Is there a natural trade-off between quantity and quality when it comes to the friends in your circle?
Between family, work, chores and other responsibilities, people often feel left with very little time to connect with friends – let alone to make new ones. With time as a limited resource, people often think they must choose between having a few emotionally close friendships or a lot of friends they’re less invested in.
But our new research published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior suggests people don’t actually pick between having many friends and being emotionally close with them.
What people say they prioritize
Across five studies with over 5,000 international participants, we asked people about their friendship-making preferences. We were interested in how someone’s preferences matched how many friends they had, if they want to make new friends, and their personality in general.
For example, people who had stronger preferences for wide networks of friends also reported that they were more extroverted, had more friends, and had more people who would help them if they needed it.
On the other hand, those with stronger preferences for emotional intimacy with their friends reported having fewer friends willing to help them, more concern about exclusion and loneliness, and less satisfaction with their friends. They were also more willing to share personal and contact information with potential friends, suggesting they were motivated to make new friends.
But one of the most interesting things we saw was that people didn’t seem to make a simple quantity-versus-quality choice. Instead, participants generally wanted both wide friendship networks and emotional intimacy with their friends. Rather than one or the other, what we found is that our participants held both preferences simultaneously.
Interested in both
This finding suggests that people may not pick between the quantity and quality of their friendships, as previously thought, but rather pursue strategies that allow them to have many friends as well as be emotionally close with them. People weren’t telling us they wanted a wide but shallow pool of friends.
We’re left wondering how these preferences influence someone’s approach toward friendships. Our research suggested that a desire for intimacy with friends wasn’t specific to wanting only close relationships with a few friends. It was associated, however, with more concern about loneliness.
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Our interpretation is that everyone wants emotional closeness, but that people pay more attention to that desire when they’re feeling less satisfied with their friendships. People who feel OK friendwise don’t need to express this desire. They can instead focus on their existing wider network of friends.
This preference for closeness, therefore, might function to warn you when you aren’t getting what you need from your friendships and motivate you to seek out new opportunities. If this is the case, then it could be like a gentle alarm that you’re close to experiencing loneliness and would benefit from more social interactions.
What still isn’t known
Friendships are integral to human health and well-being, yet researchers know very little about how people make friends. Many open questions remain.
We didn’t look at people’s behavior, so we can’t compare the overall levels of emotional intimacy people who had a lot of friends actually experienced as compared to those with just a few.
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Other research shows that men and women approach friendships differently and prioritize different things when making same-sex friends. However, we found no sex differences in our study. Maybe while men’s and women’s friendships may differ in specifics, the benefits people gain from these relationships are things that are universally valued and prioritized.
On a grander scale, preferences for intimacy with many friends could also indicate the extent of loneliness felt by individuals within different social groups, such as first-year college students, med students and working professionals. We imagine public health workers could use this metric to suggest appropriate interventions to help reduce loneliness.
Finally, we saw that extroversion was the only personality trait associated with these preferences. While it seems obvious that personality influences whether you become friends with someone, there is almost no empirical research on the topic.
If extroversion is the force that drives the number of friends you have and how close you are to them, what do other aspects of personality influence in friendships? Could conscientiousness be related to satisfaction with your friendships? Openness to the variety of interests your friends have? Agreeableness to conflict resolution, and neuroticism to avoidance?
There are many unanswered questions in friendship research, but friendship-making orientation provides a useful step toward answering them.
