Science, Weeklies

Getting By With A Little Help From Your Friends

Study explores the science of friendships–from buddies to BFFs.

Friends are the people on whom we depend, who spend the most time with and trust the most. Is attending a large school like Boston University affecting the types of friendships we have? Would a smaller school environment allow us to make better friends?

Students on larger campuses are more likely to have similar friends but less likely to have closer friendships than those on small campuses, according to a study published in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.

“We found that friends at big schools tended to be more alike. That’s an ironic finding because in the bigger space with more diverse attitudes, the friends are less diverse,” said Angela Bahns, professor of psychology at Wellesley College and lead author of the study, “The Social Ecology of Similarity: Big Schools, Small Schools and Social Relationships.”

The researchers probed this area of research and studied whether people made friends with others who shared their prejudices – for example, others who were equally racist or homophobic.

“That [research] lead us to basic questions about friendship similarity and what makes friends more or less similar,” said Cristian S. Crandall from the University of Kansas, a co-author of the study.

The researchers knew going in that people had a tendency to seek similarity in a friendship.

“People want to be around similar people,” said Bahns. “This is because it is more convenient, because similarity minimizes conflict and makes relationship run smoother.”

This is not to say that people actively seek mirror images of themselves. However, the researchers said that similar friendships simply tend to happen.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

“People feel comfortable with, attracted to and want to spend time with similar others. It’s not that we have a ‘similarity checklist’ most of the time,” said Crandall. “Mostly it’s probably just ‘comfort level,’ combined with crossing people off our list when they turn out to be different on something important.”

The researchers studied friends in pairs from the 25,000-person University of Kansas versus pairs from four small college campuses in Kansas with about 500 to 1,000 students each. Researchers sent assistants out to talk to people in pairs. If the pair said they were friends, the assistants asked them to fill out a questionnaire. Both friends filled out the same survey and were not allowed to see each other’s answers. The researchers were then able to measure the similarities between the two.

The questionnaire first asked about the relationship between the two friends and asked them to rank how close they were on a scale of one to seven. The survey then asked participants to rank their views on social issues such as abortion or rank their attitudes toward different groups of people such as Arabs and African Americans. The last section of the survey asked about how easily they were able to make friends at their schools.

Collected data allowed the researchers to conclude that on smaller campuses, although friendships were more dissimilar, they were closer friendships.

“In smaller places, people realize that they don’t have a lot of options,” said Bahns, “so even if a friend isn’t a perfect match, you make do and that sense of connection of being stuck with these people and camaraderie of a small places leads to closer friendships.”

The researchers said that although people prefer similarity, the “opportunity to achieve similarity is shaped by the diversity and number of social choices, factors that are part of the social ecological landscape.”

They noticed that relationship satisfaction depends more on similarity in situations with more social leeway. In areas with less choice, similarity was not as important.

Bahns said he believes this conclusion leaves an optimistic message.

“In smaller environments you have to make do with someone who might not be such a good match but you might actually find better friends,” she said.

BU’S FRIENDLY CAMPUS

“I’ve definitely made friends with people that are really different from me,” said Akriti Kumar, a sophomore at Georgetown University, which has 8,000 undergraduate students. “I never would have expected to be friends with some people, but now we are really close.”

The study also found that it was easier to make friends on large campuses. Some BU students agreed, but also felt the study was right in saying that these friendships might not be as close.

“It’s pretty easy to make friends, but it’s harder to get close and intimate to them at BU,” says Erica Jutras, a freshman in the School of Management.

“I feel like at a large school you have a lot of chances to make friends with a lot of people, but they are not as meaningful as a fewer intimate ones,” said Sujata Datta, sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The study did not have enough variability to analyze different ethnic groups. However, Bahns acknowledged that people had a tendency to friend people of similar ethnicities and the same small-versus-large campus situation could be applied to ethnic groups.

“At a large school such as the University of Florida, black students tend to be friends with each other based on race. At Howard University, a smaller historically black college, people are sorted on things other than race,” said Bahns. “Once again, you see that at a smaller place you might friend someone who doesn’t share the same attitudes.”

The researchers plan to look at friendships in countries around the world in order to understand whether it is the size and diversity of the location that matters or whether cultural beliefs about relationship choice play a bigger role. In order to do this, they are analyzing friendships in Korea and Ghana.

So far, the researchers have found that the idea that people should be able to choose their friends seems to be a characteristic of individualistic cultures such as that of the United States.

“In Korea, for example, there is less of a cultural idea that you choose your friends. It is a more interdependent society where they believe that people are tied together with the people around them,” Bahns said.

Bahns cited the example of Lawrence, Kansas, which only has two hundred thousand residents, versus Seoul, South Korea, which has millions of residents. The friendships in Seoul, although in a much more diverse location, are more diverse than in Lawrence, proving that cultural beliefs are more prevalent.

Researchers continue to delve into the meaning behind friendships, hoping to arrive at a series of conclusions.

 

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