The 3 character traits that make true friends
Friendship is the privilege of wise people, according to Epicurus. By meditating on the words of the philosopher, experts concretize the idea: friendship is essential in our relationships, it is scientifically proven. Our nature as mammals, as “social animals”, means that we need each other At the beginning of our life, to survive, then to grow, and finally to give meaning to our existence and flourish, explains Ilios Kotsou, researcher in positive psychology.
Friendship allows us to share, to exchange freely, to feel understood. We can, without risk, confide in ourselves, show ourselves vulnerable, imperfect. As long as you know the criteria that make good friends and take the opportunity to apply them to yourself. To do this, American researchers studied “essential” personality traits in friendships. Their conclusions, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationsand reported by PsyPostoffer avenues for reflection on the priority we give to our needs and their expression in our social relationships.
Loyalty, reliability and honesty
To identify traits considered essential (necessary) and those considered desirable (but not essential) in friendships, researchers conducted two comparative studies. The first was to test participants who had to make a decision under conditions of limited resources. Men and women had to create their “perfect” friend using a hypothetical budget based on a set number of “friendship tokens.” Loyalty, reliability, honesty, forgiveness, sharing, emotional intelligence, awareness of debt repayment : these different personality traits had to be chosen and distributed to “build your ideal friend”. The notion of a limited budget made it possible to make choices according to each person’s priorities, thus revealing the essential qualities of a friendship according to the panel.
Personality traits such as loyalty, reliability and honesty emerged as fundamental and necessary values in a friendship. These are the traits that participants strongly favored, even under budget constraints, suggesting their non-negotiable status in what constitutes a “vital” aspect of the ideal friend. Conversely, traits such as forgiveness, information sharing, emotional intelligence, and concern for debt repayment were rated as desirable but not essential.
Men and women: same expectations?
A second study, carried out in parallel by the researchers, reproduced and extended the first results by employing the forced choice paradigm with a larger sample of 449 participants. Designed to probe the hierarchical nature of good friend qualities, this method involves confronting people with forced choice scenarios in which they must choose between two combinations of friend traits. Each scenario pitted certain traits considered necessary against other non-essential traits. For example, participants had to choose between a friend who was always loyal but never reliable and a friend who was always reliable but never loyal. The responses thus allowed the experts to establish a hierarchical order of the qualities of the ideal friend and above all to reveal that men and women have the same expectations.
“One of the biggest surprises was the lack of gender differences,” said Jessica D. Ayers. Most friendship theories suggest that there should be gender differences in friendships/friendship preferences, since men and women have faced different adjustment problems over the course of History. »
Friendship, a complex subject
Although concerning, this subject of friendship is still very little studied, reveals the main author of the study Jessica D. Ayers, professor of Psychological Sciences at Boise State University (United States). “Most traditional social psychology theories have emphasized similarity, familiarity, and physical proximity as the primary drivers of friendship initiation, and only in the past 20 years have researchers started to consider individual differences in preferences that may influence who we want to be friends with. “, she explained. He added: “Friendships – how we create them, what we seek and how we maintain them – are much more complex than they seem. We are just beginning to understand all of the decisions people must make when deciding to form or maintain a friendship with another person. »
The researchers say additional research is needed to broaden demographic inclusiveness, examine how friendship criteria evolve over a lifetime, and test these preferences more authentically in more complex social contexts. “My long-term goals are to continue to understand preferences for initiating and maintaining a friendship, to eventually understand whether violating these preferences leads to the dissolution of the friendship or whether the history surrounding the dissolution is also more complex,” concludes Ayers.