Would you say you¡¯re lucky to have a lot of friends? Well, hold on that four-leaf clover because a recent study claims that most of your friends are not actually your friends.
A recent study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE took in to account surveys of 600 students from Israel, Europe and the US to figure out how many friendships they were involved with were mutual, meaning that how many of the people they considered friends also felt the same way about them.
The conclusion took a rather sad turn when the researchers discovered that only about half of your friends actually reciprocate your friendship. In a sense, if you think you have fifty friends, you¡¯ll have to bring that number to twenty-five.
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Dr. Erez Shmueli, one of the authors of the study said:
While it might be surprising to many, it isn¡¯t the first study to state this social truth.
Adriana M. Manago, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted a study in 2015 and concluded that while millennials have more access to people and are capable of building wider networks, the general feeling of fulfillment they derive from these digital interactions lasts for very little time.
This is so because these interactions are based on shallow connections and public perception.
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While we all have hundreds of people on our friends list on social media platforms, it is high time we evaluate who our real friends are, especially because it has an effect on your general well-being.
The same study that claims that half your friends are actually not worthy of the tag of ¡®friendship¡¯ also observed that when there is mutual friendship, there¡¯s more motivation to improve your life, be it any aspect of it. This happens because when friendships are mutual there isn¡¯t just mutual care but also the capacity to influence each other.
If your friends are going to exercise and motivate you to do so, you are likely to go ahead with it. If your friends really care about you, they will warn you about a toxic relationship so that you can act upon ending it.
More than anything, our generation also needs to learn the importance of quality over quantity when it comes to friendships, an idea that has gotten distorted to an extent since the advent of the social media age. For example, a study by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, shows the average person can only manage five close relationships at a time.
Hence, we need to value those few people we can depend on instead of running after shallow bonds.