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How
many friends do you have? No, not Facebook friends, silly. Real
friends.
If you have only two, then you're an average American. A new study has suggested that our circle of friends is shrinking:
Participants were asked to list the names of people they had discussed "important matters" with over the previous six months. If respondents said "none," they asked whether this was because they didn't have any important matters to discuss or no one with whom to discuss them in the past six months.
About 48 percent of participants listed one name, 18 percent listed two, and roughly 29 percent listed more than two names for these close friends. On average, participants had 2.03 confidantes. And just over 4 percent of participants didn't list any names.When Brashears looked closer at that number of socially isolated individuals, he found that 64 percent indicated that this was because they had no topic to discuss, while only about 36 percent had no one to talk to. Turns out, female participants and those who were educated were the least likely to report no names on their confidante list.
If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is the friend of my enemy also my enemy?
A new study utilizing data from the MMORPG Pardus confirmed the age-old maxim:
A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks. [...]
The study, carried out at Imperial College London, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, analyses relationships between 300,000 players in an online game called Pardus (http://www.pardus.at). In this open-ended game, players act as spacecraft exploring a virtual universe, where they can make friends and enemies, and communicate, trade and fight with one another.
See also: Friend/Enemy Ambigram
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What
kind of a Facebook friend are you? David wrote this interesting list of
classification as a note over yonder at the Neatorama
Facebook Fan page:
H) The Networker
This is the friend whose main purpose on Facebook is to build a list he can tap when he needs to for work/career. You know these friends because they only message you with e-mails that read “So you still over at Viacom?”
I) The OverPoker
No need to explain this one, right?
J) The Get-A-Lifer
This is the hardcore friend who has nothing better to do but subscribe and follow you via SMS.
K) The Attention Seeker
This is the friend who posts status updates that are purposely vague, and therefore beg for a comment. Their status is all about getting you to respond, getting attention, getting sympathy. "Lori is scared, but hopes everything works out..."
I'm S) The Silent Stalker. How about you? Link
Scientists have hammered the "fight or flight" stress response into our collective consciousness for decades. Turns out that they might just have overlooked another response, "friend":
When we’re under immediate stress—say, we are about to give a speech or about to be mugged—we either fight or flee, or so scientists have long preached. But some psychologists are now suggesting that this scenario may apply mainly to males. Men get antisocial under pressure, but women tend to react in the opposite way: they "tend and befriend," engaging in nurturing and social networking, perhaps as a way to protect their offspring, according to a theory proffered by neuroscientist Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Here at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting, psychologist Mara Mather of the University of Southern California presented powerful new support for Taylor’s hypothesis in the divergent ways that stressed men and women respond to faces.
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Just because guys don’t sit around and share their deepest feelings, it doesn’t mean that male friendships are inferior to female friendships:
"If we use a women’s paradigm for friendship, we’re making a mistake," says Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work, who has studied how 386 men made, kept and nurtured friendships. Men might not be physically or emotionally expressive, he says, but we derive great support from our friendships.
Researchers say women’s friendships are face to face: They talk, cry together, share secrets. Men’s friendships are side by side: We play golf. We go to football games. [...]
A woman from Wisconsin wrote to me recently to say that she effortlessly shares intimate feelings with her friends. That’s in great contrast to her husband. He recently went on a fishing trip to Canada with four longtime friends. And so she wondered: What did they talk about for a whole week? She knew one of the men had problems at work. Another’s daughter was getting married. The third man has health problems. Her husband said none of those issues came up. She couldn’t believe it.
She told him: "Two female strangers in a public restroom would share more personal information in five minutes than you guys talked about in a week!"
Sounds about right! Link
Psst! Do you need friends, relatives, or even your boss to come to your wedding but don’t have any? If you’re in Japan, then you’re in luck: no need to make friends, just hire ‘em!
Office Agents, a Tokyo-based company, rents out friends, work colleagues and even relatives to pad out the guest list.
For £127, one of the company’s agents will attend the wedding as a guest, while a heart-tugging speech will cost an extra £64 and a song or dance will set clients back a mere £32.
Brides or grooms who want to impress their prospective partners with their sheer volume of friends are among those secretly padding the guest list with fakes.
The recession has also boosted the popularity of the service. With unemployment rising and a growing number of Japanese in part time jobs, people rent fake bosses or colleagues.
Others turning to the company for fake work-related guests are those who have recently lost their jobs but want to maintain an air of respectability, according to Hiroshi Mizutani, who heads Office Agents.
