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friendship of high strength will decline to no more than a mere acquaintanceship in just three years.
This wasn’t true for family relationships, by the way. These remained remarkably stable across time. By comparison, friendships were much more fragile. They depended on constant reinforcement to maintain their strength.
Friendships depend on you investing enough time and effort in each other to keep the relationship well-oiled and functional. See someone less often, whether deliberately or by force of circumstance, and that relationship will inexorably fade away.
For the boys, talking together had absolutely no effect at all – and I mean no effect at all – on how likely the friendship was to survive. What made the difference for the boys was making the effort to ‘do stuff’ together more often than they had done before – going to the pub, playing five-a-side football, climbing mountains, or whatever it was that they used to do. Of course, ‘doing stuff’ together also had a positive effect on the girls’ friendships, but the effect was nowhere near as great as it was for the boys. Investing more time in activities than they had done before would just about
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This chapter has introduced two key findings about how we make friendships, and the consequences these have. One is that each of us seems to have a natural social fingerprint in the way we allocate our social effort.
The other is that these patterns seem to be remarkably stable, and quite impervious to who is actually in our friendship circle at any given moment.
The key to this is the ability to understand a ‘false belief’ – that someone else believes something about the world that you know is not true. As the philosophers have it, this is to have, or acquire, a ‘theory of mind’.
Theory of mind is the key to human sociality. It is what allows us to empathise with others and it is what allows us to manage the interminably complex network of relationships, friendships, enmities etc. that make up our social world.
So far, then, what we have learned is that there is a typical upper limit at five on the number of mindstates people can handle at any one time (with some variability round that).
brain size determines mentalising ability, and mentalising ability determines the number of friends you have.
Stephanie Carlson and Louis Moses, among others, have shown that the ability to delay gratification or inhibit inappropriate responses is linked to better social skills, in particular theory of mind, in children.
In this chapter, I’ve tried to set out the two key psychological mechanisms that are important for social life, and hence in particular our friendships. One – mentalising – allows us to see the consequences of our actions and to figure out why others behave in the way they do.
The other mechanism – inhibition – allows us to suppress our natural inclination to do something that would destabilise relationships.
In other words, what grooming actually does is build up a sense of psychological yearning for the individual you groom with. You crave to be with them, to huddle and cuddle with them. And because of that very targeted psychological predisposition, you will come to their aid when they need it,
The endorphin system, aided and abetted by the dopamine system, is central to the process of social bonding in primates. In mammals in general, and primates in particular, the endorphin system is activated by social grooming.
(By the way, this probably explains why opiate addicts lose interest in the social world and their social relationships: they are getting their hit artificially and don’t need human contact to do it for them.)
the best predictor of the quality of people’s romantic relationships (and, in particular, their degree of promiscuity) was their oxytocin-receptor genes.
The endorphin-receptor genes, on the other hand, had by far their strongest effect on measures of social predisposition, including such psychological parameters as attachment style (how warm or cold you are in your relationships)
Dopamine had its strongest effect at the network level (indexed by measures such as how many close friends you have, and how engaged you are with your local community),
In other words, the endorphin–dopamine system seemed to be central to how we interface with the social world, and oxytocin is relevant only to romantic relationships.
turned out that warm, socially effusive people have a very high density of endorphin receptors in the brain, and especially in the prefrontal cortex –
What this tells us is that how emotionally close we feel to someone is directly related to how much time we invest in them.
It seems that we discovered several ways of triggering the endorphin system using behaviours that allowed us engage in virtual grooming at a distance such that we could, in effect, groom several people at the same time. These include laughter, singing and dancing, feasting, storytelling and the rituals of religion, probably in that order.
Laughing floods the brain with endorphins. If endorphins triggered by laughter make you more relaxed and at ease, then we might expect people who laughed together to feel more bonded to each other, and so be more willing to disclose intimate information, as well as being more generous to each other.
Feasting, in other words, provides an important mechanism for bonding. And it works at two separate levels. Casual eating and drinking with close family and friends reinforces these close bonds, while the occasional large, more formal feast involving many people creates bonds within the wider community. Both are important in their different ways. The first strengthens the close alliances that protect us both from the stresses of living in large communities by providing us with those reliable shoulders to cry on. That’s why eating and drinking with close friends needs to be done regularly. The
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Although the amount of time in small talk didn’t correlate with how content they were with their lives, the time spent in meaningful conversations did predict life satisfaction.
Both studies showed that we were much more likely to remember the social content of stories, and in particular that related to the mental states of the actors, than a purely factual account.
negative gossip can have social benefits: it reduces the risk of members of our social group exploiting us. Even infrequent complaints about others may help to reduce the frequency of bad behaviour.
How you say something can totally change the meaning of the words you utter.
We really do get a lot of information about relationship quality just by hearing how someone says something, and how people interact in a conversation. In short, grunts would do almost as well as words.
They found that experiencing intense negative arousal together as a group resulted in higher levels of group cohesion than experiencing the same level of negative arousal on your own despite being in a group setting. There is something about everyone being involved in the same emotion that is important.
The picture is the same everywhere: few conversations that involve more than four people last for any length of time.
No matter how many people were in the social group sitting round the table, there was an upper limit at four on the number of people actually engaged with each other in a conversation and an upper limit at around three on the number of people who laughed together during a conversation.
Social activities that happen at night seem to hold special significance for us. There seems to be something truly magical about the dark.
You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your local neighbourhood.
In other words, not only are you more likely to share genes with a friend, you are also more likely to think like your friends. That’s not because being friends makes you think alike, but that you gravitate together because you think alike.
This tendency for birds of a feather to flock together is known as homophily and is a dominating feature in our friendships.
having the same language (or dialect) • growing up in the same location • having had the same educational and career experiences (notoriously, medical people gravitate together, and lawyers do the same) • having the same hobbies and interests • having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views) • having the same sense of humour To this, in a later study with Jacques Launay, we subsequently added the seventh: • having the same musical tastes
In other words, friendships are born and not made. You just have to find them. It may take several goes before you find the right person to be your best friend, or even in your top five friends list, but if you keep searching you will find them eventually.
women share more interests in common with other women than they do with men, and vice versa, making the flow of the conversation easier to maintain
mixed-sex conversations become too much of a mating market and cause women, in particular, to feel they need to put themselves on display when they would rather just relax. Yet another might be that men and women’s natural conversational styles are just so different that mixed-sex conversations are too stressful.
The traits that people selected significantly more often than expected were ethnicity, religion, political views, moral views and, strongest of all, musical tastes. Music was the surprise here. It seems that if a stranger has the same musical tastes as you, you are much more likely to see them as a promising prospect for being a friend.
So the lesson here is: our choice of friends is heavily dictated by trying to find like-minded people, people we feel comfortable with in casual company, people we don’t have to explain the joke to every time, people who think like us and whose behaviour we don’t have to work hard at trying to understand, people with whom conversations have a natural and effortless flow that we don’t have to work at.
she found that the main factors promoting friendships initially were gender, ethnicity and the personality dimensions Extraversion and Agreeableness.
Without trust, we cannot forge friendships; but if we trust everyone unconditionally, we will in the end fall prey to freeloaders who exploit our trust for their own ends.
In effect, relationships are like a game of snakes and ladders. Trust builds up over time as we have more and more positive experiences with someone. Then they do something that upsets us, and the relationship slides down a snake to land a row or two lower on the trust stakes.
It seems that while most people are fairly honest, a small number of people can’t help themselves, and probably become such habitual liars that they actually come to believe their own lies.
In fact, white lies might actually be beneficial in smoothing over potential misunderstandings that would otherwise rock the community boat by causing rifts between some of its members.
So while lying is frowned on, some forms of lying seem to serve a beneficial function for everyone by keeping the wheels of communication within the community well oiled.
it seems that we are more tolerant even of serious transgressions when we have a strong relationship with the person concerned than if they are strangers. It is a problem known to moral philosophers as moral partiality
