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Picking pals more to do with chance than liking
Published on Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 01:56, Updated at Wed, Jun 04, 2008 in Lifestyle » Relationship section
Tags: Friendship, Survey , Washington
FRIENDS FOREVER: Friendships may not be as deliberate as we think.
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Washington: Late English actor Sir Peter Ustinov once famously said: “Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first.” A team of psychologists now believe that there is, in fact, some genuineness in this statement.
According to the researchers, rather than picking our friends based on intentional choice and common values and interests, our friendships may be based on more superficial factors like proximity (think neighbors) or group assignments (your department at work).
Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff of the University of Leipzig sought to test the notion that random proximity and random group assignment at zero acquaintance would foster friendship in the long run.
The researchers investigated 54 college freshmen upon encountering one another for the first time at the beginning of a one-off introductory session and randomly assigned them a seat number in a group of chairs organized in rows.
As reported in a recent issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, sitting in neighboring seats as a result of randomly assigned seat numbers when meeting for the first time led to higher ratings of friendship intensity one year later. The same was true even if participants were merely in the same row.
The counterintuitive finding suggests that friendships may not be as deliberate we think.
“In a nutshell, people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number,” the researchers said.
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Friendship happens on its own accord rarely. More often than not people are thrust upon us , like in an
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