Page 4 - IAV Digital Magazine #403

The only true FREE CLASSIFIEDS in the Antelope Valley... Where buyers and sellers meet!
Many of Your Friends Probably Don't Think You're Friends, Study Says
By Cari Romm,
Here's a fun exercise: Take a minute and count up all your friends. Not just the close ones, or the ones you've seen recently -- I mean every single person on this Earth that you consider a pal.
Got a number in your mind? Good. Now cut it in half.
Okay, yes, "fun" may have been a bit of a reach there. But this new, smaller number may actually be more accurate. As it turns out, we can be pretty terrible at knowing who our friends are: In what may be among the saddest pieces of social-psychol- ogy research published in quite some time, a study in the journal PLoS One recently made the
case that as many as half the people we con- sider our friends don't feel the same way.
The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class, asking each one to rate every other per- son 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 partici- pants 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 cap- ture 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 actual- ly reciprocal.
Some caveats: The study was small, and all the subjects were undergraduates; friend- ships change over the course of a lifetime, and it's certainly possi- ble 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-recipro- cal 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. Luckily, though, it's almost the weekend, so you'll have plenty of time to give things a good hard look and question everything you thought you knew.
4
661-266-4-ADS
ANTELOPE VALLEY FREE CLASSIFIEDS ;