How the science of friendships can help make yours better

Significant friendships can look like something that should come naturally. We love people’s company or we don’t do it; We find the same funny things or difficulty laughing together. But the unwritten rules of different types of friendship can be surprisingly difficult to navigate. Over the past decade, however, meticulous research has started to disentangle not only how much relationships are important for our well-being, but also how to make sure that good people thrive.

Jeffrey Hall, director of the Kansas University Relations and Technology Laboratory, is a researcher investigating how to promote friendship. He says that it is better to consider our friendships as lying on a continuum – from simple knowledge and friends of friends to our besties who are always there for us.

“A minimum standard is that two people love each other and that there is a frequency of communication which allows the development of this relationship,” he says. “We expect a feeling of confidence and reliability, from the expectation that we can confront our secrets and that they are people with whom we really like to spend time and who will favor others.”

You may have noticed that Time Investment plays a big role in hall definitions. In a series of surveys, he asked participants who had recently moved to another city to trace the development of their new social life. He found that people had to spend between 57 and 164 hours with someone before they could be considered a “friend”, and about 200 hours together to become a “good” or “best” friend.

The type of time spent together is also vital. “This implies the person in the daily business of your life – eat, drink, play, drag – because you want to have them there, and share these things makes them better,” explains Hall, who is the co -author of a new book, The social biomeExploring these themes. Being forced in the business of the other by work or the study, on the other hand, did nothing for the training of friendship.

We are considerably more likely to spend time with people similar to us, of course. Over the past decade, anthropologist Robin Dunbar at Oxford University has identified seven “friendship pillars” which seem to undergo the most significant ties. These are: to have the same language or the same dialect, growing in the same place, having the same educational and professional experiences, having the same hobbies and interests, having the same vision of the world, having the same sense of humor and having the same taste for music.

We will only share one or two of these pillars with the 150 people whom we vaguely define as friends rather than knowledge, but six or seven with our five closest allies, he wrote in his book Friends: Understanding the power of our most important relationships.

Surprisingly, the similarities with friends even extend with their neuronal activity. In 2018, Carolyn Parkinson at the University of California in Los Angeles asked university students to watch a series of videos while they were in an irmf scanner. She found that she could predict who was friends with whom according to the similarity of the reactions of their brains to the clips they watched. The more they got closer to each other, the more likely it was that the same regions would respond at the same time.

As I describe in my book, Connection lawsParkinson’s work is displayed with the theory that having a “shared reality” – a common way of seeing the world – is the basis of any solid relationship. “These are people who pay attention to the same things as us, having emotional reactions similar to what they see, etc.”, she says. “Such people can be easier to predict and understand when we interact with them – which means that conversations circulate more easily, we feel less trying and minimizing misunderstandings.”

Can we experience this remote connection? Hall thinks. “Telephone calls and video conversations with the people we love are probably as precious as face-to-face communication,” he said. “And create routine opportunities to communicate by the phone or video chat maintains and feeds relationships.”