Friendship with Jaimie Krems
2025-06-17 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Let's do uh should we do another one that maybe more of a more of a confident vibe? Sure. Okay, maybe I'll do welcome this time. Okay. Let's do like a like a 1920s um uh like no da da da like sure, yeah. All right, a little bit more confident, a little more fast pace. Yeah, you don't have to do like a mid-Atlantic fake accent, but like like Kennedy's, but yeah. David Pinsoff. I'm David Petrozowski. Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology. The podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. Hey David. Hey Dave. Well, it's quite fitting that you are my friend and we're friends because this episode is about friendship with the premier scholar of friendship, Jamie Krems, a

professor at University of California, Los Angeles, where I do research and we uh collaborate on some stuff. Uh, she is a fascinating top-notch thinker. Uh, she has really incredible insights about the nature of friendship and why it is more complicated and nuanced and in some ways darker than you might think. We cover a lot of stuff. I mean, we get into loneliness, uh, whether there is a loneliness epidemic, we get into the so-called Dunbar number, whether there is a maximum limit to the number of people we can keep in our heads. Uh we talk a lot about Philadelphia. Uh we do. Surprising amount of Philadelphia. Yeah, a lot of Philadelphia content. So if you have opinions about Philadelphia, uh this episode is for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh enjoy. All right. So Jamie, I'll do a we'll do a countdown and then we'll actually start. Okay. Yeah? Uh uh, okay. All right. So uh five three, two, oh you can do five? Let's do five. I thought you could do three, but I love you, Farker. We should just start this now. Yeah. So ten? Yeah. So where do you so Jamie? Hi Jamie. Do you stand with the three two ones or the five four three two ones or the ten nine seven eight seven six? I even got that wrong. Yeah. Ten, three, or five. What's the right content? Uh three for podcast, five for TV, ten for rockets. Okay, I think that's the that's the correct answer, I think. Wow. Is there a hundred? Maybe if you're you're in a James Bond movie and the bomb is about to go off, you'd start

from a hundred. Building demolition. Oh that you want to give people a lot of time to get out of there. Yeah. That's a Scholi paper. That's what that makes me think of. The omission effect. Okay. We wouldn't get into that. Dr. Jamie Krems, it's good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's good to see you guys. Professor at UCLA. Yes. Um, we're gonna you study friendship. Um, and we're gonna talk about that, hopefully, or not. Uh we're gonna talk about Evpsych and how you got interested in it. But there's one question that is extremely important, probably more important than all those things to discuss, which is what is your opinion about the city of Philadelphia? It's the best city in the world.

Thank you very much for letting me say that. You could see Gritty behind there. And if I were to pan this way, there's Gritty and in fact the world's greatest mascot, the Philadelphia fanatic, who is from the Galapagos, which is a place that is critical to our field of study. So there you go. Are you from Philadelphia? I am. I was born in Philadelphia, like Lita. Um, I grew up mostly in Bucks County, like Alex Shaw, Mike Gervin, uh, I think Joe Henrick and Annie's, you know, from nearby basically. Um, so you just you just give us a huge list of of guests that you have to have. That's a great, it's an incubator of great minds. There's something in the water. It's a weird place full of terribly literate belligerents.

Mm-hmm. I imagine that was what like the uh early days of the Republic were like literate belligerents. Yeah, it still feels like that. Um and it it actually reminds me a lot of your work, uh Dave, because the uh people have commented on this when they've come to conferences. the place feels like its own team. Um, so if you're in Philly, you're on the team. It doesn't matter your uh color, creed, SES, ecology, race, uh, political view. There are people with opposing views sitting next to each other at the stadium or at the bar watching the game together. If you're on the team, you're on the team. So team supersedes race, class, gender, sexual oriented all the whole enchilada team is above all.

Yeah. If you're on if you're on team Philly, you're on team Philly. And if you're on Team Dallas or you're on you're a Giants fan, um, you know, you're gonna get hurt. Interesting. I it was a kind of a joke question, but actually is that why you love Philly? Yeah. I, you know, I didn't realize this until I was interviewing for grad school. Um, and I think I'd either just come from Santa Barbara or just maybe I was headed to, but I I was at ASU and Rebecca Neal, who's now a professor at the University of Toronto, who does EV and stereotyping stuff, prejudice stuff. Um, she and I were chatting for a while, and she's like, You really love teams. You have such a coalitional psychology. I was like, Yeah, I I never realized that.

But I love teams. Um, I love Aaron Sorkin. I love the West Wing. Um, I love smart people working together and arguing and pranking each other to get to the truth and disagreeing, but getting there. Um, and I think that's probably why I love our academic community so much. It's the closest thing I found to that. Wow. We're the West Wing of social science. We really are. Um instead of a walk and talk. Yes. Dave and I are working on our banter. This is the first this is the first episode with any banter for the record, too. That's true. Yeah, it's been pretty light on the banter so far. I mean, I've been working on it. I can West Wing the hell out of this. Just say the word and I'll start quoting.

Nice. Uh David, please uh jump in um at any point. Um, but uh I I'm following up on the on the Philly thing, which is um the Teams thing and coalitional. One thing I like about you, Jamie, is you're not coalitional in the way you just explain what coalitional means. It's not like um we talked, David and I talked, I think it was last episode or the episode before, about um people being really coalitional in the sense of really attacking the outgroup. Um, but what I like about your version of it and when you describe what it is, is very much sort of we're all on the same team, right? Um Is that something you always liked? And is that something that you felt like or is part of what attracted you to Ev Psych, the

feeling of getting that? And therefore, do you feel like sometimes that's missing in in real real life or regular life? Oh man, uh it is missing in so much of real life. It is part of the reason that I love evolutionary social science and Ev in general. It does feel more like a team than I mean, social psychology is huge. And maybe there are sub-areas that feel like that. But I haven't found one other than you know the evolutionary lens. And I've had a foot in so many worlds. I mean, um uh so my master's is in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology. Our building, ISEA, the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, was literally on the opposite side of the street for the cultural from the cultural anthropology

building. So that was a coalition against a coalition. It does feel like we are we are on the same team. We think alike and we think in a way that It's better. I just gotta interject. It's better. We can stop the podcast. We can stop the episode and then a high note. It made me feel less alone. So I I was um uh through a weird series of events. I came to read some Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, and I was like, oh my god, other people think like me. It I I think a lot of people who find it become acolytes for that reason, um, more than they learn to think that way. Um, so you found it as it was it was echoing intuitions and ways of thinking that were already in you rather than you know giving you a new perspective that

you hadn't considered before. Yeah, I mean, I was certainly an idiot when I started out. I didn't know anything, it just it uh reflected how I thought about the world. And it was the most satisfying level of why explanation that I found. Other explanations, you know, um like even I I love Dove Cohen's work and the the stuff on culture of honor. And I think there's really something there, right? But ideas like, oh well it comes back to philosophy and it's Aristotelian thinking versus Confucian thinking, to me, that is not a satisfying explanation. That that doesn't if I were a two-year-old or a whatever age, uh you guys know this, whatever age where they keep asking why, why, why, if I were that age child, that

would not stop me asking why, I wouldn't be satisfied yet. You'd be up for another hour. Yeah, you want to hit explanatory bedrock. I mean, that's one of the things I love about Tubian Cosmeties. Um, you know, they I I remember someone joking that um every Tubi and Cosmeties paper starts with the Big Bang and then gets to the the topic at hand. Uh, you know, they have a wonderful paper, uh, the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of psychology, uh, just sort of grounding psychology and the idea that uh entropy is a thing. Uh things tend toward disorder, not order. Whenever we see order and functionally organized complexity, that demands a very special kind of explanation. And the only explanation for it that has yet been devised is Darwin's explanation, which is

natural selection. The replication promoting variants uh outreplicate the non replication promoting variants, and over time you get increasingly uh complex and elaborate forms of uh replication promoting uh uh complexity. I think I just repeated the word complexity twice. Um you should have been there to to mock me for that, because we gotta work on our banter. I'm trying to figure out uh okay, so I think you know there's that quote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, but there's a quote at the foot of the Darwin statue in the London Natural History Museum. Um I'll see if I can Can we Google things on the show? Is that okay? No, you can't. Cut off the knowledge.

I mean, it kind of feels like cheating sometimes. Um uh but does it say this is Charles Darwin? I mean, it does say his name on the statue, that's for sure. Um does it say my my favorite meme is the orangutan with like the ha eyes half closed and says the caption is tell my wife I'm an orangutan It's funny but I don't even understand it. Yeah. Uh yeah, it's funny on many different levels, but is the is does it just say tell my wife I'm Charles Darwin? No, it doesn't. And maybe I'm confusing it with the quote in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, but it's uh oh man, I had it on my Facebook when I had a Facebook. Um it doesn't matter. It's just, you know, the the way to illuminate men's minds is is this thinking this way.

And I think that's true. And I think um it's great to be on a team that also thinks that way. And sometimes when our when our team does well, we can convince other people to entertain, if not accept our explanations as well. Join the team. Yeah. So s so it seems like you got on board to the team through, you know, popularizations like Pinker and Dawkins. Is that was that accurate? Because that's sort of how I got there as well. Yeah. Um, so I was working in music in Philadelphia after I went to college. I uh was a classics and uh Near Eastern archaeology major. Um and I was an incredible hipster. Um, and there was this guy in a band um who uh if you remember the treadmill video on YouTube, that band OK Go.

Um, I think they won a Grammy for that video. It was like the first big YouTube video of a band. Um, and I still have this piece of paper, and he wrote down all of these things that I should read. Um, and it includes um some of those books, and um I probably read them and did some other things in a very in a way that David Buss could explain really well. Um and so yeah, I uh I read those books and I didn't realize that it would actually change my life and I would find my people. And I found my people. And then I had to figure out how to go to do it. Um, and so I um I was in Philly and I started sort of volunteering in a lab at Penn and applied to graduate school. I didn't get into any PhD programs my first round, but I got into Oxford for um

masters and went there and worked with Robin Dunbar and Oliver Curry and this great um musicologist Ian Morley. Dunbar, the the Dunbar of the Dunbar number. The great Robin Dunbar is what I would consider my second of four dads in um the evolutionary world. Or the Dunbar Circle. I forget what the I feel like one of his Dunbar's number. Yeah. I feel like that's made it into the popular culture as like a means. Yeah. There's um just for those who don't know, the Dunbar number is the number of slots in your I don't know how would you describe it? Like the like the the maximum capacity of your social network. It's like 150 or something like that. Yeah. So 150 seems to be I mean, I think he used to describe it as sort of a cognitive

constraint, but um he would say your social network, sort of defined as the number of people that if you saw them in an airport, you'd feel comfortable sitting down and talking to them, was about 150. And he found, you know, when people sent Christmas cards, their network was about 150. Different army battalions or groupings ended up being about 150, Anabaptist communities split off around 150. This number kept appearing and appearing and appearing. Um, and uh in his mind, it was linked to um brain size and group size and across different primates. But um, yeah, I think it it is in popular culture. Uh a lot of people in the tech world know Dunbar's number. Um, and it even made it into um I read a lot of fiction, and there's a book called The

Midnight Library by Haig, I think it is. Um, and they mention Robin Dunbar in it. And like, holy shit! Oh holy moly, uh, he made it. You can swear, Jamie. That's fine. You can swear. Thank you. You did mention Philadelphia, and they do go hand in hand. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is kind of an intoxicating idea that there's this number that keeps recurring in places where you wouldn't expect it to recur. Do you are you aware of like whether it holds up now? Like whether how it's done, you know, in the wake of the replication crisis if if it's still pretty solid? There's been some back and forth on it. Um, I would not be surprised if it holds up in many ways. I I do kind of think that there are these, I don't know, uh strange

attractory ideas like fractals. So when you're flying in a plane, the mountain ridges look like you know they're fractals, and the rivers are fractals, and the veins and leaves, and in our bodies, there's there's something, there's you know, some sweet spot of efficiency. Um, and maybe for many people's brains, for most of human history, it's been that. Um, I could believe it. As for the latest, uh, I don't I don't think I know, but I do know there's been some back and forth lately. Yeah. Got it. So uh if I remember correctly, the Dunbar number was derived just by like looking at a graph of brain size and group size and just putting all the dots, you know, this is just across a number of different species, um, and just drawing a line through the dots to get

the, you know, the uh and uh just extrapolating from that graph to you know, if humans are on this graph based on the line, their predicted group size based on their brain size is 150. Yeah, exactly. You had um the brain size on the x-axis across the bottom and on the y-axis, you had group size, and um he uh plotted all of the different primate brain sizes and group sizes, drew that line, exactly what you're saying. You should expect humans to be 150. You should also expect the Neanderthals, they had larger brains. So they should have had larger groups. And so one of the ways that I think he and his group were dealing with that, including a woman named Ellie Pierce, was trying to understand why.

And the last that I remember was that the occipital lobe of Neanderthals was particularly um large, or the the indentation, I guess, would have been. And what they were thinking is that they evolved, particularly at certain latitudes, where they would have needed a larger brain size because of something with the light. I'm not really remembering, but they had to dedicate that size not to social brain regions, but to other mechanics, basically. Got it. So they would be an outlier on that graph, presumably. Yeah. I love when exceptions can help you prove the rule. And so I remember that one. Sort of like when Doug Kenrick and uh Rich Keefe talked about, I think the either the Poro or the Tiwi, or one of those societies where the young men end up with much

older women, which is against the evolutionary, evolutionarily derived prediction, and it's because the young men have no status and they have to marry the widows. It's not because it's what they want. And so yeah, when the exception proves the rule, it's fun. Cool. So he's also um a proponent of of uh an increasingly popular idea known as the social brain hypothesis or the social brain theory. Uh and as far as I'm aware, it's been gaining increasing prominence. So this idea is that humans don't have huge brains to help them solve problems and think rationally and make tools, which is sort of the prevailing view. The reason why we have these huge noggins is so we can get inside each other's heads and

get inside each other's heads, getting inside of our heads, and think through many layers of social complexity and recursive mentalizing of I'm trying to predict what you're thinking, I'm thinking, you're thinking, uh, and navigating the political landscape, forming alliances, uh, maybe secretly flouting social norms in a way that you can get away with. These kinds of of social challenges are really the main selection pressure driving brain expansion. Um, and if you think about it intuitively, like, what do you devote most of your brain power to? You don't devote it to like auto parts or like, you know, furniture repair. You devote it to thinking about people and people related stuff and how you're going to

deal with these people and get them to uh respect you or give you what you want or patch things up. Um so uh what do you think of this social brain theory? Do we need a uh a paradigm shift in how we think about the evolution of the human brain? Uh I mean, I I think a lot of people would buy this theory, whether or not they call it the social brain hypothesis, whether or not they subscribe to all of the potential tenants and related hypotheses. Um we are uh actually so the same way that Tubi and Cosmodee started a lot of papers with the Big Bang. You guys might remember in like the 2010s, uh almost all HBS talks and posters started with, well, humans are ultra social. Right? Yes. And I I think we all have bought that so hook, line, and sinker at this point, and we

all agree on it so much that I don't even hear that sentence anymore. Um so I I I think we're moving past that and we buy it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that like a lot of topics that were once considered a purely cognitive or rational part of the mind are now being reconsidered as a social adaptation. So it used to be that reasoning was sort of seen as this solitary rational practice that you'd work through these syllogisms of if P, then Q. And uh then, you know, Hugo Mercier and Dance Berber come along and say, Well, no, uh, reasoning is a social tool. It's for justifying and making excuses to other members of your social group and for trying to win arguments and get them to do what you want.

And really it's much more insightful to view reasoning as a social tool rather than an instrument of solitary rationality. I'm trying to think of other examples. I think Episodic Memory had had a paper. uh uh phenomenon episodic memory is biased by social goals, uh, has social functions. Um there's a paper by Klein and uh Tubian Cosmedys basically arguing that the reason we have episodic memory uh as it's as distinct from semantic memory uh is that it allows us to reconsider all of the social interactions we've had with a person in light of new information. So if uh if you uh prove to be untrustworthy uh or a liar, I can reflect on all of the past experiences I might have had with with you and reinterpret

them in light of this novel infation in a way that I couldn't with semantic memory, because it's just a list of facts as opposed to a list of raw experiences. Um so I I I I think that this is a good direction to go. I think we should continue going in this direction. So I have a blog post arguing that what we find interesting uh isn't is not really driven by what is practically uh useful to us, but but but what is socially useful to us. Um, that what what helps us, you know, signal our membership in various groups and show off how smart we are. Um those kinds of social goals are are driving our curiosity uh and and and what we read and what we click on way more than any kind of practical utility.

Um so yeah, I don't know if uh yeah, I don't know if I have a a question. Uh so you do you know Eshin Jolly's work? He just knew at UC San Diego. He's a social neuroscientist in the sort of Carolyn Parkinson vein. Um, and both of them are doing incredible work that um uh would would go really nicely with what you're saying. But um one of Eshin's cool findings is that the way that you remember people is basically through relationships. All of these components that we think are for, you know, of this lonely Rodin statue thinking really probably are for uh navigating the social world. And the social world is way more complex than we've bothered to think it is. So it's not a person thinking alone.

Um, the Rodin Museum is also in Philadelphia on the parkway, by the way. Um, it's not um even just, you know, one-on-one. It is people embedded in these interconnected networks that are um interesting exactly, and terrifying sometimes. And um probably the best way to get anything you want is through those people and anything you need. Um Jamie, you we this is w we're going through your travels, so you discover you're in uh Oxford in your masters. Did you did you want to be in social psychology? Did you want to be in psychology? Were you toying with anthropology? What how did you get to Oh? Yeah. Um, all right. So my honest answer um is that I wanted to do evolutionary social science and I did not care whether I was in anthropology or psychology because I think that our remits

are the same. We're trying to figure out human nature. Practically, that, you know, that comes up against some issues, which is that I didn't know this at the time, but there are fewer jobs in anthropology. I didn't know this at the time. But if you want to get a job in psychology, it's probably easier to be a social psychologist who leverages evolutionary tools than it is to be an evolutionary psychologist, particularly in the United States. Um, and practically, uh, if you want to be an anthropologist, probably at some point you're gonna go into the field. And like a motel is the field for me. I am I am a city mouse, I am a um a Persian cat that needs a velvet pillow. I am that. And so um fighting a jaguar, that could be kind of cool.

Having to put my shoes like on a branch so that a dangerous person killing centipede doesn't get in them is not for me. Yeah. So that's that's my honest answer that I probably never said out loud before. So how did you give it a little bit? I had a similar experience. I was debating whether to go into anthropology or psychology, and I remember asking uh Dan Fessler about it uh and uh I'm like so this fieldwork thing like that's kind of optional right I can I can be an anthropologist and not have to like go to a place without air conditioning and with you know man eating spiders. He's like, oh no it's very important. It's crucial. You you uh we take field work very seriously and you you can't get you can't graduate

without doing really extensive fieldwork. You know, sometimes you stay there for months or a year. I'm like okay, no thank you. Yeah. And then I love I love uh talking to uh I I dear I mean we and we're people have some like human behavioral ecologists or like field anthropologists on and I dearly love them. But then whenever more than like two or three of them get together, they'll like exchange their field stories of like, you know, the communicable or flesh eating diseases that, you know, like compare their scars, right? And and or the story of the person on the path that thought about killing them and they convinced them not to because they knew them from when they were a child, which is a true

story from an anthropologist I heard from. So is this Kim Hill or it's uh uh it was John Patton actually. I remember uh uh Chris Chris Smith who does research with the Hadza uh in uh what Tanzania I think is where they are. Or uh and uh he was staying in a tent and he was having horrible diarrhea. and uh he had in in in the middle of the night. Yes. Oh maybe I shouldn't be divulging this. Sorry. We'll have Chris on and and we'll have to tell him an important story about yourself and Chris can decide whether or not Yeah. That's true. Yeah. We're all a family, it's fine. We're all it's okay. Uh yeah. Uh so uh this this story stuck in my head because it it strikes me as the most horrifying possible.

So he's out in the middle of the night at like three in the morning because he's having diarrhea, and you can't you know poop in the camp uh because there are you know taboos around that. So you have to go wander away from camp in order to poop. And he's and he's wandering out having horrible diarrhea away from the camp, and he hears lions, literal lions, roaring. And he has to debate whether he's gonna go out and outside of camp, away from other people, where there are lions roaring. And he was it was like an emergency. And he has to poop or die. Poop or die. He ultimately chose poop uh and he survived, thankfully. Uh, but that's not the kind of decision that I want to ever have to make. Oh, we're still at Oxford, and you get so get to get us to um uh

ASU. To several programs. Um I I think Marty would be fine with me saying this because uh Marty Hazleton is here at UCLA in communication. Um I applied to work with Marty and she turned me down. Um, and someone else who applied to work with Marty is one of your other guests, Dan Conroy Beam, and she turned him down. And we were walking her home uh with Larry Sugiyama one night at HBus, and Dan and I were on either side of Barney, and she just looked at us and she's like, You're my greatest regrets. Oh it was very sweet. Um but she said yes to pin soft, and that's that that worked out. Yep, that's true. So uh I applied to a bunch of places. Um I thought I would end up at Santa Barbara, the high church.

Um so uh and I visited and I loved it, and the people were great. Um Aldo was there and he was hilarious to me. Yeah, I never met such a human Eeyore. Yeah, oh he's Aldo is wonderful. Yeah, He was just fantastic. Um, Andy and Tess were there. It was actually the day that Max got the job at Harvard. Um, I didn't know what an amazing fellow Andy was at the time. I didn't realize that they'd both gone up for that. And um, how what an incredible friend and colleague and pal Andy was. Um, though I would come to learn that. Um anyway, so I visited Santa Barbara and it was amazing. Um, and I took a picture of the CEP because, you know, it's this is the font from whence we came in my mind. Um, and uh uh it was wonderful.

Then I went to ASU and I really did not think I would go there. Actually, I think I only visited ASU because they were the ones who paid for my plane ticket from England. Uh Santa Barbara wouldn't do it. Um I think that yeah, I think that's true. Um and so uh I told Doug, Kenrick and Steve Newberg during my recruitment trip, uh, listen, um, can you make me the best evolutionary psychologist? Um and I have to like squeeze up all my courage to ask them that, right? Because it's kind of a prickish question. Um It's a badass question. I wish I'd asked it. I mean, it's it's a it's a difficult question. Um and I don't even remember what they told me, but they did convince me that what they would be able to do is get me a job so that

I could do this forever. Um, and I think they were right. I I think there have been few people in the history of our field or lens or whatever you want to call it approach that whatever we say that's appropriately non-threatening at the time, that have uh successfully gotten so many people jobs so that they could keep doing this and making more of us. Um so uh that that is how I got to ASU. Yeah. And you did get a job. You have an awesome job. Yeah. So that worked. I do now. I, you know, I got a job out of grad school. I was very lucky. It's so hard, especially given that I had an EV background. Um, and so many people who do social psych work, you know, um, uh, so this was 2018. It wasn't um, you know, I did a little bit of stereotyping and prejudice stuff, but that's

the an intergroup, that's the great, great majority of social psych now. Um, and that's not the great great majority of the human mind or the social world, um, but the it's the great great majority of the work that you see and the jobs that are advertised. Um, So I was lucky that there was a job for an experimental psychologist. I applied. I got the job at Oklahoma State University. And with Jen Bird Craven, we created the Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis, or Ocean, which is going strong to this day with uh CEP alum Daniel Sneeser and Jen and Juliana French was there for a little while. So I was very, very lucky to get a job at all. And I was so lucky that I could do the work I wanted to do and had to do at Oklahoma.

And yeah, now I have uh what I would consider like a job that would impress a person on a plane, you know, like when you sit next to them and you're like, I'm a professor at UCLA, and I'm a little vain, and that is how I measure my worth sometimes. And so that feels really nice. It's not it's not vain at all, Jamie. No, it's human. Yeah. Congratulations. Well, humans are vain. Yes, that's true. Very well deserved. Um in a cartoonish way, I sort of have friend a friendship bubble next to my picture of you in my uh slots of 150 people. Um, when you were out at Oklahoma, when you left ASU, and so when you were in Oklahoma and now at UCLA, is friendship for you, and we'll talk pro presumably about it in in a in a bit, but is friendship for you the

thing that you think about, or is friendship sort of a way station to a bigger point? Um, so you know, like what is your as you've been going through this, um, what is what's the thing that you're looking at as you keep proceeding through that sort of is your North Star that you're really interested in thinking about and tackling? I mean, I'll tell you really honestly, it was originally pragmatic, which was I need to publish papers so that I could get a job. My my North Star wasn't um lofty in any way, or noble in the very it wasn't noble in the least. Um uh and then it became, you know, I really did want to understand women's social relationships, both the competition, aggression stuff as well as the friendship.

But it turns out that the competition and aggression is sort of built on the same machinery as friendship. It's the same rails that runs that kind of aggression. And I think what we call variously indirect aggression, relational aggression, social aggression, things like gossip, Uh we all know they're not unique to women. Um what I think we don't realize enough is that they are um it's just a different name for friendship and alliance competition. Um we don't talk about friendship competition. I think we largely pretend that it doesn't exist or we'd like to think that we never compete for friends or friends' affections, but we do Which is itself a tactic in the competition. Yes, it is. We don't do that.

No, okay. Romantic partners, sure. People do that, but we don't compete for friends. I never try and make one friend like me better than they like their other friend by talking shit. No, but of course we do. Um, and it's really hard to um to uh understand friendship without understanding that sort of grimy bit of it too. So in any case, I started thinking about women's sociality that became a lot about friendship. That's the machinery. Those are the rails, like I was saying. And so yeah, I mean, one of my goals would be that at the end of my career, I've created enough people studying friendship, because we don't do that, who are getting us to the point where we could, you know, if I had to build a robot to do

friendship, they would be able to deploy the programs to build the robot to do friendship. I think my my larger goal, if I'm honest, um, and whatever, I have tenure, so I could just say this now. Um, it's it's the way we think. It's us. I want the way that we think to pervade the social sciences. Um it should. If you think this way in any other area, it is a boon. I mean, even engineering, you know, goal-wing design, the design of birds' beaks. We have made better machines and tools by looking at nature because evolution has helped to create them. And if we can start thinking that way about the human mind without all of this really stupid stuff, um, I think we'll actually be able to give the taxpayers their money's

worth and help them solve real social problems that they actually give a shit about. Um, but uh so yes, um to that end, I would like to lift up and spread our uh our gospel, let's say. Yeah. But yeah, thank you. I mean I mean, you mentioned, you know, giving the taxpayers their money's worth and solving real problems. I mean one of the biggest problems that we have in the modern world is a is a lack of deep social connections with other people, um uh problems making friends as an adult. Um we we feel I mean there's some evidence to suggest that loneliness is on the rise at least a little bit, at least in the in the United States. We can, you know, quibble about you know where and when this is this is occurring, but it

seems like a lot of people are starved for social connection. Uh, and figuring out how to help them solve that problem it would be a huge benefit, not merely for their well-being, but for their physical health. Um, there's tons of evidence showing that your uh social relationships have a huge effect on your your physical health, presumably because maybe if you're if you're more stressed. Um I don't know. I mean uh uh so number one, what do you think is going on with with the the relationship between friendship and physical health? Uh and number two, uh are you at the point where you can start to see what a potential solution to these social problems might look like, or is that too far on the horizon?

So to one, that is an amazing question. Um, here's what we know. We know that social connection at the very least, and sometimes specifically friendship, not just, you know, social support, not just marriage, right? Um, can lead to better health outcomes. So friendships can be a route not only to things like arriving at work or thriving in your life or feelings of well-being, or even I think Chetty has some stuff on how friendships among folks from different economic backgrounds can improve the economic trajectory of people who have grown up in disadvantaged uh places. The economist Raz Chetty, I believe. Did he win the Nobel Prize? I think he might have. This is a one of the sort of twin 2022 working papers.

It's really cool. Economic mobility is an outcome of some friendships. But then there's all this stuff about health. And so you see, to give some concrete examples, uh, women recover more quickly from breast cancer surgery if they feel like they're socially supported, particularly by their female friends. Um, men in Sweden are less likely to have heart attacks if they have friends and it's not about their social support, it's not about being married, it's friends. Um, we see uh so Julianne Holt Lundstadt had this sort of seminal meta-analysis that suggests that having social support, which I would argue is including and perhaps mostly friends, is so lacking social support, let's say, is equivalent to

smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which has led folks like Robin Dunbar to say that having friends is the next best thing you could do for your health behind quitting smoking. And there's a billboard here in Los Angeles that I sometimes see on my way home that actually has a live tally of the predicted number of people who've died this year due to smoking-related deaths. So if you just sort of switch that to loneliness-related deaths, um, that number is huge. That number is insane. So I mean, I think this is a really valuable problem in terms of you know human happiness, longevity. And then if you want to look at it by the numbers, healthcare costs and things like that, right? So, and it's uh loneliness is prevalent among older adults, among new mothers, among the

young, among college students, I among men, especially. So I haven't found a paper that suggests that any particular demographic has been buffered by this, buffered from this loneliness epidemic that is in the West, that it's in uh the UK. I think they have a loneliness czar, like a czar, um, uh, Korea, um, a lot of places in the West. I I have spoken to Mike Gervin and it doesn't seem to be a problem and sort of um uh small-scale societies um For reasons that we could try and play with and get into. But in any case, yes, it's a huge problem. What are the mechanisms that lead from friendship to health or social support to health? We don't know. That's the short answer. My guess would be that you probably have to bear extra energetic costs

to get and do everything yourself, right? Um, and we do know how stress impacts the immune system. That's energetically costly. Um, so maybe it upregulates that. Um, we do know that uh loneliness itself can be a cue of stress, um, which might feed back on itself. Um, so you've uh in sort of that Mark Leary sociometer sense, um, if you're lonely, you're probably doing something wrong. You might have a low opinion of yourself and that can feed back on itself. So we haven't elucidated those mechanisms. There is a world of work to be done. It's probably not even that difficult to do some of that work. There's really great groundwork that folks like Brenda Major have laid out between obesity stigma and the outcomes related to it, obesity

itself. So there are models to use. The second question was how do we actually do something about it? Right. Yeah. Okay. Uh we don't fucking know. People people have started to ask me this question. Um, how do we help people not be lonely? Right. Um and so so first I should just say most of the people that I talk to are what Musa Algarbi would call symbolic capitalists. They do jobs like we do, they go to college, they move around a lot. Um, they have they are the people who are writing the essays about having trouble making friends in adulthood. Um it is entirely possible that that's a problem for folks like us because we are moving around a lot in adulthood, right? This is a symbolic capitalist problem more.

Potentially. Potentially. Interesting. Yeah. So if you live in the same place and all the people you went to uh a grade school and made friends with live in the same place, you don't face this challenge of making new friends or having to recruit the same sort of systems and face the same sort of challenges you needed to recruit to essentially solve friendship, right? Right. You break it down to its components, you need to find, make, and keep friends. You are just keeping friends at that point if you stay in the same place. Um, uh, so but I'm I'm glad that people are realizing that this is a challenge. I think that's been one of the key hurdles is that um most of us make friends when we're young and it doesn't feel hard.

Um, and we only realize that there's a challenge to be solved because now we're adults and it feels hard and we're um professional women and we're trying to set our husbands up on play dates with other men, right? Um, that sounds condescending, and I don't mean it that way at all. Um, I've just encountered that over and over again. So yeah, people are starting to ask me. So, how do we actually solve this problem? What do the data say? The data don't exist. The data simply do not exist. We're starting to um do some friendship interventions here. We might work with Dan Conroy Beam's lab to do the prospective mating study that he's doing there at Santa Barbara to figure out: okay, can we pair people up and

make good romantic relationships? Maybe we could do that for friendship. Matt Lieberman, a social neuroscientist here, has a company called Resonance that's starting to try and play with this. I'm working with an amazing scientist and gentleman named Victor Kaufman, and with some of my students and with his postdoc, Lisa Walsh, trying to maybe get toward what we'd call a mega study, sort of in the Liz Dunn sense of what are all of the interventions that journalists have suggested, and academics to the sense that any of them have suggested anything as an intervention for actually helping people make friends in adulthood. What are they? Okay, now that we know what they are, um, let's deploy them across countries and

see what actually works. Um, that requires massive time, money, effort, and infrastructure, and we're building that. So um that's part of what I've been doing here at UCLA, part of the Center for Friendship Research, part of this friendship alliance thing that I am I've been building. Um, Because we don't even have the data to answer that question. If I wanted to answer that, I'd point you to essays that say go join a club. Yeah. I mean, I I love that answer because I feel um that the premature giving of advice is all too pervasive in social science. Um the urge to uh give lessons and takeaways uh and glib tips, uh uh it you know, it gets you status, it gets you uh in the door for for job applications, it gets you prestige.

Um everyone's constantly asking you, what do we do with this information? What do we do with this information? How can I use this to to better myself or or my relationships or whatever? You know, every pop psychology book, oh, this has lessons for the boardroom in the bedroom. You know, it's like we need to stop giving advice as a field. We are giving way too much advice on way too little data. Uh and we need to shut the fuck up. Uh uh pardon my French. Great. Would you would you agree with that? Amen. Yes, a hundred percent. We don't, especially in my area of work, we don't know what the hell we're doing. I mean, yeah. And even when I read other people's papers, right? Uh so um, Dave, if I were reading some of your papers on race and coalitions,

I'd be like, okay, so how do we solve racism sports? Um and to some extent, that's actually a kind of practical answer. I mean, you look at the the Philadelphia Eagles or any sports team, right? And you just don't see the kind of war. Those are the two. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I wouldn't give the advice of war. Um, certainly it comes to mind, but um, you know, if we have to, Canada's close. Too soon. Too soon? Yeah. Um, I have a question for you, Jamie. So I was living in Germany um until recently. And I've actually noticed so in Germany, in Berlin, um, there's really good public transportation. Um, and I kind of walked everywhere, uh, saw a lot of people, some people who I knew in my neighborhood, a lot of people who I didn't, like on public transportation.

um would eat out often. And because you know, eating out was cheap because for lots of reasons, including healthcare was cheaper. So you don't have to pay the healthcare or the weight staff, whatever. You can tip like two Euros and you know a meal is like 30 euros as opposed to like 80 plus tip, you know, whatever. long winded way of saying since I moved back to the US, I've found myself at a baseline being lonelier. It's sort of an obvious attribution, but like, has there been work that you know of on sort of maybe outside of friendship per se, but just sort of the psychophysics or the sort of structural issues beyond sort of like an individual level intervention, that there's just certain things.

Like, I mean, this is the Gervin point, right? Like if you look at Schwarand, people aren't lonely. Um, presumably it's not just because they're like, you know, seizing the day every morning. It's also a function of sort of the environment and how the environment's structured. Um, am I crazy? Is this an anecdotate, does this comport with sort of what you think uh maybe part of the loneliness epidemic. What do you think about that? I mean, I I think that's absolutely true and that must be correct. Um so the the psychophysics of it or like a sort of institutional architecture of loneliness is part and parcel of a lot of cities, um particularly affluent places where you don't need to rely on one another.

um, and where you can live your life with a different Uber driver, a different postmate, a different whomever every day. And you take your car to work and you work alone in your office and you come home and that's that. Um I so I have talked to folks like um anthropologists Luke Lowackey and Zach Garfield who are interested in this. Um and like you said, Mike Gervin talks about it. But um I mean, if you look at the HRAF, the electronic human relations area files that Yale keeps. And you look at sort of uh or other surveys of how people spend their time in small scale societies, um, you end up seeing a lot of time on shoot the shit. Um, but it's it's time that co occurs or overlaps with doing chores or anything

else. Um, we don't do that. We don't even have the architecture for that anymore. We don't have a common courtyard. We don't have those kinds of spaces. So in our little area, there are people who are thinking about this now with regard to social uh social connection, with regard to friendship in particular. And then, you know, you can go back to the city planning work and Jane Jacobs, right? And she would talk about how some of the greatest public parks were the greatest because they had this sort of mixed-use space around them. The hinterlands were I always think of Riton House Park in Philadelphia as being a great example of this, particularly pre-pandemic. It was surrounded by restaurants and shops and apartments and coffee houses.

It had the giant Barnes and Noble right on the corner, or next to the corner on the corner was anthropology, the uh store. Um uh and what that meant was that people are always walking through the park at all of these different times. Um, people are using it for all of these different things. You always saw people, and quite often you would see some of the same people. So her point was really just about the use of the space. But if you are seeing some of the same people, then you can form these acquaintances or loose ties, things like that that could go on to become truly supportive friendships. One of the things that I love about some of the advice is that it non-consciously takes from this, right?

Like go to the gym, form a habit, join a club. We don't know. We have to say we don't know. We should be saying we don't know. But that advice uh at least builds on this idea of repeated interaction, right? That's like the thing without which you cannot have a relationship. Um, one of the things that this idea of sort of an architecture of loneliness misses, though, is that it's not just about the mixed-use space and the time and seeing the same people. At some point, you're actually going to have to have time to spend on them. And so there's a really uh there's a fun study. It's admittedly very small. It's admittedly with undergrads by Hall out of Kansas that says it takes 200 hours to make a friend.

Um someone should absolutely do a giant version of that study. It would be very cool. Um but in any case, yeah, uh one of the things that it it misses is the time it takes to actually make a friend. Um, and that's something that uh a lot of us lack too. Um or uh so it pins off. And and just and the difficulty of coordinating schedules, everyone's got all their shit going on. Oh my god, yeah, right? Just like finding a common time is like the planets aligning, you know, it's it's crazy. And that's after you solve the problem of wanting the friend. So uh Yes, yes. Yeah, I there are people that probably want to be your friends, right? And I'm sure this is true for both of you, that you're just like, eh, I'd rather not, you

know, and you see them and they want to have this conversation. Um, and yeah, Pinself, I'm thinking about that uh curb your enthusiasm episode where he always talks to the guy on his way into the golf club. And um, it's just this like rigmarole of a conversation he doesn't want to have, he just wants to go and play golf with his real friends. Um, he's he has enough friends, he's good. Um, and uh so when the next guy comes, he never rolls down the window like to start the conversation. He just doesn't even go there. Um, but yeah, anyway, so you have to find the friends that you want and then actually make time for them while they're doing the same for you because you're not just picking friends like a claw game, you're trying to pick somebody who picks you back.

Yes. I mean, do you think that part of the problem of why it's so hard to make friends is precisely because we're so choosy about our friends? Uh well, that's really interesting. Um, and uh I mean what feeds into this is being eager to make friends with someone, we all sometimes take as a cue that you're kind of low status and cringe. That like you must not have a lot of friends, so you must be kind of a loser. And if you're eager to be my friend, then you must be kind of a loser. Uh and so we get caught in this feedback loop where none of us have friends, but in order to uh try to get a friend, you have to look eager to make friends, which makes you look like an unappealing friend. Uh, could that be going on?

I don't know. Yeah, so I think that's probably part of it. I would guess that's a mistaken. So that is a perception. I I believe I have anek data, and I think we have some preliminary data from an honors project we're doing on. So there's a lot of work in the romantic relationships literature on um singles and how they're stigmatized, and especially people who are voluntarily single, they're just they feel good on their own. People are like, what's wrong with those nutters? Um, And uh we're trying to do a similar line of work, just understanding basic person perception stuff about what we'd call friend singles, right? So people who um don't have friends. And then we could split that further into people who want friends and don't have them, and

people who don't want friends and don't have them, the sort of lone wolf kind of folks. Yeah. Um, and uh, I would guess that there is a negative perception of people who don't have friends compared to people who do have friends, and a cue of not having friends is wanting friends. And so, yes, exactly what you're saying would likely be true. If this person wants to be my friend, what's wrong with them that they don't already have friends? Yeah. You know, it's uh what is that? I don't want to be a member of any club that would have me. Who is that? Yes. Groucho Marks. That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. So we have to somehow make friends without making it look like we want to make friends.

That sounds really hard. I mean, grad school was great for this. You're all in a room together hanging out. You're forced to be next to each other. You're in a foxhole essentially fighting for the one job out of 500 that might possibly, you know. But um yeah, you can't artificially put people in stressful situations next to people that have the same interests as them four years, uh, day in and day out. But that would probably be a good way to make friends. Yeah. I suspect another part of uh why it's so hard to make friends, or at least part of the anxiety about it, is that in order to be friends with someone, you sort of have to equivalently like each other. And that itself is a really hard coordination problem to solve.

Because you don't want to be in a relationship where you like the person way more than they like you. Right. Uh, and oftentimes, like we find ourselves in these relationships where we're liked more, where the person likes us more than we like them. And we're often reluctant to signal that to them because that could uh sorry, do you hear that? My daughter's crying. Uh no, okay, good. I'm glad you don't hear it. Um so we don't wanna so if if I secretly don't like someone as much as they like me, or if I don't like them at all, like we're very reluctant to sh let them know. Like, so it's really hard to actually figure out whether someone likes you as much as you like them because if if they didn't, they wouldn't tell you, right?

Yes. That's the other side of it. Yeah. They're not gonna tell you that they don't like you. Yeah, there's just yeah, there's tremendous uncertainty. Uh, and there's really no way around that uncertainty. It's the it's the same thing as in romantic relationships. So let's just think of it as a dyadic kind of thing, but you have to calibrate, right? So I like you a three, and uh you like me a four. So maybe I go up to four if I want to, because you showed four, but if I like you a three and you like me an eight, I'm like, oh, this is a little uncomfortable. I don't know here. And I can't like it, does not behoove me to tell you that I like you a three when you like me an eight. Because if you like me that much, you're gonna take my side over more people, you're gonna

prioritize my needs over more people. So it's great for me if you think that I think you're my best friend, even though I think that you're a wanker, right? And it could and it could be bad for you. And it could be bad for you if the truth came out, because if you told the person that you were a three, that could end the relationship and they could become your enemy. They could become actually hostile to you and do things to damage your reputation. They could become an enemy. Yeah, you so you want these people to like you. And you have to put out a lot of energy. Well, if you're me, you have to put a lot of energy out in order to like be likable, right? Um that's not true, Jamie. That's not true, Jamie.

You're very likable. Well, with you guys, it's not work. Um, but you know. We we also there's another thing too, which is that uh I mean, with the romantic thing is sort of analogous, but it's even worse for friendship than the romantic thing because you know, presumably the romantic thing, at least there's sort of some notion of like standard. This is the most like non-sexual way to put the idea of sexuality, but it's almost like a canalization of like possibility space, right? Yeah, sort of like there's Yeah, you know, like there's no first base, second base, or third base for friendship. So exactly. So there's even the additional problem of sort of like we are going to uh slowly like escalate the relationship, and that's an additional complication of a friendship.

Like, there's no like, oh yeah, having sex, having a family, like you know, getting married. It's it's like a friendship, there's no delineation of uh of that. And so if you start early and there's minimal friendship cues, that's hiding a latent ideal, but neither person knows the other person well enough, maybe, or maybe they do, and then then it's easier to coordinate. But that's an additional complication of sort of we don't even know what the other wants or even what we want because we don't know the other person well enough. So it's really complicated. Yeah. No, it really it's a a coordination problem, a common knowledge problem, a liking problem, a timing problem. It's all of these problems.

And I I love what you're both saying about it, how it's similar to and at once different from the romantic relationship space. And to complicate it more, you know, you are not looking for, as most people typically are, a single person that you then pair off with, right? Um, you have to navigate multiple friendships at any one time. And maybe you have a best work friend and a best friend from high school and another best friend from this other situation. Um, but I uh so okay, I'm gonna ask you all a question now. Is that is that okay? Please. I'm going to put it in the most uh crass way possible, But out of curiosity, uh Pins off going back to what you said, what is the hand down the pants of friendship to you all?

Yeah, what's what's the BJ? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like when are you friends? Um I I have no idea. I I honestly have no idea. I think that's part of the that's why making friends is so hard. At least with romantic relationships, we have, you know, a shared background understanding of like what it means to progress in a relationship. The stages, you know, you got the bases, you got, you know, marriage, you got, you know, you know, w uh kids. We we have all of these stages. Yep, you got the you got the first kiss and then you got you know, but we have none of that for friendship. Like I don't even know I don't even know where to begin. Like I I don't know. Do you have any intuitions about what what the equivalent would be?

I mean, I like the first kiss or something like that. You have made plans to hang out with one another on your own without um uh you know the whatever structure in which you met. Um so you met each other and then you you go forth and have a coffee date or something. Um so my best friend um uh who is Keela Williams, a professor of psychology at Hamilton College. Um, also, I think she's taught the first class on friendship that I know of at the college level, period. That's insane. It is insane, right? We have to circle back to that. Why, why is friendship uh yeah, we have to circle back. Yeah, exactly. Um, so uh, and it was people loved that class. I'm gonna zoom into it at 5 15 a.m. in a couple weeks.

Um, because I love that class. So I love the idea of that class. Um so um uh I for the first year that we knew each other, um, I thought she hated me. It turns out that's her face. You know her. And I think you exactly you find it funny because you know her. Resting bitch face, I believe is the term. Uh it it's one of them, man. Yeah. Um, and so she, but we bonded over Val Kilmer. Um, in any movie that Val Kilmer is in, with the exception of Heat, uh, you should want to be Val Kilmer. So if I am romantically dating you and you tell me that you want to be Maverick, that is the end. That is it. Like you want to be a shortfoot to that guy? Absolutely not. No. Um, but Iceman, that's the right answer.

Uh, I mean, you could also Viper is cool and whatever. Anyway, um, Doc Holiday, who by the way went to Penn for dentistry. So um, you should want to be him. I'm here, Huckleberry. That's come on, like, yeah, you ain't no Daisy at all. Um, Real Genius, which is what I thought academia would be a little bit as well. I thought it would be the West Wing crossed with the movie Real Genius, where they blow up the guy's house with popcorn and lasers. And anyway, it doesn't hold up. Val Kilmer. Anyway, so we bonded over Val Kilmer. Um, and uh we were in some room on campus at ASU, um, just the two of us talking about work. We were talking about ideas. Um, and uh we started sort of baring the neck a little bit in terms of sharing secrets and ideas or evaluative

concepts and ideas about other people. Um, I told her uh something um that was very private about my partner at the time, not in the that's like third base. That's like divulging sensitive information. That's like hand down the pants, right? It re It really might be. Um I think those are sort of like entrees. So people talk about bids for attention and romantic relationships. Um I think sharing sensitive information is a bit of a bearing of the neck or a showing of the stomach. It's um social play, but it can have really serious consequences in a way that just, you know, some play might not. Um so anyway, that to me is I remember that moment. I remember that is when we became friends. Whereas uh with some other friends, like if um folks you've uh so you've had Dan Conroy

Beam on your show, he and I can't even remember when we met. The first time I really remember talking to him is an H bus. I sat down next to him and I congratulated him on a BBS paper, which by the way, he did not have. Um, and we just started talking and we became friends. And I don't know. I I don't know. I don't know when I met Eric Peterson. Uh Dave, I met you uh at an EvSec pre conference, I think. And Rob Kurzban introduced us. Uh, you and Annie were there, and I maybe it was I don't know, 2014, 2015, around there. Um, I remember that, but I don't remember meeting you. I just remember that I was going to be introduced to you and I was excited. Um, pince off, I don't know how the hell we met.

And I figured that we were friends before I moved here and we like actually became friends. I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think we met at HBAS. It must have been true, right? Yeah. Like where else would we have met? Yeah, I think I remember, yeah, it was maybe I we weren't we didn't become like like good friends until you moved to LA, but I remember we were like we knew each other at HBS's. I remember like we just complimented each other's research or something at one of the HBSs. Yeah. Um I do think it's easier, at least for me, to become friends with other Ev people because we share so many of the same ideas. Um uh first principles, maybe. Um, I don't know. It's uh uh I'm much more relaxed with those folks.

Um it could also be a particular like personal idiosyncratic weirdness of I always worry that I'm not nice because I'm I'm not. Um, but or at least it takes a lot of effort. Um, and I don't put it in unless there's reason. Um and uh social psychologists really value niceness and the performance of niceness and thanking people after the talk and all these things that I would consider to be gargantuan wastes of time that they could do quickly with the same impact on the other person. Um uh so anyway, um I don't feel as I don't I worry that I'm an asshole and I don't feel that way with you guys in in our world. Not even the anthropologists. So yeah. Behavioral ecologists, some of them, but is that is that is that kind of a throwback to

Philly too? I think it is. We're I I mean, I don't I don't think we were particularly colonized by the Dutch or anything, but we don't sugarcoat a lot. Uh, we're very straightforward. Um, and I really appreciate that. I appreciate that in everyone I interact with, a directness and and honesty. And like there's a level of respect to that, but I think you don't you don't get with all of this, you know, baroque niceness um or the performance of anyway. Uh yeah, I I don't know what the hell is wrong with me. I mean, I I suspect another part of the friendship loneliness crisis, whatever you want to call it, um, is that it really helps to have a shared thing that you're into. So we're all into F-Psych.

Um and it's really hard to be friends with someone if you don't have a shared thing. And I think what's happening with culture is that it's getting more and more divided and nichefied for lack of a better word. Like there are so many different kinds of shows and different kinds of music and different kinds of food and different kinds of cloak, whatever. There's so many different subcultures. And the odds that you're gonna find a friend who is into the same shit that you're into are very low. And that's a huge problem because you really need a shared thing in order to, you know, really escalate a friendship. Yeah, there's some really cool work on shared reality that folks are doing here. Uh, Grace Meow, um, uh, this uh who's a communication student

and social neuroscientist working with Rick Dale and Matt Lieberman. Um Matt Lieberman's student uh Bear Goldstein is doing this ridiculously badass study that I'll probably butcher right now. But essentially people who are friends, and this comes from some Carolyn Parkinson's work, they have, and people who are closer in the social network and necessarily friends sometimes, right? So end up having more brain synchrony when they watch videos. So if we all watched an episode of the Hulu show the bear or FX show the bear, Um, there's one episode where Sydney and Carmi are fighting, and you could take one side or the other. Um, and as Bear describes it, um, he took one person's side and someone else took

another person's side, and then they couldn't believe that they weren't seeing the same thing, like that dress meme that some people saw it blue and black black, and other people saw it white and gold. They couldn't even see it. And that's what I love about the dress is that I can't even see it the other way. Um, and so uh the then they talked about it and they changed perspectives and blah, blah, blah. But what he's going to try to do is actually um get the sort of average of the, I'm just going to call it because I'm not a neuroscientist, and this is going to be really clear in a second, because I'm going to call it the brain wavery of the um people that are on Carmi side versus Sydney side.

And while some of these patient people are actually patients undergoing brain surgery, um, he's going to try and activate that pattern to see if while they watch they have to be awake during the surgery, while they watch this episode of the bear, activating that pattern makes them more likely to take the side of one person or another. So um basically is going to get the average of you know the Carmi side versus the Sydney side. And it's so cool. So people are doing really, really neat work about um synchrony and shared reality and i think coming from having something in common like evpsych perhaps in particular evpsy for reasons i don't quite understand um provides you a shared reality provides you um all of these coordination points um

things in common uh times you might see each other that lend themselves to creating these friendships or alliances Um there was more I was gonna say, but I got totally distracted by how cool that study is. That that's uh some weird freaky sci-fi stuff. It is, right? Yeah. Uh I also I just can I say I love the idea of you're about to get brain surgery and somebody's like, We're gonna have you watch a TV during your brain surgery. I just love that. It's the bear, by the way. Do you like the bear? Have you seen it? Um I have not I'm yeah, I'm sorry. Oh, it's really good. Oh, right. So um one of the experiments that I would love to do that you cannot do, um, even though this one is like, could you do that?

Yes, they're gonna do that. Um uh so pins off to what you were saying. Um back when there was a shared reality, when anybody everybody watched either like CBS or ABC or NBC, right? Yeah. So there were common touch points. There was a shared reality there. And how cool would it be if we forced people to only have those three channels for a little while and see if people that had less choice or fewer choices in these cultural touchstones actually ended up being less lonely because they had more shared reality with other people. I think that could be a possibility. I also think that they can go on their phones and get on the internet and find, you know, a 13-year-old SoundCloud rapper with a Xanax problem and a face tattoo that four other people

have heard of and it ruins everything. Yeah, it would be cool to see if, you know, the rise of streaming and the decline of big cable networks is associated with changes in loneliness to do like, you know, time series or something like that. Yeah. You'd have to do a time series to get anything close to causality because of the massive cohort effects. But that would be that would be really cool. Someone listening to this should do that. I mean, I know, I mean, just anecdotally, like a lot of the reason why people are into sports is precisely for social reasons, because it's such a great way to connect with people. Um, but the thing is like I hate sports and uh I know that if I watch sports I'd probably

have an easier time connecting with people, but I don't want to connect with sports people. I don't know why. Maybe they're not high enough on on uh on my friendometer. I'm too picky. But yeah, I don't I don't like sports. Uh I find them boring. Um but there's another question. Um I you know, I don't I don't know about I don't know about repellent. Maybe sports the sports people is what I mean. Sports people can sometimes be repellent. Yeah. Um not always. I don't know. I think I just find it in intrinsically boring. I think that's that's it. And you know, I find boring things and boring people kind of repellent. Uh so that's probably tied in with it. Um I just need a lot of intellectual stimulation.

And and sports just doesn't get me going. Uh but um anyway, leaving aside sports, I'm curious what you think. You mentioned at the beginning uh that Psyche has a weird sense of community and camaraderie that is probably absent from like social psych or um other like large areas, yeah. Like larger like yeah, yeah, yeah. Like not one of the small con subconferences like CESP or something, yeah. So I'm wondering if an ingredient of friendship is not merely having a shared thing or a shared group identity, but having a shared group identity that is in some way embattled. Well, I was gonna say distinct, but embattled. That would be embattled in in the minority, basically lowering the amount of outside options for people who are in that group.

Because if I am a diehard evolutionary psychologist, it's a you know, as we know, it's a controversial field. Uh, that's going to limit my outside options for the number of people who will be friends with me, compared to if I was in more of a mainstream field or a mainstream discipline, or if I if I was uh into sports psychology, say. Um so maybe there's something about the perception of outside options of a of a minority or embattled group that increases camaraderie over and above group membership itself. So I I I don't think that that's the thing. Um Um, I think it's possible. I think being embattled, you know, I think that's probably a cue that you're willing to take these costs. But I would say, and where I thought you were going was that it's not just a shared

identity, but it's a shared identity that's distinct from maybe something larger that anyone else could hold on to. And if you think about like the oh god, like the Frankfurt school kind of stuff or all of the um sociology of popular culture on adorno and subcultures of style and what's that hebdage um uh the that you have a style that is not only yours but sufficiently different from others is what's so important and that's what cues the the membership to one another um and so I I could see the distinctness of it being a component, but that it is embattled means you're really you are willing to pay a cost to engage in the yeah. I mean that that's an idea. I don't know. They're they're entry costs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's sort of like the it's it's oh sorry, Jamie, go ahead. No, I said I was leaning back far from the mic. I taking all of this in. This is so much fun, by the way. Sorry. Yeah, that's why yeah. Um uh there's an idea that um hazing is sort of a like the sousis in other people. I know Andy Dalton was sort of in Aldo, Chimino Hi, Aldo. I'm not sure where you are now, but uh Aldo uh people were looking at this with the idea that sort of hazing is sort of the institutional structure that's a workaround when it's not an embattled thing. That's sort of that there's a um cost to enroll up front that show that weeds out people who aren't actually interested. Sort of like the fight club thing where they have to just sort of stand outside for in the

rain for a day before they're even let in. I mean that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. I know Richard Sosas has some data showing looking at like communes and how long they're likely to last and whether they disband, and basically showing a correlation between the costliness of the of the rituals uh and the initiation rites uh predicting the longevity of the group. Um connecting to this idea of entry costs sort of selecting for people who are committed to the group. It's interesting. Yeah. I wondered if you're not going to be able to please go. So the becoming part of a group sort of solves some of the problems we were talking about in dyadic friendship. So Pinsaf, Pin you were mentioning about uh mentioning pickiness.

And so um, I mean, that in and of itself could be a problem because you have to get picked back. But presumably if you have high friend value or association value, you'd be more likely to get picked back. Um and uh Dan Conroy Beam and I have some work suggesting that and maybe um but uh the the cost of like the the common knowledge and calibration. Cause if you there's a group and person A wants to be part of the group, that's that's really simple. You you know you're in the group. Um you don't have to do that for the sort of dyadic or maybe you know few person friendship of that calibration cost. Um I hadn't thought about that before. I actually have a student uh with Dan, uh Clara Labrador, who's doing the agent-based

modeling, and there's an association value. Um, and then it's looking at group formation and how stable they are. And basically what you find is that um the agents all have their own sort of association value, and eventually they actually sort of it's just it's just sort of an arbitrary in the in the toy game. It's uh it's something like you could be a hundred, which means you're really great to be around and or a zero, which means you're not really great in the in the artificial world, it's just a hundred to zero. But it would be presumably a stand in for you know the ability to you you're a good hunter, you have resources, you're funny. Okay, cool. Anything like that. Yeah, exactly. But it sort of just gets um distilled artificially down to like a zero to a hundred or or

got it, um roughly speaking. But what she finds is that um if you include uh agents tracking reciprocity, so I sort of see if you'll be friends with me and then I'll wait back to see if you reciprocate. Um, and then also use third party representations. So I sort of the triad things of like, you know, do I'll try to sort of befriend people that uh I'm are friends with people I'm friends with, right? Um that kind of thing, that sort of transitivity. Um, if you include the reciprocity tracking and the third party or social learning, the transitivity. So I'm using if we're already friends, I'm gonna use how I see you interacting with other people as a gauge to see whether or not I should also try those people as friends.

What you end up finding is that uh people will actually, the groups will assort by value, by association value, even then that's not programmed into the agents. If you strip out the third party representation where I don't use that transitive model and I'm just looking at who reciprocates, you don't get it. Um interesting. So in the same way that like in the mating domain, uh the tens will pair up with the tens and the nines will pair up with the nines, you see that in the group game where the tens will form a group of tens, the cool kids, the popular kids, and the k in the cafeteria and and so forth down the line. That's right. They're especially stable when they do. There's the occasional sort of um, and and some of the details are sort of a function of

some of the details of implementing it, but the general principle applies. Um, but generally, you know, you get like stable groups of four, for example, and they're almost like carbon atoms. They're really hard to sort of break up, but occasionally it gets sort of like, you know, I think where there's somebody on a uh an edge where they're acceptable to one person in the group but not the others. So they're kind of constantly it's sort of a five then a four, a group of five then a four, group of five, then a four. Yeah. So interesting. If you amplify the hazing costs there or the the costs of entry, does that allow for a more heterogeneous uh group in terms of association value? Or it's a great question.

Uh I should talk to Clara about that. And just curious. Yeah. That is I if anything, it might um reduce heterogeneity. So insofar as yeah, your ability to to incur those costs is correlated with your association value. So only that's right. What's the relationship between that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if if the the costs function to sort of filter out people by their association value, then you could it could actually help, you know, uh stabilize groups of tens because only tens are willing or able to pay the costs. And so that's gonna ensure that only tens enter the group or stay in the group. Oh wow. That is yeah, that's a lot of fun. Um it also makes me think of so when I gave my job talk here at UCLA, the very

first question I got was from Carrie Johnson, and it was about um couple's friends. Uh, and so if you are partnered with somebody who is like this is your partner, uh, most social outings in your, you know, time is inelastic. A lot of social outings, they're gonna have to be with you. And if they kind of suck or they're uh disagreeable, that can pose so many problems for you, not only um having couples' friends, but for you yourself having friends. Um, and uh thank God I love each of your wives. They're really cool. Um, but uh I what I told Carrie was like, my husband's really difficult. And I didn't mean that to be funny, but everybody thought that was really funny. Um somebody needs to have a somebody needs to have a theory of humor to explain that.

So if only that existed. Um it does make it more difficult when you have to go into the group with someone. And typically, you know, uh, romantic couples will probably have similar association value, even if the good itself is not the same good that they're high on, right? Um, but um, and this is why in like the real world outside of academia, if I get stuck in like a sort of traditional gender group that is not a bunch of academics where all the women are in the kitchen and they're talking about God knows what, like their children, I oh man, I cannot get out of there soon enough. Thank God Bob doesn't talk to us. Yeah, it's like me being in a group of dudes talking about sports. Yeah, we could switch.

I would totally talk about sports. I would totally talk about kids. It does. It really like, let's do this. Um, but also uh yeah, the the people that you associate with um do really, really affect you. Um, we don't we don't always think about it in that way, that they're sort of the, you know, pair-bonded atom that comes with you in the conversation. Jamie, one thing we've talked about in other episodes is sort of from an evolutionary perspective, one gets a sense of respect for the complexity and sort of fragility of human nature. Friendship. Well, I was thinking when I, you know, when you were coming on, I was thinking about how I think about friendship or how I think about the culture thinks about friendship.

And it feels like such a luxury. It sort of feels like giving somebody a hug almost, where it's sort of seen as this sort of all it's a luxury that's not respected, or it's almost campy. It's sort of like, well, friendship. Yeah. Do you agree with that? And then do you have a thought about why that is? So I sort of agree with that to the extent that, and this is to the second part of your question, when people think about it, they don't think about it in terms of trade-offs or the net benefits. They just think friendship is a pure good. Like friendship is great, hugs are great. Um, at the very least, there's an opportunity cost. The hug that you are giving is the meal you're not hunting, right?

And an evolutionary psychologist would at least get that. Um, I think a lot of people think that it really is this fuzzy, happy, purely beautiful thing. And so that would be that would be my best answer to that. We don't think about the fact that friendships are costly. You end up fighting some of your friends' battles. Your friends take some of your time. I'm working on this paper with uh Doug Kenrick and some grad students uh from across labs at ASU, actually a couple papers um on uh what we're calling bad friends. And it's not really bad so much as ambivalent. And there's some cool work on ambivalent ties, but um basically when we think about friends, we think about all the great things they do for you.

And I even said, you know, friendship is the next best thing you could do for your health behind quitting smoking. Presumably, although we never say it, that is good friends, right? High quality, positive friendships. But you've probably had friends or former friends or colleagues who are a net drain on you, right? Or friends of friends who you can't get rid of because you can't get rid of the friend who are a net drain on you. And that's an indirect drain. So yeah, I think a part of the reason we think of it as a luxury or as a fluffy thing is we don't think about its uh gnarly underside and it has one. And an Ev person absolutely thinks about that. Um it's uh so there's this book series called the Sholomance series.

It's like a young adult, um, dark Harry Potter, And it's a three-book series. The first book is really awesome. Um, and for to do magic, you need to incur costs. So, for example, you might do 50 push-ups or something to be able to cast a spell to clean your room. Um in Harry Potter, you're just Alohomora or whatever it is, right? You you magic is free. Um, and that's bullshit. Uh, I like worlds where magic is costly. Like the same thing in Lev Grossman's The Magicians. You have to pay a cost. But um, the Sholeman series makes the trade-offs so apparent and embedded into the world, it's it's almost like reading Ev fiction or something. Um how is it possible that there's so little work on friendship?

Okay, so why is there so little work on friendship? Um so it is a compounding problem. Um first, people don't tend to think of it as a problem that needs to be solved. Um there's a real instinct blindness there, right? That friendship is a challenge or um consists of challenges that we have to solve in order to realize it. And so we haven't bothered with it. Whereas, you know, the most easy and direct comparison is romantic relationships. People have trouble having romantic relationships throughout history all the time, right? So we know that that's a problem to solve and we study it. Um, and maybe we even throw some money at it. Very cool. Um so if you don't realize it's a problem to solve, you

don't even think to study it. Um, if you don't see it as a phenomenon that's interesting, you don't think to study it. And again, the direct comparison would be romantic relationships. People are always going to find it sexy and interesting because they're definitely going to want to have a romantic relationship, or most people, right? Um uh most people want to have friendships, but again, it's not a thing they see as a challenge that they have to solve. So that's sort of the first step of the problem. There people haven't studied it because they didn't realize it was a thing that was needed, worthy of study, or a challenge that the mind had to solve, or however you want to put it. So some sociologists study friendship, some anthropologists study friendship,

psychologists who study friendship. So within social developmental psychologists study it all the time. Let's say that. I should say for adult friendship, right? So then you end up in health psychology, and maybe they look at older adults because they're worried about their loneliness and health outcomes. for just um healthy adults um who's studying friendship you can look in social psychology and in the subfield of um the close relationships um and there are very very few people which means there are very very few labs for um undergrads to get trained in friendship or exposed to friendship um i think I think that a lot of our textbooks don't even mention friendship. So they don't read about friendship in science and social psychology.

So yeah, they don't realize it exists. They don't get exposed to it. They don't get training in it. And so if the time comes where they want to go to grad school to study friendship, then where are they going to apply? There are like 10 places. uh part of what we're doing at the Center for Friendship Research is we have a page on our website that's just all of the places that you can go to study friendship. And a lot of those people are people who are willing to study friendship, but don't actually do it as their bread and butter. They study relationships. Um and so actually, this is serendipitous. I have this book by Bev Fair on my desk, Friendship Processes from 1996. I know it's on page six, And this is sort of the state of the art of friendship

in 1996 in relationship science and still now. In any case, the the whole point of it is that in friendship science, um, there is simply in relationship science, they don't differentiate friendship from other relationships. So they study attraction and relationships. They're all grouped together. There is literally no theory of friendships per se. That's the quote that I was looking for, which I'm sure is underlined in there somewhere. And so that's that's the state of the art then, and that remains the state of the art now in mainstream social psychology and relationship science. Um and also, I should say those relationship science is not like a big job getter sub-area. So that can be difficult too.

You sort of have to rub up against health to get a job, to get a grant. People aren't spending a lot of money for basic science on romantic relationships, the way that they are for things that have more directly uh that are more directly linked to health outcomes. Hopefully that will change because of this loneliness epidemic, because of um the economic and social costs of not having friends. Um, because so few people are studying friendship. If you were to put in a grant on friendship, I think it would have a good chance. Uh Templeton, as far as I know from Michael Barlov, doesn't have a single grant that they're funding on friendship, but it's a very John Templeton kind of topic. Um, NSF doesn't have a lot on friendship right now.

Um, I have their career award, um, and that's all friendship stuff that we're doing in my lab. Um, and then the Center for Friendship Research that we started here at UCLA with Carolyn Parkinson, Matt Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and Victor Kaufman, and this panoply of amazing grad students spanning developmental and social neuroscience and com and social and postdocs who are now at other places, and some of your grad students come in and hang out. We are trying to sort of galvanize the community and change this. But yeah, the reason people don't do it is they don't realize it's a a thing to be studied. They don't get exposed to friendship as a thing worthy of study. Um, and then even if they do, there are so few places to go to study it.

That was the answer I should have given it first. No, that's great. I mean, I wonder if part of the reason why we view friendship incorrectly as a kind of frivolous thing is that we're so alienated from the Darwinian functions of friendship and our modern prosperous society that if you think about what the selection pressures for friendship might have been for our ancestors, it was probably something like really extreme hardships. You're injured and you can't forage. You're sick and you need someone to take care of you. You know, people in the group are conspiring against you and you need allies who will take your side. You're accused of a transgression and you need people to stick up for you.

Like these would have been life or death situations. Um, and precisely because we're living in such modern, affluent, safe societies with police forces and fire departments and modern medicine, um, we don't really have those hardships uh that we would need friends to help us out with. Um and this is an argument that um Tubian Cosby's make in their paper um the evol on the on the banker's paradox and the evolution of altruism, which is that because that um these kinds of extreme hardships are often the best sources of information gathering about who your true friends are. Uh, because it it's often unclear who your tr true friends are, whether they're a fair weather friend who's just in it uh when it's in their short term self interest to to help

you out, or whether they truly care about your your well being, independent of what you can uh do for them. Um and when you're sick or people are conspiring against you or injured or whatever, that's an opportunity to figure out who's who's truly on your side, who truly uh has a stake in your welfare and who's just a fair weather friend. But because we don't have those kinds of experiences nearly as frequently as we did in ancestral environments, there's just so much more uncertainty about who our true friends are. And so we really don't know who our true friends are because we have we have so little evidence one way or the other. So I'm wondering if that is not only the the answer to why we don't take friendship

seriously, is because we have so few of these these hardship moments where where friends you know are are um are so necessary. But it's also one of the uh many causes of of the loneliness epidemic, which is that there's just so much more uncertainty about who our friends are because we don't have these kinds of moments to figure out who our true friends are. What do you what do you think about that? I absolutely buy that. It also, so um, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of well, theory, period, but theory of friendship in Evpsy, whereas there does not exist one in relationship science, right? So we have this alliance hypothesis of friendship that suggests that friendship is in part

the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble antagonist or um designed to assemble support for uh future um agonistic interactions. And so, on that view, I should, for example, take the side of the friend in a fight between two friends. I should take the side of the friend who's most likely to take my side later so that they survive the fight and live to take my side another day, right? And then we have this sort of Tubian Cosmodies view that could potentially encompass that, but friendship is really social insurance. And so if a drought and famine strikes our community and we're in need and other people around us in need, um, that's exactly when strangers are least likely to invest in us

because we look like bad bets for reciprocity. And I know you guys know this, but just for your listeners. So what do we need? We need help. We might not be able to survive without it. How do we get this help? We need people who have a stake in our continued welfare. And our good friends might have a stake in our welfare. Not only that, but they might have a stake in our welfare and help us over other people who are in similar need as us. And so we survive. And that benefits our friends because we have a stake in their welfare. And when they inevitably face their own times of illness, injury, et cetera, we'll be around to help them. And the Tubi and Cosmides version sort of more directly comes from an

anthropological view of the human world, right? This is what a challenge that people would have faced over evolutionary time. The alliance hypothesis is also part of that. We certainly would have faced that, but that seems uh still part and part of our worlds, even today, divorced from everything, when you have to, you know, form your little alliances at work to get the person that you want hired or whatever, right? Um, and it kind of reminds me again of the the schism between who we are as psychologists and who we study. Um, sometimes we just study each other and college students, and they're all going to face this alliance problem. But we don't study a lot of people who don't go to college and live in the same place that

they grew up and might face or be more likely to face in some instances those real hardships. They might have better insight into human friendship psychology than any of us do, precisely because of pins off what you're saying. our friendships are divorced from the challenges um that the friendships arose to to combat, to face. Did that make any sense the way that I said it? Totally. Oh absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think about this sometimes, the the two different views of friendship there. Um uh I uh I don't know what the right term is, non-symbolic capitalists, like heartland folks, real people. Like it depends on who you talk to, but we actually have to talk to people who aren't us to understand friendship better.

And I think we've done a piss poor job at that. Um, but also time isn't elastic. So um somebody needs to go out there with like a little tape recorder and just start interviewing people who are not us in this weird world. Um, not the Henrik weird, but like just very strange, weird world, and ask them about their friendships. Um, and I bet you'll see things like um Ann Campbell recounts this in her um book that's in part on female friendships. Um, just being able to count on your female friend for some money to leave a bad romantic relationship was the difference between life and death. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's a really nice insight. Pensoff. I yeah, it's it's fun to think about this stuff and why we give friendship

the shaft. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, uh Dave, you were gonna say that there uh something about Keela teaching the classes and that there aren't even classes on it. I think that's part of the exposure problem, right? Most people would say, I think there's a Gallup poll from like 2015 that good friendships are part of well being, like right up there with their health and having a job. Um, but we don't have a class on it. You know, we have classes on jobs, we have classes on health, we have classes on romantic relationships, we have classes on 19th century Russian literature. Um, but friendship is one of uh the human universals that we don't think about or talk about or teach about. In fact, I went to Dan uh uh Don Brown's book about it.

Dan Bro now. Yeah, Don Brown, yeah, Definitely Universals. Yeah, we talked about that in my coming coming to EP story. Oh awesome, yeah. I almost said Don Brown, who I think wrote um the those Tom Hanks movie books. Exactly. Oh Dan Brown. Yeah, that's right. The Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code, yeah. So in the Da Vinci Code, uh talking about human universals and friendship, there's an albino monk played by Paul Bettney. The Da Vinci Code is the book that brought me to EbSec, that's right. Going back to the Don Brown Human Universals book. Yeah, so I don't think friendship is in there. I remember looking this up, and I didn't find friendship. Um human universals. Interesting. Yeah, I I think I probably have that book in here, but um, I pulled it up when I when I

when I was talking about it. Here, let me pull it up, see if I can uh let's see here. At least in the physical copy of the book that I have, it wasn't in there. Um the first yeah, first first stab at the huge list. I mean it's a it's an amazing list and I'm no no T no shade at this list, but yeah. Are you finding it? I don't know how I found it the first time. Uh yeah, I maybe I did Google Scholar. Yeah, David. Well take it, David, take a second while you're doing that. Jamie, this is a weird thing to ask this late in the conversation, but if an alien asked you what is friendship, what is it? Okay. Um, I would call it a voluntary, mostly, most of the time, uh communal most of the time, bond between two

or more people uh who have stakes in one another's welfare. And then I would try to differentiate it from other relationships by saying that typically this would occur between folks who are not highly genetically related. It turns out friends are more genetically related to one another than they would be by chance alone. But I think there's some Christakis work on this. And that it's people you also don't want to have sex with or aren't in a romantic relationship with, which is a weird thing because that's part of the uh practicals of studying it. We sort of have to define it that way to make it distinct from romantic relationships. But most of the things that make romantic relationships good and successful are probably

things that make friendships good and successful. Um, so anyway, put that in your type of difficulty and choke on the smoke. I'm curious, i uh in there is that a way of bridging the to be Cosby's banker paradox approach with the alliance hypothesis approach? If you posit that um we form alliances and take the sides of uh people that we have a higher stake in, So we use, you know, interdependence or how much of a stake you have uh in someone else as um a uh heuristic for choosing allies. Um and so if that's the case, then that is a way to bridge those two theories. So if if I have a high stake in you, I'm gonna take your side. Um and so I'm not only more likely to help you when you're when you're sick, but I'm also

more likely to to take your side because uh I'm I'm gonna rank my allies based on how much of a stake I have in their welfare. Yeah. So I I talk about um sort of the cognitive mechanics of how people figure out whose side to take in a um in a conflict between two of their friends. Um and then I always tell people, I'm gonna give you the like difficult answer, and then I'm gonna give you the answer that you're probably thinking of right now, um, which is the answer that you're bringing up. You take the side of the person you like better, right? Um, the more difficult version, and this is uh Peter DeSholy and Rob Kurzban would say that um uh so we have these Alicentric representations or representations of

where we think our friends rank us relative to their other friends. Um, probably more like a linear hierarchy than um a sort of dispersed network. So it's a little bit different than how Dunbar thinks about friendship as a sort of network, like a 2D circle. This is a 2D column. Um it's like basically you're talking about you know best friend, second best friend that's exactly. Yeah. So we have these allocentric representations. So another person would think that, you know, she has her best friend and I'm her second best friend, and so on. And so she would take my side over everyone else's in a fight between me and all her other friends, excepting her best friend. Okay. Yeah. So then we use these allocentric representations, which are our best bet, right?

This is not necessarily reality to form uh reciprocally our egocentric friend ranking, which is just our best friend at the top, our next best friend, and so on. Right. Yeah. I want to be best friends with the person who thinks they're best friends with me. I want to be second best with the person who thinks they're second best with me. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so our egocentric friend ranking, So what I'd say is it's not like out of a beautiful mind where you're just like coldly calculating these things on a window. Um it's the same thing as taking the side of the friend you like better, because um the reciprocal nature of it means that in a fight between your second ranked friend and your fourth ranked friend, you're taking the side of your second ranked friend, i.e.

the friend you like better than your fourth ranked friend, right? Yep. Um, so I think these things are hand in glove. Um And they make a lot of sense. I think they do go together. I do think there are valid questions about whether it's, you know, like a um a 3D sort of um like a think of goo and you lift goo up by a tip, like it's uh a representation of a network like that, rather than a 2D column or a 2D circle or concentric circles and what the networks really look like, and blah, blah, blah. And there are really interesting questions about how we try and game these allocentric representations in order to make other people like us better. Because ideally, you know, um everyone would think that I am their best friend and I would

take their side in a conflict because then they'd all take mine, um, which is a really horrific pressure if you think about it on friendships and can make them really messy. Um and uh then it you are back to that sort of Aristotle quote that a friend to all is a friend to none. Um there are many, many ways for that to be true. And this is one of them. Anyway, yeah. I do, I do think that that's sort of how they go together as this liking component is built on stakes and welfare, which we can measure by welfare trade-off ratio. Um, I do think that we have to be sensitive not just to the absolute value of the welfare trade-off ratio. So like uh pins off if I value you a five, right? Um, we're gonna interact and I'm gonna do positive things for you, and that's awesome.

Um, uh, but if you put me in a room with you and now Dave, but I value Dave a seven, although absolutely nothing has changed about the absolute value or quality of our dyadic relationship, now everything I was doing for you, I might do for him instead. Um, and so I think we have to think about these things um in terms of their being embedded in a network, um, and not just in terms of the dyad, which is how we typically study them, um, because it's easier and also because that's how people think about friendship as a dyadic relationship. Um, but uh it's uh yeah. And anyway, there are massive implications of that. Totally. No, I I get that. I think that's a really beautiful insight that is underappreciated.

Just how much um friendship is beyond the dyad, and how much, say, Dave's friendship rankings uh have externalities for me, and how your friendship rank so like if you bump Dave up in your friendship hierarchy, um there are often times where you have to choose between me and Dave. You only have one concert ticket or one spot left at the at the dinner reservation. Are you gonna choose me or Dave? If you bump Dave up, then then you're gonna be less likely to choose me and I'm gonna pay costs for that. That's gonna be a direct threat to me. Uh and we need to think about those kinds of positive and negative externalities of of friendship. And you know a relationship with you is not just a relationship to you.

It affects everyone else in the social network. Um it's it it's way more complicated than we think. Um so I pulled up the human universals, and you are correct. The word friendship is not on the list. However, there are there are some relate there's like cooperation is there, um reciprocity is there, affection expressed and felt is there. Um you have like coalitions and collective identities. Alliances Uh the word alliance is not there. You have coalitions, collective identities, and conflict. You have insulting. You have division of labor, role social roles. So stuff that's sort of like related to friendship on the periphery of it. Do you have the romantic stuff? Do you have um mating or pair bonds or any of those?

Um let's have those and you don't have friendship. Um, you only have some of the features that are sometimes common to friendship, then it would be more egregious. Again, it's still an amazing list, it's really important, etc. etc. Not yeah. Yeah. Uh so yeah, uh this I don't know. It's it's interesting. It's an interesting omission. So yeah, there's sexual attracti attraction, sexual attractiveness, sexual jealousy, uh stuff like that. Um so yeah, this this this could be uh an important omission. Um I think it is. Yeah. Cool. Um Yeah, I mean it goes back to what you guys have been saying about we don't even have words for some of these things, right? We don't have friendship um canalization or friendship first base, second base.

Yeah. We don't have um, you know, uh Pensaff, what did you say? Uh sexual attraction. We don't have like friend attraction. We don't have like um your friend sociosexuality. Yeah. Yeah. Bromance is probably the closest thing, but that's even not quite attraction. That's what happens after the attraction. Yeah. Yeah. That's more like courtship. Yeah. Yeah. What is friendship? Courtship. What is like it? We are so good at denying that we are doing this friendship flirting that because it would be bad, like you don't want to be the friendship flirt, right? No one wants to be the person courting the friendship. So, like you're saying, um, so we don't even have words for it. Um maybe that. So I keep getting approached by people to be like, write a book on friendship.

Then I'll be like, I will when I have data to write about. Um, but that might be a first chapter, is just all the words that we don't have for, you know, this is the list of romantic relationship things. Um, this is the list of sort of uh slang in in the popular lexicon. You have your bromance, but um what would be the actual word for this? What is the give us a language to use at least? Um so yeah, maybe one day. And we don't have a a a girl mance word as far as I'm aware. Um no, I'm I'm pretty sure that that's like an XNXX search term, but yeah. Yeah, don't Google that at work. Yeah, and I won't Google that. That'll be my my OnlyFans page, Girl Mance. Awesome. Yeah. Jamie, is there any question we should have asked you?

Oh, um uh I mean I don't have a good F psych animal name. You do. Um what There is nothing that I can think of. This was so much fun and very thorough. And I am really, I forgot how great it was to just talk about ideas without having a necessary return on investment. Um, you know, there needs to be a paper at the end of this, or let's talk about this toward a paper. um, just open-ended conversation about ideas. It makes me want to cry to remember that I like this. So thank you. Yeah, you gotta let people breathe. Yeah. We gotta let ourselves breathe. Yeah. Really good to talk to you, Jamie. Unless unless you've thought of a question between now and the the previous thing. I wish. I wish. I know.

I just um someday I want to ask you all about your friendships. I think that would be really fun. Um, but thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This was fantastic. Cool. This was lots of fun. Maybe we'll bring you back sometime and we'll talk about our friendship stories. Thank you for listening. Uh if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a kind review or check out our Patreon page if you want to throw us some money. Uh Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Is there anything else to say? Um uh come back for the next episode and um or if you're in the middle of binge listening, you know, go for that. Okay. Um stay tuned for the for the next episode.