In the study, MIT researchers asked 84 undergraduates in a class to score how well they knew other people in the class. They “asked each participant to score every other participant on a 0–5 scale, where 0 means ‘I do not know this person’, 3 means ‘Friend’ and 5 means ‘One of my best friends,’" as the paper explains. Then, the participants were asked to predict how other people would score them.
Predictably, people thought that the people who they considered their friends would also rate them as friends. But this wasn’t the case. Almost half of all the friendships reported in the survey weren’t reciprocal—meaning that only one of the two people considered the other a friend. This, the researchers note, might be about social climbing: People might be more likely to claim friendship with a person of higher social standing, while people who are popular are more choosy about who they call a friend.
The
study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class,
asking each one to rate every other person in the study on a scale of
zero (“I do not know this person”) to five (“One of my best friends”),
with three as the minimum score needed to qualify for friendship. The
participants also wrote down their guesses for how each person would
rate them.
Overall,
the researchers documented 1,353 cases of friendship, meaning instances
where one person rated another as a three or higher. And in 94 percent
of them, the person doing the ranking guessed that the other person
would feel the same way.
Which
makes sense — you probably wouldn’t call someone a friend, after all,
unless you thought that definition was mutual. That’s why we have terms
to capture more one-sided relationships, like friend crush or hey, I don’t really know her but I think she’s neat.
Both of which, come to think of it, might have been better descriptors
of a lot of the relationships in the study. In reality, only 53 percent
of the friendships — a small, sad, oh honey number of them — were actually reciprocal.
Some
caveats: The study was small, and all the subjects were undergraduates;
friendships change over the course of a lifetime, and it’s certainly
possible that, over time, many tenuous lopsided friendships can dwindle
to a more solid few. But the study authors also looked at a handful of
previous surveys on friendship, ranging in size from 82 people to 3,160,
and found similar results: Among those, the highest proportion of
reciprocal friendships was 53 percent, and the lowest was a bummer, at
34 percent.
“These
findings suggest a profound inability of people to perceive friendship
reciprocity, perhaps because the possibility of non-reciprocal
friendship challenges one’s self-image,” the study authors wrote. Fair
enough. No one likes to think of themselves as the unwanted hanger-on,
chasing a relationship that doesn’t really exist and maybe never will;
this blind spot, then, may be a form of emotional self-defense.
Recent research has tied friendship to major health benefits, including living longer, having better mental health, and lower risk of dementia. While some studies have linked these benefits to specifically satisfying friendships, it’s harder to say whether people who have one-sided friendships actually find them unsatisfying, or if they derive just as much pleasure from interacting with people who only consider them acquaintances as with people who perceive their bond as closer. This might also add a layer of complexity to studies about social influence, which typically ask people about their perceived social networks.
One of the major takeaways from LOST's sideways church ending was that the main characters, a bunch of loners, found each other through friendship on the island. The theme that friendship will give one's life meaning and purpose was a powerful reflection to the show's conclusion. But this study shows that may also have been an illusion; if you look at the group of people sitting in the pews in the sideways church as friends - - - you would only be half right. Half of the people would not consider themselves friends with the other half.
Which then begs the question of the End: who was the "mutual" friend that brought all these people together? Most would think Jack - - - but Jack was never Sawyer's true friend (a rival, perhaps). Locke and Sawyer never hung out. Sayid and Sawyer actually fought. Just about everyone had a gripe with Sawyer. Rose and Bernard were friendly, but never good friends with anyone. They got fed up with the group to go live by themselves. The best guess of the mutual friend that everyone got along with would have been Hurley. The LOST group was then not really Jack's group, but Hurley's.
