CAREER: Going Beyond the Dyad: A Network Theory for Understanding the Challenges of Friendship

People often take friendship for granted. Having friends is linked to better mental and physical health, longer life, and increased economic mobility. Friendship also combats loneliness, an epidemic that has been described as a defining public health concern of our time. Indeed, about 4 in 10 Americans are lonely, and therefore at risk of living shorter, less fulling lives. This project shines a light on the psychology of friendship by deploying a new theoretical framework. This framework emphasizes that friend pairs, which have been the focus of past work, live in wider social worlds, where each friend can interact with a network of other people. As a result, the challenges of finding, making, and keeping friends are more complex than one might think, and that previous research has found. These challenges might involve both simpler and well-studied two-person components (getting friends to like us) but also lesser-studied multi-person components (getting friends to like us better than they like their other friends). This program of research fills major gaps in our basic understanding of how friendship works by focusing on these vital but understudied social relationships. The project has three aims. One is to identify the various challenges that people must solve to realize friendships. A second is to better describe what these complex challenges look like. These two aims support a third aim of generating new insights into how people solve these friendship challenges. This project examines friendship challenges and their solutions in a series of cross-cultural surveys, laboratory experiments, and via cutting-edge methods such as machine learning and network analysis. A science communication component helps to disseminate scientific findings and train the next generation of psychological scientists to engage with the public. Achieving a better understanding of the social dynamics of friendship informs the development of interventions aimed at improving mental health, physical health, and economic mobility. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.