“When you encounter someone you’ve never met before but feel like you’ve known all your life, you need to act on it,” says Sewell. She looks for an “instant feeling of trust, which is rare.” The New York-based photographer and artist Joshua Woods, 39, a friendly face to many on the fashion and culture circuits, is on the lookout for people whose overall tastes align with his own: “It’s how someone lives their life and the things they’re engaged with,” he says, like a shared interest in a certain writer. Aminatou Sow, 40, the interviewer and co-author of the 2020 book “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close,” who lives in Brooklyn, agrees. When joining a new group — a running club, for example — “pay attention to who those [like-minded] people are and what you want to know about them.” Even in professional contexts, where there are power dynamics to contend with, it helps to “develop a sensitivity for who sees you as a human,” says Sehgal, noting that those people often make for good friend material.