Friendship and loneliness are two sides of the same social coin, and we lurch through life from one to the other. What has surprised medical researchers over the last decade or so is just how dramatic the effects of having friendships actually are – not just for our happiness, but also for our health, wellbeing, and even how long we live. We do not cope well with isolation
Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge from the medical literature over the past two decades has been the evidence that the more friends we have, the less likely we are to fall prey to diseases, and the longer we will live
The big surprise was that it was the social measures that most influenced your chances of surviving, and especially so after heart attacks and strokes. The best predictors were those that contrasted high versus low frequencies of social support and those that measured how well integrated you were into your social network and your local community. Scoring high on these increased your chances of surviving by as much as 50 per cent. Only giving up smoking had anything like the same effect
Being a social butterfly flitting from one friendship or activity group to another isn’t the same thing psychologically as having a few close friends with whom you spend most of your time. You are likely not to feel part of a group, and so to feel lonely even though you think you are socially very busy.
Why friends matter
When you look at their graphs for the community as a whole, it is blindingly obvious that happy people cluster together and that unhappy people cluster together. If your friends are happy, you are more than likely to become happy too. You could even see happiness spreading slowly through the population: if someone’s friends were happy in one sample, there was an increased likelihood that they too would switch from being unhappy to happy in the following samples. This was especially true if the
a depressed friend was six times more likely to make you depressed than a happy friend was to make you happy
For men, the death of their spouse was associated with an 18 per cent increase in the chances of dying in the immediate future, and the death of the husband increased the wife’s risk of dying by 16 per cent
It seems that the endorphins triggered by the presence of friends tune the immune system and give us enhanced resistance to the bugs that are responsible for many of the diseases that so discomfort us.
that the people we feel most emotionally attached to and see most often are precisely the people who are most likely to help us out
So important is it to be part of a social group, that when we find ourselves alone or an outsider we typically feel lonely, even agitated, and will actively work to try and remedy the situation
Loneliness takes its toll on us, and we do our best to look for opportunities to meet people. Being part of a group makes us feel properly human. We feel more relaxed when we know we belong. We feel more satisfied with life when we know we are wanted.
loneliness is actually an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system as well as your psychological wellbeing that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death.
Friends are genuinely good for you, even at the physiological level of your immune system. I remember being told by someone who
loneliness among freshmen students resulted in a reduced immune response when the students were given a flu vaccine. Their immune system was depressed and didn’t rise to the challenge of the vaccine in the way it should have done in order to bestow proper immunity. In other words, despite having had the vaccine, they would not have been so resistant to future invasions by the flu virus. There was also an independent effect of the number of friends they had: those with only four to twelve friends had significantly poorer responses than those with thirteen to twenty friends. These two effects seemed to interact with each other
Friends are genuinely good for you, even at the physiological level of your immune system
The military make great efforts to turn their units into family affairs because that creates a level of bonding that ensures that the men stick together through thick and thin on the battlefield. By arranging life so that men eat, sleep, train and socialise together in the same small unit (usually the company, typically 120–180 men), they create a deep sense of bonding among them. The result, it seems, is much lower levels of general illness than we would see in the everyday civilian world
They found that people who belonged to more groups were less likely to experience bouts of depression. And this wasn’t simply because depressed people don’t join social groups: they could follow individuals from one sample to the next, and this showed that depressed people who belonged to no groups at the start of the sample reduced their risk of depression in a later sample by almost a quarter if, in the meantime, they joined even one group. If they joined three groups, it reduced the risk of depression by almost two-thirds. As they commented, ‘membership of social groups is both protective against developing depression and curative of existing depression
In a series of experiments carried out in Mexico and in Oxford, she found that perceived empathy in the way a stranger responds to you in a stressful situation results in a reduced sense of loneliness, as well as positively affecting physiological responses such as heart rate; in contrast, being on your own or with an unsympathetic stranger increased the sense of loneliness and the physiological responses
Friendship protects us against disease as well as cognitive decline, allows us to be more engaged with the tasks that we have to do, and helps us become more embedded within, and trusting of, the wider community within which we live
I turned my attention to humans, doing more or less the same kinds of things that I had always done on monkeys using the same kinds of observational methods. In the midst of all this, I lit upon what, at the time, seemed to be four unrelated ideas – all in the same year. These were the Social Brain Hypothesis (the claim that a species’ brain size determines, or more correctly constrains, the size of its social group), what later came to be known as Dunbar’s Number (the limit on the number of friends you can have), the importance of social grooming for bonding in primates, and the gossip theory of language evolution (that language evolved to allow us to exchange social information as a partial solution to the time constraints of social bonding). With the benefit of hindsight, it later became obvious that these are, in fact, part and parcel of the same phenomenon – friendship. They form the framework around which this book hangs
The important thing about friends is that you need to have them before disaster befalls you. One reason is that, as we shall see later, people are only likely to make the effort to help you if they are already your friend. We are all much less likely to help strangers or people we know only slightly – despite what we sometimes claim. Making friends, however, requires a great deal of effort and time. It is not something you can just magic up over a cup of coffee – not least because everyone else is already embedded in friendship networks of their own, and to make time and room for you as a new friend means that they will have to sacrifice a friendship with someone else
Dunbar’s Number
all the people you would not hesitate to go over and sit with if you happened to see them at 3 a.m. in the Departure Lounge at Hong Kong airport. They would immediately know who you are and where you stand in relation to them, and you would know where they stand in relation to you. Your relationship has a history. No introductions needed. At this point, his regular panellist and comedy foil, the comedian Alan Davies, threw up his hands in mock despair and quipped: ‘But I only have five!’ He was not as far off the mark as he thought. We do indeed typically have around five intimate friends, but we also have 150 friends-in-general
This was a real experiment and the people at each step in the chain had to add their names onto a list on the envelope. It turns out that you almost never need more than six people in the chain linking you and any other randomly chosen person. You are never more than six ‘handholds’ away from anyone else in the world
Galena Rhoades and Scott Stanley at the University of Virginia had concluded that marriages that had 150 or more guests at the wedding were more stable and outlasted those with smaller guest lists, with very small weddings (those with fewer than fifty guests) doing worst
In fact, this number turns up all over the place as a natural group size for human communities. The first place I had looked for it was in the size of communities in small-scale societies (hunter– gatherers and traditional horticultural societies). The average community size for a dozen or so of these was 148.4. A later study of a different dataset by Marcus Hamilton at the University of New Mexico came up with a value of 165. It also seems to have been the typical size for early medieval English villages
So, contrary to repeated claims, most people don’t in fact seem to have very large numbers of friends on Facebook. Yes, a handful do, but the bulk of us have numbers that are in the same range as those we find in the everyday face-to-face world
There was a distinct ∩-shaped relationship between the number of friends people listed and the women’s age. Network size increased up to the age of about thirty, stabilised, and then began to decline again from the age of about sixty
Interestingly, we documented exactly the same effect in gelada baboons when we were working on this species in Ethiopia during the 1970s. The energetic demands of lactation are so high for female monkeys and apes that they are forced to increase steadily the time devoted to feeding as their infant gets older and demands more milk; to provide the extra time needed for feeding, they withdraw progressively from interactions with all but their core social partners. Once the baby is weaned (at about a year old), the pressure is off and they reinstate social interactions with casual friends … until the cycle begins again with the next baby, of course. It’s a universal problem, it seems
Thomas Pollet had a look at personality in a Dutch sample and found that extraverts typically did have larger networks than introverts, and this was true of both sexes
Thomas Pollet had a look at personality in a Dutch sample and found that extraverts typically did have larger networks than introverts, and this was true of both sexes. We knew from our previous analyses of the British and Belgian women’s network sample that people with larger networks tend to have less emotionally close relationships, on average, with their network members than those with smaller networks. And this turned out to be true of Tom’s extraverts and introverts. In effect, extraverts behave like social butterflies, flitting from one person to another and not devoting a great deal of time to any of them
I persuaded Russell Hill to run a survey that asked people to tell us whom they were sending cards to that particular Christmas. We wanted to know not just how many cards people sent but who was in the household concerned, when they had last contacted each of them and how emotionally close they felt to each one. Although we explicitly asked them to exclude their doctor, lawyer, butcher and baker, and any other purely business acquaintances