Making friends is not natural

I grew up in an “urban village,” of mostly working class Irish- and Italian-Americans who attended the same Catholic Church on our corner (St. Joseph’s). All of my friends and acquaintances lived within walking distance, and most, like me, went to St. Joseph’s elementary school (behind the church) or to the local public school (right on our block).

But then my parents decided to join the hordes of apartment dwellers migrating to live on Long Island, an hour’s drive away. I vividly recall how awkward I felt looking for a seat at a lunch-table in the crowded lunchroom at my new school. All the tables were territorialized by groups of close friends, and I feared I would be shooed away wherever I chose to sit: “Hey, that seat belongs to one of our friends.” After a few days of looking for an unoccupied corner to slink into, a very kind kid from my English class invited me to sit with his group of friends. Over a half century later, I am still grateful to him.

The situation my teenage self was facing, desperately needing to find new friends in a group of total strangers, is common in the modern world. According to one U.S. Census estimate, the average American will move about 12 times in his or her life. On the large college campus where I work, thousands of new students arrive every year from all around the globe. Many of them do not know a single person when they arrive.

Why is it so uncomfortable to try to make new friends? Certainly, our ancestors needed friends, so shouldn’t making friends come as naturally as speaking a language or walking? As Dave Lundberg-Kenrick and I discussed in Solving Modern Problems With a Stone-Age Brain, our ancestors didn’t need to make new friends. Most lived in circumstances like those of Iris, a member of the Maisin of Papua, New Guinea, described by cultural psychologist Anne Marie Tietjen. Iris lived in a hut within a stone’s throw of her aunts’, uncles’, and cousins’ huts, and would likely live around the same blood relatives and in-laws her whole life. Cultural psychologists Fathali Moghaddam, Donald Taylor, and Stephen Wright noted several ways social groups in modern societies differ from those in traditional societies (like those inhabited by our ancestors). Our ancestors’ relationships were permanent, ours are temporary. Our ancestors did not have to choose who to hang out, or seek a group to accept them, they were born into one particular social group, and that was it. Finally, relationships in traditional societies were collectivistic, you were an integrated part of one interconnected network of families. In the modern world, relationships are individualisitic –based on unique characteristics, such as occupational interests, unique talents, attitudes and beliefs (which might be very different from those of your siblings, cousins, or neighbors). You may be from a farming town in Iowa, but if you are interested not in farming, but in sustainable architecture or journalism, you will pack up and go study at a university far from your hometown, and make a new group of friends interested in the same things you are. When you earn your degree, you will uproot yourself again, and move to a new city where you will have to start making friends all over again.

Friendship researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad has argued that there is now an “epidemic of loneliness” in the United States. After meta-analyzing 148 studies of health and friendship, she estimated that not having friends is as bad for your health as being a habitual smoker. So, friendships matter. But if you are someone who has moved to a new place, or whose old friends have moved away, what can you do about it?

The author with his friend Luis Gomez Jacinto (who grew up several thousand miles from one another).

Source: Doug Kenrick, used with permission

Making Friends involves Three Separate and Complicated Problems

The first step in making a new friend is probably the hardest: going from being a stranger to a familiar acquaintance. The second is moving from acquaintance to friendship. And the third is managing the friendship. That third step can be further broken down into three very different problems: how to be a good friend, how to maximize benefits and minimize costs of the friendship, and how to withdraw from a bad friendship.

In thinking about practical ways to manage each of these three steps, I delved into the research literature on friendship, where practical applications are often hidden deep behind a jumble of abstract methodological details. I also asked the advice of several colleagues who have done research on friendship, or who I know to be good at making friends. I will go into more detail about what I learned a couple of follow-up posts, but I’ll offer one simple suggestion here.

Location, location, location

One way to make new friends is simply to put yourself in the right place. A classic study of friendship formation in a student apartment at MIT found that people whose apartments opened on mailboxes were more likely to make friends (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). Why? They were more likely to come in contact with neighbors, who, in those days, checked their mail on a daily basis. If you walked by the mailbox every time you entered or exited your apartment, you would be much more likely to encounter your neighbors, greet them politely, and become a familiar face, compared to a resident who lived at the end of a remote hallway, or with a door facing out onto the street away from the common gathering areas.

This past year, I noticed that one of the undergraduates in our lab started bringing his computer and working at the tables just outside the main psychology office, at the junction of two hallways leading to many professors’ offices. At first, he would work alone, and passersby began to recognize him and greet him politely. Within a few months, he had been joined by several other students, and become the hub of a network of new friends.