Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

We agree to live together, or to be friends, so that we can both benefit by solving the problems of daily survival and reproduction more efficiently than we each of us could do on our own.

This seems to reflect a difference between the two sexes in the way they maintain, or service (to borrow a motoring metaphor), their relationships.

Given that someone’s willingness to support you is directly related to the time you spend socialising with them (and hence their perceived emotional closeness to you),

First, if there are only selfish liars and honest people in the population, the community very quickly breaks up into small subsets of very close friends who interact only with each other, whereas they form a single large, interconnected community if everyone is scrupulously honest.

standard psychological Attachment Scale that measures your social style

making: if the decision is fairly simple, we use rational willpower and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but if it is more tricky we bring pre-commitment and the frontal pole into play, since this allows us to suppress activity in the dorsal cortex.

There is, they suggested, a limit on the number of people we can feel sympathy for, and this seems to set a limit on other groupings where close psychological interaction is required.

some friendships held up better than others over the course of the study, and we wondered what the difference was between those that did and those that did not.

Eye contact is an important component of this and, like grooming, you cannot hold eye contact with more than one person at a time. What dancing does allow you to

Interactions that occurred face-to-face or via Skype were rated as much more satisfying and enjoyable than those using any of the other media, with little to choose between these others.