an experiment testing this hypothesis, Carstensen and her collaborator Barbara Fredrickson asked people to choose who they’d rather spend thirty minutes with: an immediate family member, the author of a book they’d recently read, or somebody they had met recently who seemed to share their interests. Older people preferred the family member; young people were just as excited to meet the author or make a new friend. But in a critical twist, if the young people were asked to imagine that they were about to move across the country, they preferred the family member too.
