What's Friendship?

Excuse me for sounding like some lame-o, but in the past week or so I’ve been reminded how important friends are. After cashing in a bunch of favors, moving out of my apartment (and helping some folks move out of theirs), and more than one instance of Dobie Gray being sung over gins and tonics, I’d consider myself pretty lucky to have good ones. This isn’t just about me; we’re all lucky to have friends for laughs and support. But, if you’ll join me in throwing on our evolution goggles for a minute, why do we have them in the first place?

There’s one hell of a long history of failed attempts at trying to explain culture through the processes of natural selection, and thus consider this a sidelong glance at the question (I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments). But I ask because, if you were a subscriber of the Dawkins brand of individual-driven evolution, an idyllic view of friendship wouldn’t make any sense. If our evolution is driven simply by our genes’ ability to replicate themselves, then you’d expect, as Dawkins mostly does, that everything you do would necessarily have to have selfish motives. And if the driver of evolution is selfishness, then the only way you’re here today is because your ancestors were inherently selfish, which would mean you likely are too.

Through the selfish lens, altruistic acts — like those that you’d hopefully receive in a good friendship — are pretty darn hard to explain. In ecology, there’s long been the concept of kin selection, which suggests that you help those indirectly related to you because you still share some of the same genes. But how does that explain the kind acts an individual does for someone unrelated, like a friend?

Those acts are often tied into the concept of reciprocal altruism, which argues that helping out another individual, or a group as a whole, is simply a numbers game: I’m willing to do something to help someone else out because there’s a high enough probability of that someone returning the favor. But even if that helps explain, say, antipredator vigilance in birds, the idea that our relationships are solely based on what we get out of them seems rather depressingly Ayn Randian, doesn’t it?

Dawkins highlights his views in a recent review of Edward O. Wilson’s new book on the role of groups in evolution, The Social Conquest of Earth. From Dawkins’ piece in Prospect Magazine:

Penguins huddle for warmth. That's not group selection: every individual benefits. Lionesses hunting in groups catch more and larger prey than a lone hunter could: enough to make it worthwhile for everyone. Again, every individual benefits: group welfare is strictly incidental. Birds in flocks and fish in schools achieve safety in numbers, and may also conserve energy by riding each other's slipstreams—the same effect as racing cyclists sometimes exploit. Such individual advantages in group living are important but they have nothing to do with group selection. Group selection would imply that a group does something equivalent to surviving or dying, something equivalent to reproducing itself, and that it has something you could call a group phenotype, such that genes might influence its development, and hence their own survival.

It’s interesting that Dawkins’ piece was pretty roundly panned in the comments, but we should note some context as well: Wilson’s book builds off a paper he co-authored in 2010 that discusses various models for describing eusociality, a topic of which Wilson is one of the foremost experts in the world, and of which arguments have raged for about as long as evolutionary biology has existed.

But eusociality describes hierarchical group structures, like those of ants, and unless you take a rather cynical view of the world — that our ‘queens,’ like those lovable fat cats on Wall Street, are genetically designed to be at the top, while the rest of us forgo potential individual success to toil for the security that overall group success brings — it doesn’t offer the clearest insight into how our interpersonal relationships work. I mean, if you’ll allow me oversimplified reductions, Dawkins might argue that our friendships are nothing but superficial power moves, while Wilson might counter that our relationships are driven by some greater group matrix whose needs don’t necessarily align with our own.

Let’s instead look a little closer to home. There’s a wealth of evidence that chimpanzees, our closest natural relatives, have their own commodities markets, which in turn seem to form the basis of basic friendship. Late last year, Jill Pruetz and Stacy Lindshield published a paper looking at how chimpanzees share food and tools with each other. They argued that sharing is, at least in part, a social exercise. According to a New Scientist report by Rowan Hooper discussing the paper:

Pruetz suspects that item transfer is a social lubricant. “It seems like the ulterior motive is social group harmony on some level,” she says. If a male is transferring goods to another male, then Pruetz predicts that the male will expect support from the recipient of his largesse in any future aggressive encounter with other males. If a male shares with a female he is likely to expect sexual benefits from her. “But other age-sex classes were also involved,” says Pruetz, “and I think this reflects the cohesive nature of this chimp community.”

There’s one key nuance, as noted by Adrian Jaeggi of UC Santa Barbara in Hooper’s report: While there’s an expectation that favors will be returned, it’s more of a general expectation, rather than a more rigid requirement for return on one’s investment as argued for in reciprocal altruism calculations. “The observed exchanges resemble human friendships, in which we don’t keep detailed track of what we owe each other,” he told Hooper.

There seems to be a distinction between the aforementioned birds, who risk themselves to watch out for the group because they know the favor will be returned (and that cheaters will likely be punished), and the chimps, whose sharing appears to be more personal. Rather than saying “I’ll do this now, because someone else will cover it later,” chimpanzee sharing suggests that they’re more focused on relationships: I’ll lend you a tool now because I know you’ll be on my side when I need help, whatever that may be. It’s the difference between doing work in shifts and being available for someone in need.

Is this part of the basis of our human friendships? It sounds plausible. We prize people that are reliable, and we also tend to go the extra mile for the people we care about. That’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario, but nonetheless I think anyone would argue that trust and friendships go hand-in-hand. And it’s not like we’re being friendly for totally selfish reasons, to get a return in kind for what we do. It’s more personal than that: I help a friend move because maybe down the line I’ll need to be driven to Hoboken. In any case, the exchange of help is an integral part of the friendship.

But that situation could also describe any old business relationship as well, and in business actually liking someone isn’t a prerequisite to getting things done. Plus, as much as we praise reliability, we all have friends that we help and care about even when we expect nothing in return. (In less-kind words, a lot of us have friends that are worthless bozos. But if you’re reading this, you’re not one!) We don’t keep score in a real friendship, which would be a basic necessity for reciprocal altruism to work. How do we factor in that we genuinely like someone?

Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban published a paper in PLoS One that hypothesized that human friendship is based on alliances. They had study participants name their top ten friends, and had the participants divide a set number of friendship points amongst the ten (say, 100 points for the 10 people). The experiment was conducted under two conditions: One time the points were divided publicly (as in, the friends could see the results) and privately (the results were secret). In ‘public,’ the participants allocated points equally; in other words, they said all their friends were equally their friend. But in private, they clearly ranked some friends higher than others.

The kicker? DeScioli and Kurzban found that participants allocated points in private based on how they thought those friends would rank themselves. As Jason Goldman put it in an article for Scientific American, “Carl would place Arnold high up on his list if he thought that he ranked high on Arnold's list.”

DeScioli and Kurzban thus argue that:

Friendship is generated, in part, by cognitive systems that function to assemble a support group for potential conflicts…Human conflicts are usually decided by the number of supporters mobilized on each side (rather than strength or agility). …Therefore, individuals can increase their power by creating and maintaining a network of allies, well in advance, before the onset of an argument or quarrel.

Frenemies aside, this is an intriguing concept: Not only do we maintain friendships because they potentially may be advantageous to us, but also because they help us avoid conflict. (That’s something we’ve also seen in chimpanzees, who have their own police.) There’s another angle to that, too: Our friends may help us avoid conflict because they’re on our side or in our posse (or whatever), but there’s also the more direct benefit that if we spend our time with and effort on people that make us happy, we’re avoiding conflict by default. If we didn’t have any concept of friends, we’d end up wandering through life bumping into people that drove us insane.

So on top of all the great benefits that friends bring, the fact that they make us happy (and vice versa) means we all get to avoid the more bummer-inducing folks in the populace. But, if Americans really are losing their friends, a bigger question looms: What happens if friends disappear? Will we all turn into zombies stumbling about on a schizophrenic social trip of indiscriminate laughs and fights? Holy hell, I hope not. But whatever happens, don’t wait for the friendpocalypse to tell those close to you that they’re keeping your life together.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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