What does the ideal friend look like? The question seems simple, almost childish. However, she intrigued a team of American researchers to the point of launching two successive studies to answer them. Objective: to identify, among a series of human qualities, those that we consider as absolutely essential in a friendship. Their conclusions, based on original experiments, shed new light on our way of loving, choosing and keeping our friends.
The three qualities that are unanimous
For this first study, researchers turned to a specific audience: undergraduate students, in a large public university in the southwest of the United States. Everyone has received a defined number of “friendship tokens”, to be distributed among several character traits in order to create their ideal friend. The more a feature received tokens, the more it was deemed essential. On the menu: loyalty, reliability, honesty, forgiveness, information sharing, emotional intelligence, and awareness of the reimbursement of debts.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, but with remarkable coherence, three features have imposed themselves at the top of preferences: loyalty, reliability and honesty. Qualities perceived as non -negotiable, essential to any lasting and balanced relationship. The other features, although appreciated, appeared as secondary, even accessories.
An amazing experience to test our preferences
But an experience, however ingenious as it is, is not enough to draw solid conclusions. This is why the researchers conducted a second study, this time with 449 participants and an even more subtle method: the “forced choice”.
In this version, the volunteers had to make arbitrations between two profiles of friends. Concrete example: Do you prefer a person always faithful but never reliable, or vice versa? By directly confronting the qualities between them, the experience revealed stable and frank preferences. Here again, the same fundamental features – loyalty, reliability, honesty – dominated, whatever the proposed dilemmas.
This type of situation makes it possible to go beyond the declarations of intention. It forces participants to prioritize, to give up, to decide. And it is precisely in these difficult choices that we really expect from a friendship.
Identical results for men and women
The other major teaching of this research is the lack of difference between the sexes. Men and women have formulated the same preferences, with the same clarity. For Jessica D. Ayers, Deputy Professor of Psychological Sciences at the Boisse State University and the main author of the study, this confirms a strong intuition: “Friendships – how we make them, what we are looking for and how we maintain them – are much more complex than it seems“.
She specifies: “We are just starting to understand all the decisions that people have to make when they decide to initiate or maintain a friendship with another person“. And this is only the beginning: his future work will look at the end of friendships, and in particular the way in which the betrayal of these key qualities can lead to rupture.