How to Be a Good Friend, Not Just an Acquaintance

The author with his two friends Bob Cialdini and Steve Neuberg, laughing over one of hundreds of meals they have shared over several decades; they were of course once strangers.

Source: Douglas Kenrick

What would you be doing if you were trying to find meaning in life?

When Jaimie Krems, Becca Neel, and I asked 565 men and women that question, the most common response was that a meaningful life would involve spending time with friends.

And when Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn analyzed the results of 48 rigorously conducted studies on happiness, the data revealed that spending more time with friends was one of the most reliable predictors of happiness.

Close friends are connected to a happy and meaningful life. But what if you’ve recently moved to a new place, taken a new job, your closest friends have all gone off to college, and you’re not naturally extraverted? Is there anything you can do to make stronger connections with other people who can be so important to enhancing your positive feelings and meaning in life?

In my last post, I discussed three techniques for breaking the ice: for moving from being a complete stranger to being a familiar acquaintance. But mere acquaintances are unlikely to be the source of deep personal fulfilment; we need a few real friends.

Psychologists have conducted thousands of studies of the features people find desirable in friends (such as similarity), the personality traits associated with having fewer or more friends (such as social anxiety), and the psychological consequences of loneliness and isolation. But those studies don’t usually explicitly spell out the practical advice about how, the specific approaches people can use to move from social isolation through initial acquaintance to close friendship. If you dig, you can find a few useful strategies buried in all that research. Here are five of them:

1. Spend time together. Jeffrey A. Hall surveyed 429 people who had recently moved over 50 miles from their previous residence. They were asked to name someone they had met since moving, and to report on the number of hours they had spent with that person. For every 10 hours spent together, there was approximately a 4 percent increase in the likelihood of calling that person a friend rather than a casual acquaintance. People began to move from acquaintance to casual friend after spending around 30 hours together. It took at least 140 hours together to become a close friend, and it takes at least 300 hours together before someone is defined as a best friend. It also mattered what people did during those hours together. Hall found that small talk (about sports, TV, or pets, for example) was not as good a predictor of becoming friends as what he called “striving” conversations—including catching up on what’s been happening to one another, discussions about serious or personal topics, playful joking around, or expressions of attention and affection.
2. Be a responsive listener. What if you are having one of those striving conversations, perhaps about something that happened to you at work yesterday, and the person you are talking to keeps glancing down at their cell phone? It’s unlikely you will look forward to the next conversation with them. Yohsuke Ohtsubo and colleagues found that when you are paying attention to what your conversation partner is saying, they feel understood, accepted, and cared for. How do you make it obvious you are paying attention? Making appropriate eye contact is one signal. Simply moving in synch with the other person (nodding when they do, or adopting a complementary posture) increases the chances that they'll feel similar to you, and enjoy the conversation (Chartrand and Bargh, 1996).
3. Open up. In a series of studies, Charles Truax and Robert Carkhuff found that the best psychotherapists were perceived by their clients as genuine (or authentic), empathetic (understanding and sharing the client’s feelings), and respectful (in the sense of accepting the client unconditionally and nonjudgmentally). The same is true of good friends, except that, unlike a therapeutic relationship, friendships are completely reciprocal. Before you can genuinely accept one another, you need to disclose important things about yourselves. Valerian Derlega and colleagues found that, when people do not know one another well, they tend to match the other person’s level of self-disclosure. Once you know one another, it’s a lot easier to open up about yourself, and one doesn't want to jump right into the deepest darkest reaches of one’s soul during the first 15 minutes of a conversation with a new acquaintance. But because meaningful conversation is a hallmark of a true friendship, someone has to start somewhere. How you respond when your friend shares information about themselves also matters. Relationship experts Shelly Gable and Harry Reis talk about how people can “capitalize” on positive events by responding enthusiastically when someone shares good news with them. Your enthusiasm is taken as evidence that you care about them and identify with them. If your reaction is unenthusiastic or negative, though, it is taken as evidence that you're not on their team.
4. Don’t underestimate the power of simply reaching out. Socially anxious people don’t reach out to others because they have negative expectations about how others will respond (Cacioppo and colleagues, 2015). If you think others will not welcome your contacts, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; you never reach out and never close the social distance. Peggy Liu and colleagues asked 109 students to write a short note to someone in their social circle, simply to “check in and say hello.” The students were asked to estimate how much the recipient would appreciate being reached out to. Then the researchers delivered the notes and asked the recipients how much they appreciated them. The researchers found that people reliably underestimate the positive effect of simply reaching out: Recipients enjoyed the notes much more than the senders had expected.
5. Be helpful. Anthropologist Dan Hruschka examined friendships across 60 societies around the globe. Whether those societies were composed of hunter-gatherers, farmers, or urban commuters, one feature of friendship was universal: Friends help one another out. In traditional societies, this often involved sharing food or tools, or helping one another build a hut. In the modern world, sharing food is still a great way to go (everyone loves the person who brings a tray of brownies). But you can also help your new acquaintance by assisting with a class assignment, offering a ride when their car is in the shop, or simply providing information you have but they need (like how to log on to one of those #*%!# user-unfriendly websites).

Facebook image: we.bond.creations/Shutterstock