Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA have found that about 50% of people that we consider our friends don’t feel the same way.
The study analyzed friendship ties in 84 subjects aged 23 to 38, who were taking part in a business management class.
The subjects were asked to rank how close they were with each person in the class on a scale of 0 to 5, where 0 means “I do not know this person,” 3 means “Friend,” and 5 means “One of my best friends.”
The researchers found that while 94 percent of the subjects expected their feelings to be reciprocated, only 53 percent of them actually were.
The results of the study are, of course, limited in value on their own because of the tiny sample size. But, as one of the researchers, Kate Murphy told the The New York Times, the team’s results line up consistently with previous research on friendship done in the last decade — these found reciprocity rates between 34 to 53 percent, from a pool of over 92,000 subjects.
This gap between the number of perceived and reciprocated friendships could stem from the fact that we can’t clearly define what friendship is. Alex Pentland, a computational social science researcher and a member of the MIT team behind the study, thinks that this difficulty arises because of our efforts to maintain a good self-image — in a “We like them so they must like us” mentality. But that’s not how friends work.
“These findings suggest a profound inability of people to perceive friendship reciprocity, perhaps because the possibility of non-reciprocal friendship challenges one’s self-image,” the study authors wrote.
