How to Make Friends, According to Science
To move from being a casual friend to a meaningful friend called for another fifty hours spent together over the course of three months, while those who advanced to be best friends took another 100 hours to be spent together.
Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
it takes ninety to 200 hours to turn a stranger or acquaintance into a close friend.
Kat Vellos • We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
you could become “good friends” if you spend 120-160 hours together over three weeks, and “best friends” if you spend 200 hours together over six weeks.
Kat Vellos • We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of N... See more
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? (Published 2012)
Brian Wiesner and added
ALWAYS FOLLOW UP We all meet people but we rarely take the time to follow up and actually begin a friendship. Analyzing eight million phone calls between two million people, researchers at Notre Dame found that what makes close friendships endure is simply staying in touch every two weeks.
Eric Barker • Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong
Kaustubh Sule added
Everything takes longer than you think it will. It takes approximately 140 hours to establish friendship; 300 hours to make it a close one. The path to success is circuitous and not without detours. But oftentimes, that only makes it sweeter.
Agalia Tan added
Some social scientists and even philosophers suggest a different vision of friendship, in which friendship is conceived not as a ledger of emotional debits and credits but as an organic creation — an artwork — built by the friends themselves. Conceived in this way, friendships are not ranked or stratified along a bright line from BFF to near strang... See more
Lisa Miller • The Vexing Problem of the ‘Medium Friend’
Alex Burns added
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.