for every pair of people in your community, instead of sorting people into rough types.

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Only the most compatible

Out of everyone available to you, the network picks the people you score highest with and matches you with them, with a reason for each match. Shy people get matches just as strong as outgoing people.

Matthew Lieberman, co-founder of Resonance
Who's behind this

Inspired by decades of
social neuroscience research

Resonance was created by Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA Professor of Psychology and one of the founders of the field of social neuroscience. He has spent more than 25 years studying how our brains make us social, including why social connection is as basic a need as food and shelter.

Concerned by how many students feel lonely on campuses full of people, he built Resonance to put that science to work: finding the people around you you're most likely to become friends with.

Why this matters

What loneliness costs

Feeling alone while surrounded by people is one of the most common experiences in college, and one of the least talked about. The research shows it has real costs.

Mental health. These are the effects people expect, and they're real. In college students, loneliness is linked to depression, anxiety and suicidality, and these can be predicted from how connected a student feels.

Physical health. These effects surprise people, because we think of loneliness as a problem of old age. It isn't only that. In young adults, loneliness affects the immune system, inflammation and blood pressure. The body responds to isolation the way it responds to other threats.

School, and then work. Loneliness, and the weak social ties behind it, are linked to whether students stay enrolled and graduate, and to their exam scores and grades. The campus research is the clearest, but this isn't unique to campuses. The same is true in a new job or a new city.

Universities have mostly responded with counseling, mentoring, clubs and orientation. Those are worth having, and they've been in place for decades, while loneliness kept getting worse. When people are lonely, they don't want therapy. They want friends.

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The goal isn't time in the app. Resonance succeeds when you stop needing it, because you're too busy with the friends it helped you find.