Friends normally share their secrets among themselves. The tough part comes when one so-called friend discloses them to other people. (Photo : Getty Images)
For a couple who share a deeper kind of love, their lifetime promise to each other may include a line like this: “‘Til death do us part.”
Those, on the other hand, sharing a different kind of bond, their motto may be “friends for keeps,” or in today’s more popular way of saying it online, #BFF.
“Best friends forever,” that is.
How can one essentially determine that another person is worth keeping for as a friend?
How can people spot the telltale signs that their professed friends are not truly what they deem them to be and whom they may eventually wish to strangle to death once the nagging feeling of betrayal sets in?
Making Friends--It’s All Human Nature
Abdullah Almaatouq, Alex Pentland and Erez Shmueli wrote a preliminary paper about the “fundamental characteristic of human beings” called friendship in “Are You Your Friends’ Friend?”
The researchers said that people generally think “friendships are reciprocal in nature.”
They added that the more intimate the relationship becomes, the more the friendship is reciprocated. They also mentioned in the paper that social status serves as a “better indicator for reciprocity.”
Still, they reminded about the reality that some individuals don’t reciprocate the friendship entrusted to them.
Great Expectations
In their final paper published by the scientific journal PLOS (Public Library of Science) ONE and titled “Are You Your Friends’ Friend? Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Behavioral Change,” the researchers, now including Laura Radaelli, said that “individuals have difficulty in judging the reciprocity and directionality of their friendship ties (i.e., how others perceive them).”
The authors of the study conducted a survey where 84 students (40 percent male, 60 percent female) aged 23-38 and taking up an undergraduate university course participated.
On a 0-5 scale--0 for “I do not know this person,” 3 for “Friend” and 5 for “One of my best friends”--the participants gave a score to all their fellow participants. Afterward, they scored themselves based on how they thought other participants might possibly score them.
The researchers said that the participants showed “high expectations of reciprocity,” but sadly, “almost half of the friendships are actually non-reciprocal.”
A Bad Judge
Shmueli said, “We found that 95 percent of participants thought that their relationships were reciprocal,” according to Science Daily, a research news website. “It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are.”
In writing the paper, he and Radaelli from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel collaborated with Pentland, an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., and Almaatouq, a graduate research assistant at MIT Media Lab-Human Dynamics Group.
A senior lecturer at TAU and heads the university’s Big Data Lab, Shmueli added: “If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case--only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.”
Now how many friends do you have?
