Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
Think about your friends for a second. Do you feel like you have the right number of them? If you feel like you’ve heard that there’s a right answer to this, you’re probably thinking of the work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who famously landed on the number five for close friendships and around 150 for less intimate connections. Of course, you probably won’t be shocked to hear that friendship is hard to quantify, and your results may vary wildly.
So why does this matter? We know that having some number of good friends is really beneficial—one 2010 meta-analysis found that people with stronger social relationships are less likely to die in any given period of time—and we also know that many people struggle to form and maintain these connections. In 2023 Pew Research found that 8 percent of American adults claimed to have no close friends at all.
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Today’s guest is Jessica Ayers, an assistant professor of psychology at Boise State University. She says that she and her colleagues see a lot of confusion about friendship and how to do it—and not a lot of research aimed at closing the knowledge gap. Their latest study challenges some common assumptions about how humans set out to build their social networks in the first place.
Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Jessica Ayers: I’m very excited to be here.
Feltman: So you recently worked on a study about friendship. How did the idea for this study come about?
Ayers: Yeah. So when it comes to friendship, one of the strangest things is that we actually know very little about how human friendships function compared to all the other social relationships that we have in our lives: parenting relationships, relationships with other family members, romantic relationships.
Then there’s friendships where everyone is just like, “They’re there, they exist,” but we don’t really know how or why, and that is mind-boggling because there are so many huge benefits associated with having friendships, like healing faster after surgeries. Not having friendships, so experiencing loneliness, can sometimes have the same negative physical impact as smoking.
So there are some really big positive benefits of having friendship, and we don’t really know about them. So the study really came from this idea of, well, you know, some people have a lot of friends; some people don’t have a lot of friends. Some people with a lot of friends are lonely; some people with a lot of friends aren’t lonely.
Where do these different ways of making friendships actually come from, and how does that actually impact how we’re feeling? And so as a graduate student, I was kind of looking into this question with my co-author, Diego Guevara Beltrán, who’s the co-first author with me on this paper, and we were really just interested in trying to understand, like, “How do we get these differences?”
How do we have people with a lot of friendships versus a little friendships? How do we make that decision? And what kinds of other personality factors or other behaviors that we can measure are associated with this preference?
Feltman: Yeah. So how did you go about trying to answer that question?
Ayers: A lot of different ways—so when we’re doing scale construction to come up with a way to actually see, like, is this idea real, can we measure it in the real world, there’s a bunch of different steps you have to go into, and so they’re very technical. We won’t really pay too much attention to them. But basically, we went through this painstaking task of finding the items that actually get at: Do you want a lot of friends? Do you want a little friends? Do you want emotionally close friendships? Is it okay if they’re not as emotionally close?
To show across multiple different samples, these concepts seem to resonate, and they seem to show up in the same way. And then, after we had done that, we started looking at the different personality constructs that are associated with this.
So we found, like, people who want a really wide network of friendships, they also tend to be more extroverted. People who are worried about not having enough emotionally close friendships, sometimes they’re actually more lonely. And so we did five different studies. Most were done in the U.S. The fifth one also contained participants from the Philippines, Egypt and one other one that I can’t remember off the top of my head [Editor’s Note: Brazil] to show that this isn’t just a Western phenomenon.
This seems to be kind of a universal phenomenon. When we’re making friendships, we’re kinda making a decision between “Do we want a quantity versus quality of friendships?” And the really surprising thing about our scale was that it showed us we might actually not be thinking about that in the right terms, or we might not be thinking about it the right way compared to how the research has presented it before.
Because one of the most surprising things that we found in our study was that when people had a wide network of friendships, they could also still want really emotionally close friendships within that wide network.
So while most of the previous research has always relied on this kind of implicit foundation— it’s one or the other: you want a lot of friends, or you want really emotionally close friendships—we found that it’s not quite as clear-cut to those two things.
Feltman: Hmm. Could you unpack for us a little bit, kind of, what the existing paradigm is in terms of how, you know, close friendships versus a lot of friendships work and what your data actually found?
Ayers: So when we think about this idea that there has to be a trade-off in how we make friendships, this comes from a lot of evolutionary biology, looking at human growth, human development, that kind of shows that when humans have these really fundamental goals that they have to achieve, there’s often a trade-off in how they achieve.
So you can think of, like, you grow, and you reach sexual reproduction and sexual maturity earlier. And so there’s a trade-off in there for “How much are you growing? At what point do you make that turn from somatic maintenance to reproductive maintenance?” Another really famous one is this idea that there is a trade-off between the quality and quantity of the children that we have.
And so we see some research in other nonhuman primates looking at how those individuals invest in their children. Some of them invest in only a few children, and they invest very heavily in them, or I should say offspring ’cause they’re not humans, and others will invest or not as heavily in their offspring, but they have so many more of them.
And so the most famous one, when we were thinking about our study in particular, was actually thinking about how people invest in potential romantic partners. Are they investing in short-term relationships, or are they investing in potentially one long-term relationship? And so when we were looking at some of that original data and the original scales used to measure what we call sociosexual orientation, we started thinking about, well, you know, some of these things are actually really similar to friendships, except for friendships have this cool kind of nuance of you don’t just have one friend at a time.
And so when it came to the data, we found that people, they seem to have preferences for both for the extent to which they want a wide network of friends and the extent to which they want emotional closeness within those relationships.
And so the fact that we have both of these things operating at the same time is really cool and interesting because that kind of starts pointing toward how we’re making our social networks, that it’s not just we have to pick only a few number of people and be emotionally close to them, but we can’t have other people that we may go to for other needs, or the flip side—we have a bunch of people, but we’re not close to any of them.
Feltman: So people want both close friends and a wide network of friends, but do they have preferences as to one or the other?
Ayers: We see in the data that people tend to fall on one of the two categories. They have a stronger preference for one or the other, but they still have the preference for the other. But to kind of go one step further beyond that, when we were then looking at some of the things associated with this preference, for example, having this preference for a wide network of friend, you generally tended to have more friends if you had a stronger preference for a wide network of friends.
You had more people that were willing to come and help you, more friends that were willing to come and help you, whereas when you had this preference for this emotional intimacy within your friendships, what we saw was that those people tended to say that they had lower friendship quality in their current friends.
So you can think of it more as like an alarm going off of, like, you don’t have enough people that are satisfying what you need in these friendships.
And so we have this preference for how wide we actually want our networks to be, but we also have this red flag that’s kind of operating in the background of like, hey, like something isn’t going right.
Like maybe you have this preference for this huge network of friends, but that flag is also going off in the back of your head, telling you, “Hey, but none of them are close. None of them will help you if you need them.” You don’t have those strong connections that we know are so important to human social life.
Feltman: What do you think the implications of this are for situations where people don’t feel like they’re really satisfied with the friendships that they have—because, you know, we talk a lot about the loneliness epidemic and how shallow so many friendships feel now that so much of our lives are online.
So what do you think some, like, further questions are here or even takeaways im- immediately?
Ayers: Yeah. So there’s a bunch, and we can go down the rabbit hole, we can put on our tinfoil hats, and I can talk to you about all the ideas I have. But I think the biggest takeaway is that this scale is giving us a way to actually start measuring some of the stuff you’re pointing at: that loneliness, the isolation, “my friendships feel fake, and they feel hollow.”
Because you’re exactly right—research tells us that friendships that are maintained primarily online, they’re not as satisfying as those that are in person and face-to-face. But the world is moving toward “that’s the way we’re maintaining our relationships.”
So what I like to think about is if we can actually start using specifically the preference for emotional closeness within friendships as a way to maybe screen people for, are you actually satisfying your social goals? Are you meeting the correct number of friends that make you feel like you’re satisfied or make you feel like you have people that are there to help you?
And that exactly talks about the loneliness epidemic or leads to the loneliness epidemic kind of solution of being able to point at, like, hey, it’s actually specifically a lack of these positive social interactions with friends that is what’s making you feel lonely.
It’s not that you don’t have friends. It’s not that you’re not good at making friends. It’s the actual interaction, the emotional closeness, all the things that we know we need to have to have satisfying friendships. Like, we now have a way to actually point at it and say, like, “Here. It’s right here.”
Feltman: It seems like, you know, one thing that, that you’re getting at is that lack of perceived emotional intimacy isn’t necessarily something that’s wrong with the friend or the friendship or with, you know, your ability to make friends, but that sometimes we’re not fostering those friendships and doing the kinds of activities that make us feel like we have that emotional intimacy and fulfillment. Could you talk a little bit more about how people who feel like they’re lacking this kind of closeness in their friendships can remedy that?
Ayers: Yeah. So I can give you some speculations ’cause you’re kind of pointing right at the forefront of the research for the things we’re trying to figure out now. So ways that people can remedy that: we know the face-to-face interactions, they are so incredibly important. The best way to maintain a friendship is to have some kind of face-to-face interaction.
But one thing that’s really important to remember and pay attention to is that the ways in which we make friendships are different. We do know that there is a pretty strong sex difference in how men and women make friends, and not saying that, like, men only do this, women only do this—they do both. But we know that there’s a slight sex difference in terms of which direction they’re likely to lean.
Women tend to have what we call face-to-face friendships. They’re more likely to be emotionally close, they’re more likely to talk literally face-to-face, and they’re more likely to interact in one-on-one situations, whereas men’s friendships, they’re more likely to be team-building, activity-oriented interactions.
And so when we’re thinking about like, “Okay, well, how do I get that face-to-face interaction that makes me feel like my relationship is actually fulfilling?” For women, it might be going to a coffee shop and having a talk about what’s going on in their lives, catching up, chitchatting, whatever you wanna call it.
But for men, it might not be going to that same coffee shop and catching up in that way. It might be like, “Hey, there’s a pickup basketball game. Let’s go hang out,” “Oh, my gosh, our favorite sports team’s playing. Let’s go watch it at the local bar”—things that are more activity-based that still allow for that catching up, still allow for the relationship to be strengthened by being face-to-face and with each other but not in the same way.
And I think that’s something that’s really important to remember—is that we, all of us, we have friendships that go both ways. We have friendships that are face-to-face, emotionally close. We have that kind of relational aspect to it, and we also have the ones that are more task-oriented. And it’s not a problem to have one or the other, but you have to know what makes you feel satisfied and fulfilled, so you know how to actually go about making those relationships fit that need for you.
One thing that’s really important, um, to mention here is our studies, they don’t show a sex difference where men and women prefer different parts—or like, it’s not like men want this really wide network; women want this really emotionally close network.
Like, some of the previous research may have suggested or may have kind of had this underlying assumption that because women have these face-to-face relationships, of course they have to be emotionally close; they have to always be looking for that. Men have task-based friendships—of course it has to be something that’s really wide so you can do all the tasks in the world. It doesn’t seem like that’s the case.
Everyone has these preferences. They’re operating under the surface. And so what I think is really interesting is that that kind of points toward “How are we organizing our social networks?”
How are we actually going through and figuring out, like, how many close friends do I have? How many acquaintances do I have? How many people are in my network that I’m friendly with, but I wouldn’t call them a friend? It kind of points toward, like, maybe this is where this different orientation toward making friends is coming from, is this underlying idea of the quantity versus quality of friends we have in that network.
Feltman: Hmm. So I know that this wasn’t the focus of the study exactly, but as someone who researches friendship, do you have any advice for people on how to go about making friends in the first place?
Ayers: Do I have advice? Yes. Not all of it will be perfectly scientifically backed. A lot of it is kind of like my internal speculations about what I think is happening. We know that when people are making friendships, they have to be genuine. Like, when someone is faking a friendship, you can feel it, or when they’re faking social interactions with you, you can feel it.
It feels icky. It feels like this person really is like, there’s just something I can’t put my finger on, but they’re not really interested in me. So we know that if people are trying to make friendships under those kind of situations and under those kind of false pretenses, the friendship isn’t gonna flourish.
Another one is to find shared interests in some way, shape, or form because we know that having that shared common knowledge base as the start of a friendship leads to friendships that can be maintained because there’s always something that you can fall back on to continue talking about building a relationship over.
So that is really important. I wouldn’t necessarily say, like, be open or be willing to go out there to find friends, but also kind of knowing where your niche is—for me, I’m not gonna go to, like, a gym and go look for gym bros because that’s not something that I value in my friendships.
I’m going to look for someone that I can have conversations with, that I can run ideas by, and so I’m more likely to make friends at a coffee shop or a bookshop than I am when I go to the gym. And so knowing what your own preferences are, the things that make you feel satisfied, helps you kind of guide yourself toward the people that are gonna make friends with you long-term.
And then another thing that’s really important is also just remembering that, like, you are bringing something to the table when you’re making friends. Like, you have intrinsic value; you have intrinsic worth. Some of my other research, not related to this stuff but tangentially, shows that, like, we actually really like people as potential friends who are interested in us and wanna know stuff about us.
So, like, you, you bring something to the table. Not only do you wanna know about that person, that person wants to know about you, and you make better friendships when you have that kind of dynamic and you have that understanding going in.
Feltman: Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat with us about this. I will definitely be keeping it in mind as I socialize.
Ayers: Thank you so much for having me.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back on Friday to talk about another aspect of humanity’s friendship problem: how our social lives are changing now that we spend so much of our time talking to machines.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Emily Makowski, Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
