Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship
400
Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship
400eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520947887 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2010 |
| Series: | Origins of Human Behavior and Culture , #5 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Friendship
Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship
By Daniel J. Hruschka
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94788-7
CHAPTER 1
An Outline of Friendship
Den neie.
I should like to eat your intestines.
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, a Wandeki man shouts this phrase as an old friend comes to visit. At first glance, the expression is startling, invoking gory images of cannibalism. Even in islands not far from New Guinea, the promise of eating someone's body parts is a sign of anger and aggression. However, in the presence of a Wandeki friend, the phrase means something quite the opposite—unbridled affection and happiness at seeing a companion after a long separation. The greeting continues as the two men wrap their arms around each other and the visitor responds in kind, "A! Ene den neie!"—"Yes, I too should like to eat your intestines."
From the perspective of a European or American, the appropriate behaviors among friends in other cultures may appear bizarre and indeed unfriendly. Consider, for example, the obligation among Dogon farmers of Mali not only to attend a close friend's funeral, but also to dress in rags, overturn jars of millet porridge, and insult the generosity of the family. Among Bozo fishermen in the same region, friends demonstrate their love by making lewd comments about the genitals of one another's parents. Given these diverse and frequently counterintuitive behaviors between friends, how can we hope to define the relationship? As the Wandeki example suggests, focusing exclusively on overt behavior is not enough. The intentions, feelings, and thoughts behind those behaviors also matter in differentiating a hostile act from a gesture of friendship.
Accordingly, I examine friendship as an integrated social and psychological system defined not only by behaviors, but also by underlying feelings and motivations. Figure 3 illustrates this multidimensional view of friendship. Behaviors between friends are the most visible parts of the system—both to participants in a relationship and to researchers who attempt to observe it. In the course of daily life, behaviors such as gift giving and kind acts and words are about the only observables for grasping the workings of friendship. Below this visible surface of behavior, psychological processes, such as perceptions, feelings, and motivations, play a role in steering actions among friends. For the last half-century, psychologists have tried to get a handle on this submerged system through individual self-reports and behavioral experiments. Deeper still are physiological mechanisms, including the activity of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones. Researchers have only recently begun to investigate activity at this physiological level by measuring the concentration of specific chemicals in the body and taking pictures of blood flow in the brain. Although each of these analytical levels is equally important, the relative weight I give to each of them is also a function of how much time and effort researchers have devoted to their study. Therefore, the fact that there are so few observations about the physiological underpinnings of friendship says more about the relatively short time period in which they have been studied than about their relative importance in the functioning of friendship.
The chapter is organized into three sections that focus on key aspects of the friendship system, as shown in figure 3. The first section focuses on behavior and describes how two important activities among self-described close friends—helping and sharing—are not observed to the same extent among strangers and acquaintances. Moreover, it describes why three standard explanations for friends' increased generosity—a norm of reciprocity, an urge to balance accounts, and a concern about the shadow of the future—do not fit empirical findings from observation and experiment. The second section focuses on psychological constructs commonly used to describe feelings among friends—including closeness, love, and trust—and how these relate to behavior. The last section brings the discussion full circle by examining how people display and communicate these internal psychological states through behavior, and why the mutual communication and recognition of these feelings and intentions is an important part of maintaining a friendship.
A caveat is due here. Comparing claims about why friends help one another often requires carefully controlled experiments that can parse the precise relationships between variables such as subjective closeness and helping (see box 3). Therefore, I devote considerable time to describing such experiments. However, while such experiments serve an important purpose in the scientific process, they also come with limitations. First, the more tightly controlled an experiment, the more artificial and oversimplified it becomes, raising questions about how much it can tell us about behavior in the real world. This is a necessary evil of experimental research, and one to consider when interpreting its results. Second, researchers have traditionally found it easier to conduct such experiments in the United States and Europe (and most frequently on college campuses). Therefore, there is a substantial Western (and collegiate) bias in this chapter. I will attempt to remedy this in chapter 2 by looking to descriptions of friendship, like that of the Wandeki men, found in a wider range of world cultures.
HELPING AND SHARING AMONG FRIENDS, AND WHY THREE COMMON MECHANISMS CAN'T EXPLAIN THEM
Among Trobriand sea voyagers off the coast of Papua New Guinea, friends who trade with one another also provide support and lodging for one another when one of them is traveling. Among Baka Pygmy foragers and their farming neighbors in Central Africa, close friends (or loti) openly share and exchange material and social goods; male friends may even exchange wives. And in U.S. high schools, friends stand up for one another against verbal backstabbing, they keep important secrets, and they help talk one another through problems and conflicts. These examples illustrate a recurring expectation about friendship in its diverse manifestations around the world. Whether one asks a Wandeki gardener in Papua New Guinea or a Turkana cattle herder in East Africa, the reply will be the same: Close friends should share what they have and help one another in times of need.
Despite the ubiquity of an ideal of mutual sharing and support among friends, little quantitative data exists in cross-cultural settings to determine whether this ideal reflects real acts. In the U.S., at least, carefully designed experiments comparing self-described friends with acquaintances and strangers have confirmed that these norms and expectations are consistent with actual behaviors. For example, when given the opportunity to share money or food in a laboratory setting, people are more willing to share with friends. And when asked to play a game in which partners can acquire more money by shirking than by cooperating, friends are more likely to cooperate. Indeed, in many studies of support reported in everyday life, people help close friends at levels comparable to immediate kin (chapter 3).
Most economic and evolutionary analyses have proposed three mechanisms to explain such behaviors among non-kin friends: a norm of reciprocity, an urge to balance favors, and a concern about the shadow of the future.
From an evolutionary or economic perspective, each of these three mechanisms is a way to ensure that an investment in helping will not be lost. The first two mechanisms deal with monitoring past behaviors, keeping accounts and withholding help from those who hold a deficit. The third relies on estimating how one's actions might influence a friend's behavior in the future. These mechanisms successfully explain much of the helping and sharing observed among strangers and acquaintances in experimental settings, an observation that has led researchers to assume that the same mechanisms are at work among self-described close friends. However, a growing body of literature in social psychology, sociology, and economics indicates that this is not the case. In the next few sections, I outline these different accounts and then describe the experimental evidence showing why they haven't been able to explain increased sharing and helping among friends.
The Norm of Reciprocity
People often try to reciprocate the good deeds (and misdeeds) of others. In the early twentieth century, French sociologist Marcel Mauss postulated that a norm of reciprocity underlay this tendency to return favors, and that it was a basic principle of gift giving in many of the world's cultures. In the 1960s, American sociologist Alvin Gouldner extended Mauss's argument by postulating that the norm of reciprocity was a human universal. According to this norm, people expect their favors to be reciprocated, and if a partner violates these expectations, then people react with fewer and smaller favors. Moreover, people have an urge to reciprocate kind acts. Verified in numerous experiments with strangers and acquaintances, the norm of reciprocity forms the basis of marketing techniques in which gifts, whether T-shirts, address labels, or Hare Krishna religious materials, are given to potential clients to encourage purchases or donations. A tendency to reciprocate past behaviors is also the underlying principle of tit-for-tat strategies in the prisoner's dilemma game and is a common form of exchange in arm's-length commercial trade.
Behaviors consistent with the norm of reciprocity have been observed in numerous experimental and naturalistic settings. However, most of these experiments have focused on strangers and acquaintances. When researchers have examined how friends reciprocate, they have found something very different; friends are less rather than more likely to follow the norm of reciprocity than are strangers or acquaintances. For example, in the 1990s investigators set up an experiment to see how giving a gift to a partner—either a stranger or a friend—influenced that partner's willingness to help later on. In the experiment's gift treatment, one student gave another student a can of soda before asking the student to buy some lottery tickets ($1 each). In the control treatment, no soda was offered before the request to buy lottery tickets. When the experiment was conducted among strangers, the students who received sodas bought nearly twice as many $1 lottery tickets from their benefactor (mean = 1.31 compared to 0.69, d = 1.03). This fits nicely with the argument that strangers follow a norm of reciprocity. However, among friends the findings were very different. The gift of a soda had no effect on the number of tickets a friend bought. Indeed, friends uniformly bought more tickets from one another, and when friends were given a soda, they agreed to buy slightly fewer tickets (2.63 compared to 2.94, d = -0.19). This lack of short-term reciprocity among friends has been confirmed in a number of experiments, including those examining how young children share precious items such as candy, toys, and crayons and how members of non-Western societies behave in "trust games" (box 4) (five experiments, average d-statistic = 0.77; see appendix C).
These experimental results fit an ideal expressed in many places around the world that friends should eschew a norm of reciprocity, focusing rather on a friend's need. Chuuk islanders in the Pacific Ocean state that friends should not expect their favors to be returned. The main expectation among Tzeltal maize farmers in Mexico or Shluh barley farmers in Morocco is that any kind of repayment among friends is deferred. And Arapesh gardeners in Papua New Guinea regard strict accounting among friends with distaste. Although a hard-nosed behavioralist may discount such expectations as mere ideals that poorly match behaviors, the previous experiments confirm that such ideals indeed reflect how friends behave toward one another (at least in tightly controlled experimental settings).
The Urge to Balance Favors
An urge to balance favors is like a norm of reciprocity but involves maintaining a balance of favors over the long term rather than responding to particular past deeds. According to one influential theory of relationships, equity theory, a partner in a relationship should be happiest when his or her inputs and outputs (however measured) balance those of the other partner. This theory predicts that people will act in ways that maintain equity in their relationship—by helping more when they have received an excess of help and helping less when the balance is perceived to be tipped in the other partner's favor.
Like findings regarding the norm of reciprocity, however, several lines of evidence indicate that friends are actually less concerned about balance than are acquaintances and strangers. In ethnographic groups around the world, friends are expected to ignore the balance of accounts. Koryak reindeer herders in Siberia state that friends should not keep score. Thai farmers should not reckon help given by friends in their fields or at home. And Guarani maize farmers of southern Brazil should not weigh or balance their friends' help with clearing, tilling, or harvesting.
These expectations are corroborated by several experiments and survey studies that have examined how individuals focus on the relative balance of inputs and outputs in their relationships. For example, in one experiment with college students, researchers compared how friends (and strangers) paid attention to the input of their partner during a cooperative task. Researchers separated a pair of friends (or strangers) into two rooms to take turns on a fifteen-minute exercise—searching a matrix of numbers for particular sequences. While one partner sifted through rows of numbers, the other waited in another room. A red light in the waiting room lit up every time the worker completed ten sequences, indicating how much he or she had contributed to the task. And behind a double-sided mirror, an experimenter recorded the number of times the waiting partner looked up to check the red light. Strangers glanced at the light much more than did friends, an observation that the researchers interpreted as a greater concern about a partner's inputs to the task. Interestingly, when the researchers changed the experiment so that the red light indicated that the worker was in need, friends glanced at the light much more than did strangers.
Another experiment suggests that friends also care less about equality when splitting payoffs and more about their total group payoff. In this study, researchers asked ten- to twelve-year-old boys to choose between splitting a low group payoff (50 cents) equally or a high group payoff (90 cents) unequally. In this study, friends were more likely to agree on the higher, unequal payoff than were strangers (d = 0.53). In short, friends cared more about their total outcome as a pair rather than about maintaining equity.
These studies indicate that friends are less concerned than acquaintances about short-term balance in their relationship or the inputs of their partner. A disregard for balance is also confirmed by studies of longer-term exchange among friends. When people are asked to rate or quantify the inputs and outputs in their close friendships, partners in balanced friendships are somewhat more satisfied with the relationship than those in unbalanced friendships (seven studies, average d = 0.44). However, this pales in comparison to the negative effect of imbalance in non-close relationships (d = 1.34). Underbenefited friends are no more angry about their situation than are overbenefited friends (two studies, average d = 0.03), and they are no less satisfied with their friendship (six studies, average d = -0.10). Moreover, inequity in either direction poorly predicts the probability of ending a friendship (d is less than 0.10).
One weakness of such studies is a reliance on individuals' subjective assessments of how much they put into a relationship and how much they take out of it. Such assessments are prone to many kinds of error, both systematic and random, and so the lack of observed association may simply indicate poor measurement. Nonetheless, the findings from these experiments and observational studies present little evidence for the assertion that friends are more generous because they are concerned about balancing accounts between one another. Indeed, the limited evidence available indicates that if anything, friends care less about inequality than do strangers and acquaintances.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Friendship by Daniel J. Hruschka. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsList of Boxes
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Adaptive Significance of Friendship
1. An Outline of Friendship
2. Friendships across Cultures
3. Friendship and Kinship
4. Sex, Romance, and Friendship
5. Friendship: Childhood to Adulthood
6. The Development of Friendships
7. Friendship, Culture, and Ecology
8. Playing with Friends
Conclusion
Appendix A: Ethnographic Data and Coding
Appendix B: Mathematical Models for Chapter 8
Appendix C: D-Statistics for Studies Cited
Notes
References
Index