20 Observations On Friendship

Plus a Rattle Bag of Juicy Links

Team GB’s Katy Marchant, Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell celebrating gold in the team sprint. AFP via Getty Images

Catch-up service:
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Five Bad Motivations With Good Outcomes

The Olympics are making me soppy. This post was prompted by watching the three women above talking about what it meant to have achieved what they’ve achieved together, which got me thinking about friendship. What follows is a random mixture of personal and evidence-based observations.

1. It’s easier to have friends than it is to have to make them. This is Jeffrey Parker, a psychologist at the University of Alabama, who specialises in childhood friendship: “Even if, as a parent, you might look at your children’s friendships and think, you know, ‘Oh, they just play together, how hard could that be?’ it is in fact hard work. They’re working very hard.” Of course, some find it easier than others, but for many people it’s like learning to pole vault: the rewards don’t come immediately, and you can make some painful mistakes along the way. As Bryan Caplan puts it, “Trying to make friends hurts before it works.”

2. Apparently, a great way to make friends is to tell a funny story about something that happened to you -but be sure to exaggerate. Exaggeration fosters closeness. People love to know that you’re more invested in telling them a good story than you are in accurate reporting.

3. The friendship groups you become part of early on shape your life in significant ways without you necessarily being aware of it. At Harvard Business School, new students are randomly assigned into different groups or ‘sections’ with whom they share classes and facilities. The economist Kelly Shue found that when those HBS graduates became senior executives at major companies, those who were in the same section at Harvard tended to make more similar decisions about things like executive pay and company acquisitions, compared to classmates who weren't in their section. The effects were strongest right after class reunions. Your friendship group will have a subliminal but significant effect on your levels of energy, optimism, and ambition.

4. You probably have fewer friends than most of your friends. This is a mathematical effect, not cause for a personal crisis. In fact I find it reassuring: it’s not just me, then.

5. Friendship groups are one way in which inequality is reinforced, as people tend to make friends with people of similar socio-economic status to their own, and subsequently help each other out. The sociologist Raj Chetty, who has studied this in depth, points out that policymakers can mitigate it by designing school or college admissions policies or zoning laws that throw together people from different backgrounds. And keep it small: ‘friending bias’ is higher in large schools because people are more likely to split into cliques. The sharp decline in churchgoing in American society may contribute to inequality: Chetty found that friendships in religious groups are more likely to cut across class and income than friendships formed in schools or neighbourhoods.

6. Friendship groups can be competitive in subtle ways. The evolutionary psychologist Jaimie Arona Krems recently published a study of ‘venting’: airing grievances to a friend about a mutual friend. Using a series of role-play games, Krems teased apart the effects of venting from overt derogation. When the same grievance was framed as venting rather than derogation the listener (the person being vented to) tended to report liking the venter better than the target (the person being vented about) and gave the venter preferential treatment in subsequent games. These effects were not observed when the speaker straightforwardly derogated the target. Successful venting requires considerable skill. Krems found that if the listener inferred that the venter wanted to harm the target, the venting backfired. In her summary, venters use indirect speech to “reap the target-harming benefits of saying mean things about targets without paying the reputational costs of being seen as aggressive”. It’s a fascinating paper. But it’s possible to vent with love, right? Wait - isn’t it?

7. Weak ties are friends you don’t see very often or don’t know very well; friends in the outer circles of our network. The term was coined in a classic sociology study which suggested that we get more insight and information from weak ties than from strong ties. Our close friends tend to know the same stuff as us and have similar thoughts. Weak ties bring something different to the party. There’s evidence that weak ties make us happy too. That makes sense to me. I really love my weak ties. The worst thing about the pandemic was not seeing the people I used to see infrequently.

8. Social psychologists carried out a series of studies to investigate people’s willingness to reach out to friends they hadn’t seen in years. After asking them about how they felt about getting in touch again, they gave them an opportunity to actually do so. What they found is that people are surprisingly reluctant to reconnect with old friends, even if they’d like to see them again. They were happy to hear from them, but not to make the first move. In fact, they would just as soon talk to a stranger. This is a puzzle to the researchers, given the clear benefits, emotional (overcoming loneliness) and practical (‘dormant ties’ can provide useful knowledge and insight) of reconnection. Maybe we just worry that they’ll be disappointed in us.

9. I recently reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen in over forty years. I can recommend it. We pretty much carried on where we’d left off. He is a store of memories about myself that I’d forgotten (I’m afraid I was less help to him, because my episodic memory is so bad). So many moments from your life, so many components of yourself, are distributed across a network of friends who look after them for you in perpetuity. The older I get the more I value my longest relationships.

10. A survey of Americans found that 63% of adults don’t have any close friends who are at least 15 years older or younger than them. It’s inevitable that most of our friends should be the same age as us but having some cross-generational friendships is a good idea. It’s like getting news from a neighbouring village. Is that what they’re up to over there? Goodness. The relationship is asymmetrical though: the younger person is much more aware of the age gap than the older person, who at some level believes they are the same age as their young friend.

11. In In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s narrator writes about being in a room full of unfamiliar elderly-looking people and suddenly realising that they’re his friends; grown old, just like him.

12. Vampire bats are generous with their meals of blood so that they have friends they can turn to when family members aren’t around. Is friendship a survival mechanism; a safety net of reciprocity? I suspect it started that way but then became adapted to other, non-utilitarian purposes. It’s evolutionary cheesecake. I like cake.

13. The poet laureate of conservatism, Michael Oakeshott, on friendship: “Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into. One friend cannot replace another; there is all the difference in the world between the death of a friend and the retirement of one’s tailor from business.”

14. ”People like working with their friends, but it makes them less productive.” Another study finds similar - that having co-workers who become friends is good for performance but also distracting and stressful. It entails a higher rate of “emotional exhaustion” as people are try to maintain complex relationships. Work and friendship can overlap in lovely ways but, as Oakeshott knew, there is a fundamental tension between them. The ideal is to make friends at work and then stay friends while you take completely different paths.

15. I hate the idea of networking and only make friends with people I like. Sometimes the two motivations coincide but it’s always affection that is the discriminator; if it’s not there, the most useful contact will dwindle on the vine. There have been times when I’ve reached out to a friend or acquaintance to ask for help on some professional matter and been mildly worried they’ll think I’m using them instrumentally. What I want to say to them is that while it might seem that I’m using our friendship as a pretext for a professional request, it’s actually precisely the other way round. Of course I don’t say that, that would be excruciatingly embarrassing for both of us.

16. People tend to build a stock of friends early in life and then run it down, like depreciating capital. How often do people make new friends after thirty? Or forty? My impression is not very often, but I may be wrong. In middle age I have continued to make new friends, including friends I expect to be gladly stuck with for the rest of the stretch. Perhaps it comes down to how many friends you acquire in the first place. For various reasons I made very few lifelong friends from school or university, and I don’t have a large extended family with hundreds of siblings and cousins, so in my adult life I have always felt like I was playing catch-up. Now I’m just glad I have the habit.

17. I’ve made quite a few friends via social media. Actually, not ‘social media’ - I’ve never made any friends over LinkedIn - but Twitter specifically. There’s something about the way it blurs the boundaries between professional and personal which lends itself to friend-making. It helps you pick up people to whom you’re already connected to via the social graph but for whatever reason haven’t met in person. Still, years later, when people ask you how became friends and you say ‘Twitter’, eyebrows are raised, as if it’s improper somehow. Everyone accepts ‘school’ or ‘university’ as a legitimate answer even though there’s just as much or more contingency involved.

18. A friendship needn’t be balanced. Most of my friends are good listeners who are interested in me (or whoever they’re talking to) but some are not. Some of them glaze over if I talk for more than a minute - and that’s OK. It’s good to be reminded that I’m not so interesting, and as long as these friends are entertaining company and basically good souls then I don’t care about being listened to. I have other friends for that.

19. You want some of your friends to be more or less similar to you, and other friends who are very different, and in different ways. Your friends should reflect the span of human temperament and life experience. Having said that, you like who you like; you don’t need a DEI strategy for friendship. But you can cultivate the variety that naturally exists.

20. William James: “Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to ‘keep’ by force of mere inertia.” I can’t recall who it was now but someone - not William James - posted about their ‘three strikes and out’ rule: they’ll try and fix a date to see a friend; if ignored or rebuffed, they’ll try again, and again - but after that, it’s up to the other. Calibrate to taste but friendships do take a little mutual effort, especially if you don’t have some regular activity going on already, like training for the Olympics. There’s less time left than you think. Which reminds me: we must get together soon, it’s been too long. I’ll send you some dates.

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In this week’s rattle bag: thoughts on Tim Walz; on the British riots; on how children think about their own beliefs; on whether athletics will come to a natural end; an extraordinary time capsule of a video, and more…