Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

by Eric Barker

happiness levels are highest while with friends.

we’re the absolute happiest when with both friends and spouses.

Less than 20 percent of people see their manager as a “close friend”—but those who do are 2.5 times more likely to enjoy their job.

And while we would all love a raise, a 2008 Journal of Socio-Economics study found that while changes in income provide only a minor increase in happiness, more time with friends boosts your smiling to the equivalent of an extra ninety-seven thousand

friendship variables account for about 58 percent of your happiness.

Your friends are also critical in maintaining your...

loneliness affects your health the same way smoking fifteen ci...

breast cancer patients who had ten close friends to those who had zero. Being in the first group quadrupled the women’s chance of survival—but, more...

A long-term study of 736 guys showed friends reduced the likeliho...

unrelated individuals, that involves mutual affection and support, possibly asymmetric, especially in times of need.”

relationship consistently gets the short end of the stick in everyday life. What’s the deal?

Unlike those other relationships, friendship has no formal institution.

If you go without speaking to your spouse for six weeks, expect divorce papers. If you don’t talk to a friend for that long . . . meh.

With no formal rules, expectations are blurry.

you consistently find that within seven years, half of current friends are no longer close confidantes anymore.

Around that time is when you gather all your friends for your wedding—and then promptly never see them again.

the weakness of friendship is also the source of its immeasurable strength.

they’re always a deliberate choice, never an obligation.

Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity.

an absence of strict reciprocity is one of the few universals about friendship.

Why does anyone help anyone? Darwin’s white whale again.

Price equation on Wikipedia.

The thing that made his name, that he had sacrificed everything for, he now wanted it to go away.

he could be the change he wished to see in the world.

He knew people were taking advantage of him, but he believed that perhaps if he gave away everything he could somehow disprove his theorem.

who fights to change the future but realizes he cannot alter destiny.

we are wired for selfless altruism.

Put people in a functional MRI and ask them to think about donating to charity, and the same circuits light up that are triggered by food and sex.

there’s not a contradiction; Darwinism and altruism can both exist in harmony.

Evolution cares only about consequences, not intentions.

doesn’t care why you do things, just t...

On January 22, 1975, a diverse group gathered in London’s St Pancras Cemetery chapel. University professors with genetics PhDs stood next to junkies. They were there to pay their respects to a man who had influenced their lives.

great Socrates explicitly said that he couldn’t define friendship.

Transactional relationships based on benefit weren’t real friendships to Aristotle.

To Aristotle, friends “are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.”

Selfishness can actually be altruism—if I believe that you are me.

And this concept of another self was so damn catchy

Eric’s “Friend-as-Another-Self” drinking game.

“The support for our basic prediction is consistent with the notion that, in a close relationship, other is ‘included in the self’ in the sense that cognitive representations of self and close others overlap.”

it’s called “self-expansion theory”—that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to.

A series of experiments demonstrated that the closer you are to a friend, the more the boundary between the two of you blurs.

We actually confuse elements of who they are ...

has to work harder to distinguish th...

The parts of the brain associated with self-processing.

gray matter responded the same way it did when they heard their own name.

the IOS (“inclusion of other in the self”) Scale was developed, and it was so powerful that the ranking could be used to robust...

Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs,

when you become confused where you end and another person begins.

What is a friend? A friend is another self. A part of you.

Friends expand us. Unite us. And as far as our brains are concerned, the people we care about truly do become a part of us.