Why You Have Fewer Friends Than You Think

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Scientists usually make us happy. They make discoveries, develop science, tell new things about human behavior. But not at this time. They've now published one of the most depressing studies ever, and it's hard not to be upset to hear the results.

Let's do a fun exercise. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and try to count all your friends. Not only the closest ones and not only those whom they saw recently. In general, all people on Earth whom you can call a friend or comrade.

Have you counted? How much did it turn out? Fine. Now divide that number by two.

We lied a little here: the exercise is not at all fun. But as a result, you got an almost exact number of real, real friends.

Okay, we lied big. Actually, the exercise is pretty sad. It is based on one of the most depressing sociological research.

PLoS One has published a study showing that half of those we consider our friends do not feel the same way.

The researchers asked students studying together to rate each other on a scale from zero (“I don’t know who this is at all”) to five (“This is one of my best friends”). Friendship was considered a score from three to five points. Participants also wrote down their guesses about how other people would rate them.

It turned out that 94% of those surveyed hoped to get the same high scores from their friends. This is logical: you are unlikely to call someone else if you do not think that this connection is mutual.

On the other hand, we also record one-sided friendly relations. For example, we say: "I don't know her, but she seems to me to be a good person." In general, these two scenarios for the development of friendship encompass almost all the relationships between students recorded during the experiment.

But the reality turned out to be cruel: only 53% of the assessments were mutual. Half of those who hoped to get high marks from their seemingly friend were actually rated low points.

Of course, the study was not large-scale: only 84 people took part in it. In addition, they are still studying at the university. And everyone knows very well that after graduation, relations between fellow students change. Someone begins to make friends even stronger, and someone forgets about their comrades, crossing the threshold of the university with a diploma in their hands.

But the researchers did not calm down and looked at data from other studies on friendship, thus increasing the number of participants to 3,160 people. And the results were even worse: reciprocity existed only between 34% of the subjects.

“These data indicate the inability of people to perceive friendship as something fundamentally mutual. At the same time, the possibility of non-mutual friendship spoils our own self-image,”the authors of the study note.

Well that's fair. No one will like to think of themselves as unwanted, to be in a relationship that actually doesn’t exist (and maybe it won’t be). Perhaps this inability is just a way of emotional self-defense.

There is something to think about, right?