Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

social world is probably the single most complex thing that we ever have to deal with in everyday life.

Thomas Fudge’s: typically, people indicated that only 16–20 per cent of the friends listed on their Facebook page could be considered real friends.

This tendency for birds of a feather to flock together is known as homophily and is a dominating feature in our friendships.

Exchanges have meaning only when there is an existing relationship to give them meaning.

even the potent forces of religion can be at least temporarily overcome in contexts where other cross-cutting loyalties are allowed to build up – no matter how arbitrary those loyalties might be.

We simply won’t be willing to put that much trust in anyone, and instead will settle for weaker relationships where we run less risk of being cheated

every inch of stature is worth nearly $800 a year on your salary across a wide spectrum of jobs, especially in males.

We live among strangers. In part, that is because, instead of our friends and family being clustered around us in the village as they once were, they are now dispersed all over the country, sometimes a whole continent.

They are also the ones that are most difficult to reconcile, precisely because they end with such an acrimonious rupture.

our choice of friends is heavily dictated by trying to find like-minded people, people we feel comfortable with in casual company, people we don’t have to explain the joke to every time, people who think like us and whose behaviour we don’t have to work hard at trying to understand, people with whom conversations have a natural and effortless flow