Ruminating Out Loud

The concept of friendship is one that is being loosely applied in the advent of virtual inter-connectedness that social media is affording. However, is modernity stealing the honesty and intimacy out of relationships and filling the void with superficial means of interaction? Is the essence of friendship being lost? What does friendship mean and what purpose does it serve? Those are the type of questions that are discussed in this article at Boston Globe. My take on the proliferation of social media and its impact on real (in the sense of non-virtual) interpersonal relationships can be found here.

“A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder – we’re often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are…

Whatever the cause, such findings challenge our idea of what friendship is. Friends and spouses are people to whom we are supposed to be able to confide anything – we draw support and a sense of well-being from the thought that our friends know us better than anyone else in the world, and like us nonetheless. Instead, it appears that there are whole regions of our personalities that they miss entirely, and we do the same with them.

The problem, Flynn says, is that interacting with people and sharing experiences with them doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing lots of things about them. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond – in short, to make friends. And we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending.

The intriguing part of this article is that there may actually as much of a benefit from the allusions of friendship as there is from real and intimate ones. I find it hard to believe.

Indeed, according to Michael Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, simply believing we have lots of close friends brings the same benefits as actually having them. In other words, if someone’s ignorance of one of his “friends” extends so deeply that he’s not actually aware that the person doesn’t like him, he may be better off for it. Even befriending entirely fictional people seems to do some good – a paper published last year by researchers at the University of Buffalo and Miami University found that television characters actually function as “social surrogates” for viewers, and watching a favorite show can be an effective way to alleviate loneliness.

Even in a close and strong relationship like a marriage, a certain amount of blindness may help. While the idea remains controversial, some researchers argue for the value of so-called positive illusions, the rosy image that some people hold, despite the available evidence, about their romantic partners. The psychologist Sandra Murray at the University of Buffalo has found that couples that maintained positive illusions about each other tended to be happier than those that didn’t.

Something similar may be at work in close friendships. And, according to Dunning, a slightly different form of social illusion may also arise. People naturally seek out those they see as most like them, and a falsely inflated sense of similarity may only further cement friendships.

In other words, one of the nicest things a friend can do is let us misunderstand them just a little.

“If you don’t know everything about someone else, you still enjoy the time you spend with each other,” says Delia Baldassarri, a sociologist and assistant professor at Princeton who has studied people’s perceptions of their friends’ political attitudes. “In certain ways, you may even enjoy it more.”