The Secret Power Of Friendship: 8 Ways Your Friends Shape You More Than You Realize
Your friendship can rewire your thinking and impact your choices in significant ways.
A. C. | Unsplash Friends are our unsung heroes. Soulmates and romantic partners get all the attention, and the fawning and the celebrating. But in many ways, it's our friends who rock. This isn't just my opinion. A whole stack of studies by social scientists have demonstrated all sorts of ways that our friends seem to make us better people: more upbeat, more resilient, more helpful, and more successful. Here are nine examples.
Here are 8 ways your friends shape you more than you realize:
1. You're happier because of your friends
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In a study by a Nobel Prize-winning social scientist, more than 900 adults described the people they were with the day before, and how they felt when they were with them. Participants were most likely to feel happy and least likely to experience negative emotions when they were with their friends.
The time they spent with their spouse or romantic partner, their children, other relatives, clients or customers, co-workers, or their boss was just not as enjoyable as the time they spent with their friends.
2. Close friendships from your past set you up for success later on
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Want to know whether you're going to be successful at work by the time you're 30? What matters is whether you were good at friendship when you were 20. If you had a close, confiding friendship around the age of 20, you're more likely to be a success at work 10 years later, according to research.
What if you had a good and lasting romantic relationship when you were 20? Doesn't matter. That has nothing to do with how well you will do at work when you are 30.
3. You're less anxious when you have your friends to count on
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Are you anxious in certain social situations? Call on your friends. You will feel less nervous in those difficult situations if your friend is right there next to you. You will also have fewer of those negative thoughts running through your head.
A 2016 study showed that older adults were more likely to be protected from loneliness, stress, and depression if they had friends or relatives they could count on than if they were married or in a relationship like marriage. Having a close friend is more likely to protect you from feeling depressed than having a romantic relationship.
4. You can tackle physical challenges more easily
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Are you facing a physical challenge, such as climbing a steep hill? Do it with a friend. When you're standing there looking at that hill with your friend by your side, it will actually look less steep to you than when you're standing there alone. Your friends can actually change what your body can do. Research shows that people who exercise with companions improve their pace and distance more than those who work out alone.
5. You're more humble with your friends
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Do you like yourself better when you're modest than when you're telling other people how great you are? Friends bring out the best in us in that way, too. We're more modest with our friends and more likely to be full of ourselves when we're with people we hardly know.
Research showed that people habitually present themselves differently depending on who they're interacting with, hyping themselves up with strangers but shifting toward modesty and a more authentic version of themselves among friends.
6. You're more helpful when you're around your friends
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Do you wish you were more helpful to other people? For that, you don't even need to be with a friend. If you're just thinking about a good friend, you're more likely to help a stranger than if you're thinking about someone who isn't that important to you, such as a coworker who isn't also a friend.
In one study, participants who got a neutral prompt were asked to think about acquaintances — the people you know but aren't close with. But when people were primed to feel secure, the effects were surprisingly wide-ranging: they assumed the best in people and felt more empathy toward strangers.
8. You may end up seeing the world the same way as your friends
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That happens with our friends. For example, pairs of female friends read other people more similarly than pairs of strangers do. Even without consulting with each other, two women who are friends will interpret another person's facial expressions in much the same way.
In one of the first studies I ever conducted, my undergraduate student and I showed pairs of friends pictures of facial expressions to see if they'd interpret them the same way. In a follow-up study, we found that female friends agreed with each other across the board, watching 10 seconds of anyone's facial expression, familiar or not, pleasant scene or unpleasant.
8. You get really good at seeing through each other
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Do you want to know how other people really are feeling, even when they aren't forthcoming? As the two of you become closer, you get better at detecting each other's lies.
In my research with colleagues, we followed pairs of new friends over several months and tested how well they could tell when the other person was faking their emotions. Friends were better at reading each other's true feelings than strangers were, and that ability kept improving over time.
Bella DePaulo, PhD., is the author of Singled Out and has written the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today since 2008; and has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, The Atlantic, and many other outlets.
