 As an example, a famous study by Leon Festinger and colleagues investigated critical factors in predicting friendship formation; the researchers concluded that whether or not people became friends was most strongly predicted by their proximity to one another.Ebbesen, Kjos, and Konecni, however, demonstrated that proximity itself does not predict friendship formation; rather, proximity serves to amplify the information that is relevant to the decision of either forming or not forming a friendship.Negative information is just as amplified as positive information by proximity.