People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other people with your personality. According to Gretchen Rubin, “whatever you say about other people influences how people see you.” If you describe someone else as genuine and kind, people will also associate you with those qualities. The reverse is also true: if you are constantly trashing people behind their backs, your friends will start to associate the negative qualities with you as well.

Self-disclosure may be one of the best relationship-building techniques. You can try this technique on your own as you're getting to know someone. For example, you can build up from asking them about their last trip to the movies to learning about the people who mean the most to them in life. When you learn personal information about another person, they are likely to feel closer to you and want to confide in you in the future.

This strategy is called mirroring, and involves mimicking the other person’s behaviour. In 1999, New York University researchers documented the “chameleon effect”, which occurs when people unconsciously mimic each other’s behaviour, and this facilitates liking. The psychological experiments showed that the participants were more likely to say that they liked their partner when their partner had mimicked their behaviour.

People are more attracted to those who are similar to them. This is known as the similarity-attraction effect. In his experiment, Theodore Newcomb measured his subjects’ attitudes on controversial topics and then put them in a university-owned house to live together. By the end of their stay, the subjects liked their housemates more when they had similar attitudes about the topics that were measured. If you hope to get friendly with someone, try to find a point of similarity between you two and highlight it.

People tend to like things that are familiar to them. It was discovered that college students who lived closer together were more likely to be friends than students who lived farther apart. This could be because students who live close by can experience more day-to-day interactions with each other. Under certain circumstances, those interactions can develop into friendships. Even if you don’t live near your friends, try sticking to a steady routine with them, such as going out for coffee every week or taking a class together.