PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPSon that first day were predictive of friendships a year later. Students who’d
sat next to each other on day one tended to be better friends than people
sat apart, with students who shared the same row tending to be better
friends than students who’d been sat in different rows.
Another key influence on friendship choices is vanity: on average, we
are more likely to be friends with people who are similar to ourselves – a
phenomenon known as “homophily”. Research by the social psychol-
ogist Robert Hays in the 1980s showed
that, in general, friends tend to be more
similar to each other across a raft of factors
- including age, sex, ethnic background,
marital status, personality and even IQ –
than do people who know each other but
aren’t friends. Shared attitudes seem to be
particularly important. Consider a 1970s
study by William Griffitt and Russell Veitch
which recorded the attitudes of thirteen
male volunteers on 44 different issues, just before they spent ten days
together in a simulated fall-out shelter. During and after the exercise, the
men were asked to choose three others who’d they’d like to keep in the
shelter. Predictably enough, they selected people with attitudes similar
to their own.
There’s an irony in the fact that we’re drawn to people who share our
attitudes, given that research consistently shows that most people tend to
overestimate how much others (including their friends) agree with them - an error that’s been called the “false consensus bias”. In fact, we don’t
know our friends and lovers nearly as well as we think we do. William
Swann Jr. and Michael Gill at the University of Texas demonstrated this
in 1997 with a study that looked at how much students who were dating
and college room-mates knew about each other, in terms of their sexual
histories, hobbies and so on. The results showed that people’s confidence
in how well they knew each other increased the longer they’d been in
a relationship or shared a room together, yet accuracy remained stub-
bornly resistant to improvement.
ABSENT FRIENDS AND RELATIONS
The meaningful others in your life can have a profound effect on you,
even when they’re absent. At Duke University, James Shah showed this
by setting participants a task after first priming them subliminally
“I do not believe that
friends are necessarily
the people you like
best, they are merely
the people who got
there first.”
Sir Peter Ustinov