The friendship illusion
...or how only half of those we think of as pals actually like us
We may not be as popular as we would like to think.
For research shows that we may have only half as many friends as we believe.
A US study has found that a mere 50 per cent of friendships are mutual. In other words, only half of our so-called pals like us.
Reasons for the misunderstanding range from it being human nature to expect those we like to like us back, to social media blurring the definition of friendship.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Alex Pentland asked students on a business management course rank how close they were to each of their classmates, one a scale of 0 to 5.
Zero meant ‘I do not know this person’, 1 was defined as ‘I recognise this person but we never talked’ while an acquaintance merited a score of 2. Only scores 3 and above denoted friendship. A 3 described a friend, 4 was reserved for close friends and to get a 5 someone had to be a best friend.
Importantly, the 84 men and women aged 23 to 38 were asked to predict how the other person would score them.
Analysis of the results showed that 94 per cent of the students expected their feelings of friendship to be reciprocated. But that happened in only 53 per cent of cases.
The study is not the first to show that our friends may be less keen on us than we are on them.
Previous research has found that as few as a third of ‘friendships’ are mutual. Professor Pentland, a computer scientist and psychologist, said: ‘These findings suggest a profound inability of people to perceive friendship reciprocity.’
One explanation is that we simply assume our feelings are shared –because the thought that the people we value don’t feel the same about would be too hurtful.
Writing in the scientific journal PLOS ONe, the professor said: ‘People don’t like to hear that people they think of as friends don’t name them as friends.’
It is also possible that many unreciprocated friendships are aspirational, with people naming popular or powerful types as friends, even when they don’t know them very well. The popular person, in contrast, has lots of ‘friends’ to choose from and so can afford to be more picky, experts say.
The rise of social media means the definition of friendship has become blurred. Ronald Sharp, professor of english at Vassar College, New York State, said: ‘People are so eager to maximise the efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.’
Professor Sir Cary Cooper, a Manchester University psychologist, said the rise of social media may mean a lot of people don’t have many true friends. ‘That is rather sad. It is a social media commentary of our time,’ he said.