Do we have to choose between the quantity of friendships and their emotional quality? Maybe not as much as we thought
– by Jessica D. Ayers & Diego Guevara Beltran
Friends are integral to our health, well-being, and survival. In fact, having at least one close friend does more for our longevity than quitting drinking, smoking, or picking up a steady habit of exercising. If just one friend is so good for us, why don’t people make as many friends as possible? One important reason is that our time and energy are finite–time spent making new friends cannot be spent doing other activities, such as helping family members, looking for potential romantic partners, or investing in our careers. The reality is that we often have to make difficult choices, not only about how much time to allocate towards making new friends, but also about how much to invest in our friendships. Is it possible that this decision reflects an underlying friendship quantity vs. quality trade-off, where our preferences influence how people navigate the social world?
Our new paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that people may not sacrifice quality for quantity when it comes to their friendships. It seems that some people want it all: those who want many friends also typically report wanting intimacy with many of them, while those who want only a few friends are content having intimacy with just those few friends.
When we look at other domains of social life, we can see humans experience other quality vs. quantity trade-offs. For example, one trade-off includes whether to invest in having many offspring at the expense of their quality, or in having fewer offspring that are likely of higher quality. Another recurrent trade-off people experience is whether to invest in having many (potentially lower quality) short-term romantic partners, or having one (potentially higher quality) long-term romantic partner.
However, unlike monogamous mating relationships, where strong norms exist about exclusivity, there is no norm regarding the “appropriate” number of friendships one can pursue, explore, or maintain. Indeed, we can be friends with more than one person at a time, so that we can both invest in long-term friendships while also pursuing new potential friendships.
The similarities between romantic relationships and friendships inspired us to examine whether people experience a quantity vs. quality trade-off in their friendship making psychology. To this end, we created and validated the Friendship Making Orientation Scale by adapting the revised Sociosexual Inventory (SOI-R) to investigate friendship making psychology. Across five studies with over 5,000 participants, we determined the structure, validity, reliability, and cross-cultural generalizability of the scale.
The scale asks questions like “I enjoy making casual friendships with many different people“ and “I often wish others would introduce me to new people to talk to/hang out with.” These questions make up two underlying features of our friendship making psychology: preference for a wide friendship network, and desire for intimacy with many friends. Having established that these constructs are reliable and valid in US samples, we examined how these preferences related to participants’ actual friendships. On one hand, we found that people with a preference for having a wider network of friends tended to be more extraverted, had more friends, and had more friends willing to help them when in need. On the other hand, people with a stronger desire for intimacy with many friends reported having fewer friends, fewer of those friends were willing to help them, and being less satisfied with both the number and the quality of their friendships.
Yet, people with a higher preference for a wide network also scored higher in their desire for intimacy with many friends. This unexpected finding introduces a new puzzle: are people who want intimacy with many friends lacking in some aspect of their friendships? And if so, how could they also score higher on preference for wide networks–which is associated with a host of positive friendship outcomes? One plausible explanation is that desire for intimacy with many friends regulates friendship making motivations, increasing affiliative tendencies when one is below their desired friendship threshold, and decreasing such tendencies when one is above their threshold. Exploratory analyses suggested this may be the case; desire for intimacy with many friends was associated with friendship seeking motivations and behaviors for people who were both dissatisfied with their current number of friends and who scored high on preference for a wide friendship network.
Up to this point, our studies focused on American samples, limiting our ability to understand whether the idea of friendship making orientation travels well across cultures. To address this, we tested the Friendship Making Orientation Scale in a cross-cultural sample (Brazil, Egypt, and the Philippines, NTotal = 673), showing that the construct was applicable beyond American samples. Here, we confirmed the factor structure in a new cultural context and affirmed that the scale was associated with affiliative measures such as friendship quantity, prosociality, and closeness.
Although people make friends for many different reasons, the desire to make friends ultimately links back to their importance for our survival and well-being. The quality of our friendships is important because they provide crucial emotional and instrumental support. But having many friends is important too–a wider network of people can help us manage unpredictable risks, pool resources, provide protection, or even help us gain prestige. The time and energy needed to pursue these different friendship strategies have led researchers to believe that people experience a trade-off between these desires when it comes to their friendships.
And yet, our scale showed that the trade-off between the quality and quantity of friendships is not as clear-cut as once believed. Instead, it appears that people can have preferences for maximizing both the quantity and quality of their friendships without necessarily pitting these motivations against one another. However, whether people can actually have it all–many friends and emotional intimacy with all of them–without sacrificing their friendships or other important domains of life (such as mate retention or kin care) remains to be seen.
