Why Friendship Is One of the Most Underrated Forces in Human Life

Friendship can change your health, your happiness, and even how long you live—so why do we treat it like an afterthought? We sit down with UCLA psychologist Dr. Jamie Krems, co-founder of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, to unpack what truly makes a friend, why betrayal cuts so deep, and how small acts can rebuild trust and closeness at any age.

Jamie takes us around the world to show how cultures define friendship, then brings it home with an evolutionary lens: friends are allies we rely on when we’re at our worst, not just our best. We explore the traits that matter most—kindness, loyalty, trustworthiness—and how men and women often prioritize support differently. We also challenge a common myth: jealousy is not automatically toxic. Sometimes it’s a useful alarm bell that a valued bond needs attention, especially in young adulthood and again in later life when social networks churn.

Technology and modern schedules have thinned our connections, fueling a loneliness epidemic with real health costs. Still, there’s hope in the tools at our fingertips. Messaging groups can “groom” many relationships at once, quick voice notes carry warmth, and consistent light touches keep ties alive. Jamie shares promising strategies—gratitude letters to friends, and the underrated power of asking for help—to ratchet up closeness over time. For listeners in midlife and beyond, we talk candidly about forming new friendships, sustaining old ones, and why friends often predict well-being even more than nearby family.

Friendship is under-researched compared with romance, but the science we do have points to clear action: invest in small, regular contact; express thanks; trade favors; and practice outreach like a skill. Press play to learn how to protect the bonds that protect you—and then send this to someone you want to keep close. If this conversation resonates, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Transcript

Opening And Show Setup

Dr Jaime Krems 0:00

No, I I did the forward to Amy Alcom's book Mean Girls, and I have a footnote in there that's just I forget what the footnote is even in reference to, but it just says, sorry, my father loved me, Emily. Still still a little spicy about it. Your next favorite podcast pick starts now. Here's the Professor and Heather Anne.

Hosts Reflect On Lifelong Friends

Heather Anne 0:24

Welcome to The Professor and Heather Anne. Although we don't have all the answers, we hope we can encourage and excite you. We're here sharing our lives to inspire you to make the most of the second half of your life.

Joe 0:38

And today's episode is about friendship. And we will have as our guest um uh Professor Jamie Krems, who is doing amazing research about friendship. Um but before we before we get to her, though, um we're gonna talk about uh our own friendship experiences. And I I am envious of you, Heather, because your best friend is someone that you've been best friends with since you were eight years old.

Heather Anne 1:05

Yes.

Joe 1:06

Um this is I I wish I had something like that. I I have a few friends, none of none of them are super close anymore, but I have a few friends that I made in grad school. So that's when I'm in my way, it was in my twenties. I don't know I'm not in contact at all with anyone from before that.

Heather Anne 1:22

Because of social media, I'm actually in contact with a lot of people that since that I've been friends with since elementary. My best friend and I have been best friends since we were eight. We met in the third grade, and we just hit it off, and we've been besties ever since. And as we have shared in previous episodes, we're actually moving to be their neck next door neighbors. Um, we used to live down the street from each other, and now we're going to be neighbors again, and we are very excited and very appreciative that our husbands um are willing to do this because you were you just jumped in and was like, let's do it. So um so we're excited for the next chapter for our lives and building that relationship even stronger. And we her and I have just scheduled a girls' weekend for just a couple of weeks that we we moved there. So we're very excited.

Joe 2:28

And it's I when we tell people this, so many people say, Oh, I wish I wish I could do that.

Heather Anne 2:34

And talking about social media and stuff, I am in contact with a lot of people that I again went to school with uh since elementary school. I was very fortunate that I went to the same school. So that helped build those friendships and those bonds. I just had one of my high school friends reach out um the other day and talk about some stuff that we did when we were in high school. Um we talked about how she was there for me when everything happened with my parents. And um, you know, she was just reaching out, she just had some questions and stuff and wanted to. She's like, I remember doing this, and um, and again, that's a whole nother episode, you know, and wanted to make sure she's like, Did I make a difference? And it's like, you made a difference. And we've talked about that as well, is that my friends and the sports that I did in growing up was the positive things that happened into my life and changed the trajectory of my life because of those friendships, and because I still have many of those friendships now, and especially with my best friend, but I know that's not normal for everybody, and I know that I'm fortunate to have that. I know my um middle sister is the same way, she still has her best friend in her life that we had since our childhood.

Social Media’s Double-Edged Role

Joe 4:09

I never had any like you know, rupture of a relationship. I never like you know had a like a falling out with a friend, but it just most of the friendships from my early from my early life have just sort of drifted apart, you know. Like we stayed kind of in touch in college and um and may you know maybe maybe you know if social media had existed then it would have been easier to stay in touch. I think we're gonna we're gonna talk later in this episode about social media, and of course, you know, it has very destructive effects on on social relationships, but it can also have very um very positive effects, which it has for me.

Introducing Researcher Jamie Krems

Heather Anne 4:46

It's it's helped me connect with people that I grew up with, people that, you know, there's a lot of times when we're on social media and we'll be laughing and talking about something, and we you know, we call our uh the old hood, the oildale hood, is what we call it, and we talk about the crazy, you know, through social media and stuff. We talk about the crazy stuff we did when we were kids and running around the the neighborhood and all of that fun stuff. So it's fun to relive and be able to relive those those positive things that happened to me in my childhood. So I'm very excited about our next guest. Not only um is she doing amazing things um with her career and the research of friendship, but she's also a friend of yours and a friend of mine.

Joe 5:41

Yes, so a friend, a friend who studies friendship. A friend that studies friendship. Um so Jamie Krems uh is associate professor of psychology at UCLA and the co-founder and director of the UCLA Center for for friendship research. Um her undergraduate degree from Brynmarr is in classical and near Eastern archaeology. So this is this is a serious education.

Heather Anne 6:07

Very serious.

Joe 6:08

Um and then she uh got her PhD uh in in psychology from Arizona State. I I met her when she was in grad school uh at conferences of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, HBES. And then in 2018, um she joined the faculty um in psychology at Oklahoma State. And so for um when I moved from LA to Stillwater, Oklahoma in 2022, um she was part of the the evolutionary psychology group there, so uh we hung out a lot that that year. But then in 2023, uh she started her current job um at UCLA.

Heather Anne 6:48

And um which by the way, I find very fascinating. You moved from UCLA to Stillwater. She moved from Stillwater to UCLA.

Joe 6:57

Right, it doesn't seem like like a training.

Heather Anne 6:58

She went forward. You just okay, heading to Oklahoma now.

Joe 7:05

So, um Jamie, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr Jaime Krems 7:09

Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here. Good to see you.

Heather Anne 7:13

It's good to see you guys. Good to see you. I just really want to dive into all the great research and the projects that you're doing now. Obviously, friendship is uh means a great deal to me. I'm fascinated by your research because of, you know, like I said, my best friend and I have been best friends for 49 years. So we let's just jump in.

What Counts As A Friend Globally

Joe 7:43

Let's jump in. So so first, okay, what how everyone it's one of these things, everyone thinks they know what it is, but do they really know what it is? So how how would you define what is a friend or what is friendship?

Dr Jaime Krems 7:53

Oh, that's a great question. Uh so when you're a friendship researcher, you do get bombarded with this question. And the thing that people love to remind me, especially if they're not Americans, is what we Americans call a friend is kind of bull****. Or sorry, is not the highest bar. Um because, you know, if you're a French person or you're an Israeli, what you call a friend, what that word means is something kind of more serious, somebody that's really there for you. And Americans are pretty promiscuous with who we call friend. Um, an acquaintance to many other people might be a friend for us. Um so that's one of the first things you realize. There are some really fun words and terms for friends around the world. Um, so in Western Tibet, um, there is a culture that calls friends something that translates to happiness grief identical. Um Mortlucky's speakers living in atolls around Micronesia call a friend something that translates to brother from another canoe. So there are a lot of different words for it all around the world. There are different kinds of flavors to it around the world. Um, and what we think of friendship in the West is not necessarily what friendship looks like across the world. So Dan Brushka looked at the human relations area files, that compendium of ethnographic data, to try to see what characterized friendship in 60 small-scale societies. And when you look at the data that he came away with, it seems like friends are people who absolutely help one another, especially when one another is in need. This helping is motivated by feelings of affection. And these feelings of affection are ratcheted up over time by giving of gifts and favors. So that's a friend, somebody that you help when you're when they're in need and helps you when you're in need.

Heather Anne 9:56

What I really like is what you just said is that friendship in other countries is looked upon differently than here in the States. Because I kind of think of friendship that way myself. I have a lot of acquaintances, I only have a few very close friends. In my one true friend that we know each other's all of each other's secrets and things like that. So hide-the-body friend. Yes, that that that's fascinating. So how how did you get interested in this topic?

Gossip, Indirect Aggression, And Hurt

Dr Jaime Krems 10:34

Um, so it turns out I've always been interested in this topic. I just didn't realize it. Um, I started trying to understand why. Um, so I had these two very close female friends, Emily and Mia. Uh, one had been my friend since I was five years old. Uh, the other I met at Bryn Mawr, and she lived with me and we went on vacations together. Um, we were living in Philly, and they had this two-hour G-Chat conversation exclusively about how much they hated me behind my back. Um, and I found it because that idiot Mia did it on my computer. Like these were not bright women, but I did love them, especially Emily. Um, sometimes I go on Facebook to make sure they're still unhappy with their lives, and they are no, I I did the forward to Amy Alcon's book, Mean Girls, and I have a footnote in there that's just I forget what the footnote is even in reference to, but it just says, sorry, my father loved me, Emily. Um, but yeah, so you know, still still a little spicy about it. Um in any case, it blew my mind that this could happen. Um, their conversation started like, I don't want to start anything between you two, but I just think that you should know. And so this was gossip, this was indirect aggression. And I started studying that, particularly amongst women. Um, but what I came to realize later is that it's really all about manipulating people's affections. Um, the best way to break me and hurt me was to take away my relationships. It's uh exclusion and relational aggression tactics like that are almost uh perfectly tailored to hurt women even more than men sometimes.

Heather Anne 12:27

I was just going to ask you that because it it you know the term mean girls that we've girls have been mean to each other forever. And, you know, we know high school's even one of the worst times for mean girls. But the same thing on how that hurts, and and so does it hurt us more, does it hurt women more or men more when they're betrayed? Because I went through a situation the last couple of years and lost a friendship of something that I I I thought we were gonna be friends the rest of our lives, and it was very it it's hurtful. It it I mean I was very sad about it and kept trying to go through the motions of what happened and all of that stuff, and I even did some stalking for a little bit for the exact same thing that you did. It's like my life's amazing and yours not is not, so it is what it is. But do women feel that loss of friendship like that more than men?

Do Women Feel Friendship Loss More

Dr Jaime Krems 13:34

I mean, the the data that I know uh really looks at exclusion, and there the data are equivocal, like some data say that it's equally painful to be excluded. Um, but when there is a difference, it's that women are report being more hurt by it. Um for all of these kinds of um different acts of aggression that manipulate our relationships or sever our relationships, um, I would expect that women would be more hurt by it, not because women value all friendship more than men do necessarily, but because women have fewer closer friends than men do. And so they put more eggs in each sort of uh in these fewer friend baskets. Um and they also engage in more evaluative talk and self-disclosure with their friends. So if you lose that friendship, now you have a person out there with all of this information about you that can potentially ruin your life, because you know, you told that person how much you really hated this other person.

Heather Anne 14:46

So do you think because women we grew up with the mean girls and we all had them? We no matter what school or high school you went to, even college, we all had mean girls. Does that because we have a tendency to put everything into more of one basket than the other, it takes a lot for us to be closer to women? So we're more selective. So it how what am I trying to say here? How does that affect us starting new relationships?

Dr Jaime Krems 15:24

Oh, yeah, so um uh Menelaus Apostolu did this study somewhat recently. It's probably like a hundred students from Cyprus. He often studies, you know, um, people that are in his nation, uh, convenience samples like that. So take it with a grain of salt when it comes to generalizability. But one of the stumbling blocks that everyone reported to making new friends was trust. But that was especially the case for young women. Um women really do face some different challenges when trying to get closer to other women. Um, when I got the job at Oklahoma State and I was coming to tour it, um, I met Jen Birdcraven, who is an incredible woman, right? Um and I told her, because I felt comfortable with her, she was a fellow evolutionary person, and so we're family. I was like, Jen, just to tell you, um, I'm kind of afraid of other women for the most part. It takes me a while to warm up to other women. Not that I'm not affectionate and warm and I don't respect you, I just am a little afraid given my past. Um and I don't know if that's the case for everyone, certainly, but women do tend to have more perturbations in their friendships than men do. Um, we don't have the data on this, but I would imagine that women have a greater number of former best friends than men do. Um, their friendships end more. Um, because Joe, what you were saying, like you don't recall an end to a friendship in gener for most people, it just sorts of sort of fades away.

Joe 17:06

Right.

Dr Jaime Krems 17:06

That's what mostly when you ask men about their former friendships, they're like, well, that's not former. We're still friends. Nothing happened, you know. If I saw them, it would be great. Um, whereas more often women have stories of of a real acrimonious ending, sometimes akin to, you know, as acrimonious, if not more so, than some divorces.

Joe 17:31

Yeah. This was I mean, just seeing what you went through with that person. It was pretty it was pretty painful.

Heather Anne 17:38

It was I I wasn't understanding what was going on and finally just had to accept it. It's over. I'm never gonna know what really happened, it is what it is.

Evolutionary Psychology Of Friendship

Joe 17:47

So so Jamie, you you you mentioned that evolutionary researchers are like a family. Yeah. So can you uh could you uh explain so you take an evolutionary psychology approach to friendship? And so if you could explain briefly to our listeners what that is and how how it leads you to different kinds of questions from what you know, what psychologists who don't use evolutionary theory, how how they would approach it.

Dr Jaime Krems 18:12

Yeah, well, first of all, we're right. So there's that. Um sorry. Uh so no, that's true.

Heather Anne 18:19

I've I've been learning that hanging out with you guys. So uh that's a true statement.

Dr Jaime Krems 18:24

I mean, the the way that I look at friendship is that it's an outcome that you only realize once you solve a series of recurrent challenges. So you throughout evolutionary history and even you know some non-human animals have had to find, make, and keep alliances. And so what I try to do is figure out all right, if I had to build a robot and program a robot to do friendship, how would I do it? Well, first I need to identify the challenges that the robot has to meet to have friends. What are those? It needs to find friends. Okay. It needs to make and enrich these friends. So that needs to be broken down further. How does it really enrich these friendships and make friends? Well, it needs somewhat frequent interaction plus mutual attraction. How do we get those things? And you break it down further and further, sort of like a key fitting into a lock, right? And the better able you are to describe or to identify and describe the shape of that lock, the challenge keeping friends, say, the better informed predictions you can make about the cognitive tools we use to solve them, the shape of the key to solve the challenge of keeping friends. Not that it's just a single key, but I sort of think of the mind like that. Um, and we know that friendship is an adaptation. Um it helps us survive, pass greater numbers of genes into the next generation, thrive, and so on. Um, so given this, our minds are probably well designed to solve these historically recurrent challenges like finding, making, keeping friends.

Joe 20:13

And and you you draw these analogies between the formation and maintenance, the choice of and maintenance of friendships. There are analogies between with mate choice and and and so and so um you know, and evolutionary psychologists have come up with, you know, and debated for, you know, and well, a lot uh about mate choice criteria. So what can you say though about friend choice criteria? Like what makes a valuable friend?

What Makes A Valuable Friend

Dr Jaime Krems 20:45

Yeah, I mean, at base, the most valuable person to you is somebody who finds you most valuable because friends uh sort of function to help us when we most need it. Um, when we most need help, we look like a bad bet to strangers. Strangers aren't gonna help us. Uh by contrast, our friends have a stake in our continued welfare. So if our friends value us, if they find us irreplaceable, they're gonna help us. Um so that would be the sort of chief criterion. That said, that's not something that you can look for in a friend, right? Oh, that person's gonna find me irreplaceable. Um, when we go out into the world and look for people, we want people who in general are kind, are uh funny or funny to us, they share our sense of humor, um, loyal to us, um, people who are intelligent, dependable, trustworthy is a really big one. Um, and then there are some sex differences. Men want some more sort of friendliness and jocularity and formidability. Women want more emotional support. Um, but in general, yeah, the biggies, you know, it's the same thing as. With mate choice. Both sexes want the same things at the top of the pyramid. The things are kindness, loyalty, trustworthiness.

Joe 22:10

And so another analogous line of inquiry has to do with jealousy. So there's tons of research about sexual jealousy, but you you've looked at friendship jealousy, right?

Friendship Jealousy Has A Function

Dr Jaime Krems 22:22

Yeah, we were some of the first people to do that. So Parker and colleagues had done it, and Joyce Benninson mentioned it. Turns out Rob Kurzban has a whole bit in his book on it, which I found out, or I guess reread only after I'd published this big JPSP. So Rob beat me there again. He always has. That you just don't realize no one friend can solve all your problems. And this is kind of what Selman and colleagues think, and Parker and colleagues took off with that there's sort of you've not matured correctly or not matured at all if you still feel friendship jealousy as an adult. Now, in reality, it might be a negative emotion to experience, but it is a beneficial emotion to you for helping you hang on to your valued friends and friendships.

Joe 24:08

But wouldn't you say that this is a thing in psychology in general?

Dr Jaime Krems 24:12

Is that negative emotions are bad.

Joe 24:16

They're bad. Yeah.

Dr Jaime Krems 24:17

Yeah, shame is bad. I I watched a Brene Brown uh I'm gonna give a TEDx talk at UCLA, they're starting it again. And um I watched a Brene Brown thing, and she's an incredibly compelling speaker, but the way that she thinks about shame is just like shame is awful, we should get rid of shame. Like, okay, let's think this through. What would happen if we got rid of fear? You'd walk into the street. Why don't you go try walking into the street, Brene Brown? See, see how well that works out for you. I mean, yeah. So anyway, this drives me kind of crazy because negative emotions are not fun to experience, but they're incredibly valuable to us. I want to feel pain when I put my hand on a flame. I want to feel fear when I'm trying to cross Wilshire.

Joe 25:08

And you want to feel jealous when value valuable social partners are might be taken away from you.

Dr Jaime Krems 25:15

Exactly. If the the defection of their affection and resources can really affect me and my outcomes, you know? Um and yeah, this happens more in uh sort of young adulthood, but um, it does sort of pop up again in later life, um, particularly when people are living like in assisted living communities and retirement communities, where everyone's living together, new people come in and out. And whenever you have that, of course, you're gonna have these issues and shakeups in relationships.

Heather Anne 25:52

So I've had that problem with some friendships. But I've been fortunate, I'm kind of the opposite.

Joe 25:59

I've had friends for different aspects of my life and haven't had to deal with a lot of jealousy and so so is there evidence for this kind of, I don't know, niche separation where you know you have like some some friends are doing certain things for you, and then you want to sort of complement that with other friends who are doing other things for you.

Niche Friends Versus One Best Friend

Dr Jaime Krems 26:25

You know, we're at some point gonna do one of those um uh K-cluster machine learning studies to see how people build friend groups, um, and to see if you know they they sort of say you want five friends who are all 10 out of 10 on all your preferences, or you know, you have some friends for this and some friends for that. But to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any data that actually um support the idea that some people have, you know, uh one friend for everything, and some people have niche friends, and some people do a combination. Um there were some data that a Steve Newberg student, I think Kathy Cottrell, had ages ago, and I don't know if they did anything with it. They showed me the data. I hope I still have it on some hard drive somewhere, or they showed me the poster that men tended to have different friends for different jobs, whereas women tended to want their best friend with them for every job, um, a sort of all-use tool. Um, but you would imagine that, yeah, you have different friends for different activities, right? Um, and today, in our very sort of weird world, we have different social spheres in a way that we probably hadn't had throughout much of our evolution, right? So my work people never interact with my family people who never interact with my college people who never interact with my other people. Um, and that might also um sort of muddy this whole picture.

Heather Anne 28:04

Which brings me to my next question. So, what is the biggest challenge friendships face today with technology, isolation, and even mental health?

Loneliness Epidemic And Time Scarcity

Dr Jaime Krems 28:17

Yeah, I mean, we're in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Um, every other American is lonely, um, which is a subjective feeling of unmet social needs. Um, and this literally shortens your life. Um, so when lonely people are more likely to have cardiovascular issues, mental health problems. Um, and there's one big meta-analysis that suggests that lacking social support has the same negative effect on your health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Um, so a lot of people are lonely. Um they are aching to make friends, um, but at the same time, they're spending people are spending less time with their friends today than they did 20 years ago, um, 20 fewer hours per month on average. Uh people have fewer friends. So in 1990, 3% of people reported having um uh I think uh 3% of people reported having no friends. Now that number is up between 12 to 25 percent. I think one in five single men in the US has zero friends. Um, so uh the challenge is making friends, I think. And some of the hurdles there include time. Um, people spend more time alone than they ever did. Um, people are working gig economy jobs, so folks who have only a high school education have suffered more from the friendship recession than folks who have potentially more time and college degrees and can work differently, have more flexible schedules. Um there's also, I mean, technology certainly can help people, but the time spent alone is probably partially due to technology. Um, you're scrolling on your phone, you feel like you're being social, you're watching Netflix.

Heather Anne 30:14

And that's that's actually what I was going to say is that especially the younger generation, you know, the Gen Xers and even the older millennials, we were outside playing. We we would, if you if you were bored, you went out your door and you found somebody, whether they were a friend or not, you just went and found somebody to go play with and you became friends. So more kids are now on technology, they're sitting in front of screens. How they're not going out and playing. How are they supposed to how are they supposed to be making friends? They're also overscheduled, a lot of them.

Dr Jaime Krems 30:54

Um I don't know. I guess they make friends at school. And uh for better or worse, this whole Jonathan Haidt, don't let cell phones in thing might actually be helping. Um, because even just a few years ago here at UCLA, and maybe Joe, you've seen this too, people would come into class. I teach a 350-person class for um junior, senior, psych majors, social psychology. Um, they'd come into class and they'd talk to each other before class. But now they come into class and it's quiet. They're all on their computers or their phones doing something individual. Um, I don't know. Joe, when you were teaching large undergrad classes, what was it like? Were people talking to each other?

Joe 31:39

It was, yeah, well, I there was I saw the transition over the I I left in 2022, and uh um and so yeah, yes, like year by year there was that the room got quieter and quieter, and by the you know, the time I left, it was that's how it was. Like everyone's like staring at a at a phone or a and that's a good question.

Heather Anne 32:03

So has it gotten worse since COVID?

Dr Jaime Krems 32:07

So it does seem to have gotten worse since COVID, um, but we were trending in this direction before COVID, and we haven't completely rebounded since COVID. Yeah. So and by the way, I should say it's not just the US, right? So um the World Health Organization estimates that one in six people around the world are lonely, um, and that the loneliness there leads to an approximate hundred deaths per hour. It's crazy.

Heather Anne 32:35

These are crazy. So, what about what are some suggestions that you've had that you have to strengthen friendships?

Joe 32:46

How can now we're getting to the applied part of them?

Screens, Schools, And Lost Practice

Dr Jaime Krems 32:49

Okay, so let me preface all of this by saying I'm not even familiar with a single empirical intervention for friendship, right? So there's the art erin 36 questions thing that we call fast friends. Um I think we can't call it that because it's never been followed up for more than six weeks. So it's more of an acute liking induction, and maybe it works to make people friends, maybe it doesn't. Um we're going to do sort of a mega study here where we're crowdsourcing um ideas for actionable, scalable interventions that people can do to make friends or enrich friendships, and um we'll test them in the lab and then deploy them in the world. Um we're also about to run uh Hei Wan Hong, my grad student, and Lisa Walsh, who's a former postdoc here at UCLA, who's now a professor in Singapore. She's a Sonia Lubimirski student, and so she's very familiar with gratitude and those kinds of positive emotions. Um, and they are about to do what we think is the first gratitude intervention to strengthen friendships. Um, so writing uh your friend some letters of thank you, you know.

Heather Anne 34:07

Oh.

Dr Jaime Krems 34:08

So we don't have these data, but if I had to extrapolate from what we do know, I would say um telling your friend you're grateful. And I would also say um asking your friend for help. I think that is something that we've stopped doing, again, related to technology, right? It's much easier for me to ask a task rabbit to hang my television or paint my wall than to try and schedule something with my friend and do it ourselves. Um, but it's these small favors that ratchet up friendship. And if we're not doing them with or for each other, we're not ratcheting up our friendships. So for help is great.

Joe 34:51

It's kind of counterintuitive. Like I think some people would think, oh, you know, then I then I if I if I ask for help, I'm making a burden of myself. What I should do is offer help. But um you think that might it might turn out that actually asking for help is a more effective tactic than offering help.

Dr Jaime Krems 35:08

I think so, but I I also think you're exactly right to point out this sort of perception gap here. Because if you think about asking your friend for a ride to the airport, um, you're pretend you have to go to the Tulsa airport, not the Stillwater airport, right? It's a longer drive. Um you're like, ah, I don't want to burden them, I'll just take an Uber. But if your friend can do it for you, I mean, very often, you know, put yourself in the space of somebody that's been asked a favor, and you're pretty happy to help a friend. Um, so I think there's a huge perception gap whereby we think we're burdening our friends, but in reality, our friends would be so happy to be able to help us.

Strengthening Bonds: Gratitude And Favors

Joe 35:49

So I know you study social psychology, not individual different psychology, but what what would you say to someone who says, Well, I I'm just I'm bad at friendship, I'm I'm socially anxious, um, you know, this is the problems with me. Um is there, you know, any any any kind of and you know, you know, uh sort of well, is there any kind of of intervention that you you would suggest?

Dr Jaime Krems 36:15

I mean, what I'd probably say is, hello, husband, how have you been today? Um, because that sounds just like my partner. Uh sorry. Um I think one of the things that I've seen that I believe could work, especially for folks who are anxious like that, is practice. Um, guided practice would be the best, but we really don't have programs like that. Uh that said, I think this is a place where AI would be useful for friendships. You practice calling an old friend. Um, so the data suggests that people are as anxious to call an old friend they haven't spoken to in a while as talking to a new person. Um, but the thing that worked in one of these studies to decrease that anxiety was practice, practicing the call, figuring out what you'd say. Um, so I would practice, and I would even try and practice with an AI. Um have it talk back to you. You don't know what it's gonna say, it might throw you a curveball. But um that's that is the way that I would go about it to alleviate some anxiety. That is one of the things that, you know, I think for the younger folks, they're missing, right? They are not getting that daily practice. Um, they don't have to talk to strangers, they don't have to go to the post office, they don't have to, you know, mingle and interact at the grocery store. Uh they're not getting this practice. And when they are out and about, they have their headphones on or they're looking at Instagram anyway. Um this is potentially one of the reasons that they are failing at friendship so much and romance.

Heather Anne 38:02

So I am one of those people that I'll be standing in line and just start talking to people. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I'm sure that says a lot about me, but I just have conversations with people, especially if you're standing in line. How often should we realistically be reaching out to our friends?

Practice For The Socially Anxious

Dr Jaime Krems 38:23

Yeah, you know, I don't know of any data that have tried to sort of help optimize this. Um, we should do this. Robin Dunbar once did a study where he gave people cell phones for 18 months and I believe paid the bills to get all the data. Um, it's a really cool study, uh, or several studies came out of that package. Um we don't know is the short answer. I would imagine that you are not gonna overburden your friend by talking to them once a week, right? Yes, people are really busy, but they also want to connect. Um, and so if you're the person reaching out and you do it once a week, you're not gonna, you know, um drive someone away by by reaching out that often.

Heather Anne 39:17

Um but again, we don't know. And I think that might be some of the problems that we have with friendships, is we're all living such busy lives, and as you get older, it just gets busier and busier with your raising your children, having grandchild, you know, your grandchildren and so forth. But sometimes we feel like, because even I do sometimes, I feel like I'm bothering my friends. But they're probably busy. Do they have time to talk? But once we do connect, then I could be on the phone for an hour or more with several friends.

Joe 39:52

So well, and again, you know, thinking about the how technology can both hurt and help people's social lives. So I I read there's a study, I mean I just saw it on Twitter, but it was that amount of time spent on Instagram and TikTok, that was negatively correlated with people's psychological well-being. But the amount of time on messaging apps, like WhatsApp, that was positively correlated.

Dr Jaime Krems 40:20

And so he's doing well.

Joe 40:24

Yes, yes, he is. And so it seems like one of the things that the messaging apps do is they enable you to, again, again, so this is like primatological, this is the kind of thing that Dunbar would say. It's like you're able to service these relationships very cheaply. Yeah, right. You know, just a few wisecracks a day on WhatsApp, you know, and that's sort of that's keeping the friendship alive.

How Often To Reach Out

Messaging Apps And Group Chats

Dr Jaime Krems 40:44

I think these groups especially are massively underestimated for being able to do that because you touch or groom more people with each message that you send. That's right. Um, and there's just something about being part of a friend group that you don't get from one-on-one friendships. Um, but I'm saying this personally drawing on research and personal experience because they're they're really extrapolating from research and drawing on personal experience, I should say, because we don't really know very much about the different benefits of having a friend group. I should say, so we don't study friendship, right? Um, with my grad student Hei Wan Hong and Bill Chopic at Michigan State, we've now looked at almost 30,000 peer-reviewed published articles in seven top psych journals, including Evolution and Human Behavior, calling it a psych journal for this. Um we over-sampled journals that are about close relationships. So this would be where friendship work would be published. Um the and we went back from the first journal publication, so all of the publications in these seven journals from 64 to 2024. It looks like about 4% of these papers focus on friendship. Um again, that's probably an overestimate because we are oversampling relationships journals. By contrast, it's 20-some percent for romance, it looks like. Um, and if you go to the HRAF, that ethnographic compendium where you could search keywords paragraph by paragraph, every paragraph uh that returns a find for friendship, there are 12 mentions of kinship. So social psychologists and people studying relationships are not only not looking at friendship, and most people aren't, except in philosophy, um, not only are we not looking at friendship with the same eye that we're looking at these other relationships, but when we do look at friendship, we almost always look at the friendship dyad, which really misses so much of what friendship is, does, and the challenges we have to face, because every dyad exists in a wider world. Um, most of the challenges that we face in having friends are probably these exponentially complex multi-person challenges, not just getting my friend to like me. You want to get your friend to like, I want to get my friend to like me better than my friend likes other people.

Joe 43:19

Right. Um so this our this podcast we do, it's um mostly focused on the challenges and opportunities of middle age and and early old age. So we expect that most of our audience are uh Gen Xers and younger boomers. And so what is known about, well, first of all, about maintaining friendships as we get older, and and also about the challenges of forming new friendships. I I I read it might have just been sort of like uh you know a popular account like in a in a in the in a popular media, but it was basically saying, like, you know, you don't Expect too much about you know the forming a new friendship like in your 50s. And so, like, what can you tell us like what's known about this?

Why Friendship Is Understudied

Dr Jaime Krems 44:08

I mean, one of the things that we do know is that particularly for people 65 and up, because a lot of the friendship research is in the health area for older adults, is what they that's the older term there. Um uh one in four in the US is socially isolated, which is an objective measure. This kind of isolation and loneliness kills you. Um, so it increases risk for dementia 50%, um, risk of stroke 30-some percent if you don't have social connections. Um it uh it's estimated that um older folks lost almost $2 billion in fraud a couple years ago because they didn't have anybody to sort of consult on some decisions. Um there are you know health consequences, economic consequences, and it also feels ****** to be alone and isolated. But particularly for older adults, having friends is the best predictor of subjective well-being of them saying they're happy and they're having a good time. And it's probably it seems like it's even a better predictor of their longevity and health than um living near family, than being close to neighbors. Um, especially for people 65 and up, according to the data, having friends is one of the best things that you can do for your health and happiness, period. Um, how you make new friends, um maybe that's a you know, um, a different ball game in some ways, but the ingredients are the same. You know, you need to encounter some people more than once, ideally frequently, and some mutual attraction, which a lot of people translate to similarity. So a lot of people translate this, and they say join a club because there you'll re-encounter people who have similar interests, and therefore you're meeting the frequency and the mutual attraction components. Um, and maybe that works, maybe that doesn't, we don't know.

Heather Anne 46:18

And what is there a difference between there's studies that show the difference between men and women and long-term relationships? Do women have a tendency to have long more long-term friendships than men do?

Dr Jaime Krems 46:34

You know, I would imagine that that's true after young adulthood, um, once uh sort of these um social competitiveness uh factors settle down, so finding a mate, keeping a mate, and all of that. Motherhood might massively disrupt friendships. I mean, parenthood in general, but particularly motherhood because of all of the demands on a woman's time. Um uh and my student Vanessa Zankic is actually looking at how motherhood affects friendships for women who become mothers, but also the people that aren't mothers that might sort of lose their friends to this baby. Um so there are differences, but I would imagine that um women are better at keeping relationships, period. And so I would imagine that they are better able to keep friendships as well and tend to them. In fact, um, I don't know if you guys have heard of this. Have you heard of manking? No. So you would think that it's something to do with mating or jealousy, or maybe you make the mistake that I did and confuse it with manscaping, which is about, you know.

Heather Anne 47:42

That's actually the first thing that came to my mind was is that another manscaping?

Midlife And Older Adult Friendships

Dr Jaime Krems 47:48

But no, uh it so there's a theoretical paper that came out in the Journal of Men and Masculinities maybe a year ago or so, um, that said uh it theorized that women feel responsible for basically getting their male partners' friends. Um, extrapolating from the data that women are often the ones that keep in touch with family, even the, you know, like husband's kin. The the women are the ones that keep in touch with the husband's kin. And so if women feel this responsibility or and or are better at it, then maybe women are also trying to do that for men and their friends. Um, anecdotally, I've certainly seen this in academic women, um, where we move all over the country and try like hell to get play dates for our partners. Um we have just finished collecting data on a nationally representative survey for some friendship stuff and for some politics stuff with uh my student Elias A. Savedo. Joe, I think you met him. Um he's amazing, um uh has some really cool work with me and David Pinsoff and Marty Hazleton on um abortion attitudes and um uh which replicated in this nationally representative sample, which is really cool. Um but uh concerning the man keeping stuff, we have some questions on there. So if you ask me in like a week or two, I might be able to tell you whether or not women actually feel this way, or it's just a sort of inference that some researchers are making because they, like me, have moved around the country with a partner that is anxious.

Heather Anne 49:31

I do, I fully understand that. I I had that with my ex. You moved to a new area that you didn't know people, so I felt like I've had to Oh, yes, you know, you you you arrange a lot of our social life, that's for sure. So well that just opens up to we're definitely going to hopefully Jamie will be on with us again.

Joe 49:53

There's so much more to talk about. There's so much more to talk about.

Dr Jaime Krems 49:56

Uh or you know, you might not want to come back to LA, but come back to LA or I'll meet you in San Francisco, which it turns out is a real city. And uh we can hang out where it's warm because I love that, and talk about friendship and watch people in LA be very transactional with their friendships.

Heather Anne 50:14

LA is because I lived there when I was younger, and it is a whole different world. And I mean friendships in LA is on a whole different level.

Dr Jaime Krems 50:25

It's weird. I I think one of the difficulties for a lot of people here is how transient uh the population is, you know, and the with residential mobility and comes relational mobility comes can I count on this person? Absolutely.

Heather Anne 50:41

Well, Jamie, thank you so much for being here with us. We really appreciate your time. And um talking about a very important topic that you have shown us is has not had enough research. We don't talk about enough.

Joe 50:58

Yeah, yeah. It's um yeah, your papers are amazingly impressive. And uh I hope we're gonna see a lot more of them.

Dr Jaime Krems 51:06

I hope so too. I love reading. I think everyone I'm working on about to send to EHB about um people's estimations of the costs and benefits of different kinds of friends. So ideal, hypothetical friends, actual closest friends, ambivalent friends, so friends you wish you could get rid of, but you can't, and then former friends. Um I like that. Yeah. So uh that's coming. And um, anytime you want to talk about friendship, you know that I won't be able to shut up about it, kind of like right now, where I am shutting up, I promise.

Heather Anne 51:37

We like that. We appreciate it. Always love having conversation with you. Well, I look forward to seeing you soon, and if not, hopefully at the next HBS, yeah. The next one, but the next one.

Dr Jaime Krems 51:49

Yes, there's no C West this year, I don't think, but um uh SPSP will be in Philly. You guys should go because the Epstein pre-conference will be rad. Um I like going to the conferences, being in the Philadelphia.

Joe 52:02

Yeah, well, well, you know, we won't be very far from Philly.

Dr Jaime Krems 52:05

Yeah, yeah, you'll be pretty close. So maybe I'll see you before then, but if not, I'll see you in Philadelphia, best city in the world.

Heather Anne 52:12

Okay, thank you, Jamie. Thank you. Well, that was great.

Joe 52:19

That was uh amazing.

Heather Anne 52:21

Amazing information and being able to talk about friendships and how different countries look at friendship is fascinating as well. And why hasn't there been more studies on friendship? Next time we're gonna definitely have to have Jamie on again because she is just a wealth of information on what she's studying is amazing.

Joe 52:51

You know, not all not all psychological research seems, you know, compelling and interesting and useful. Some of it it seems like you know, they've just sort of like done this experiment, and you're like, yeah, okay, even if that's true, which I'm not really sure it is true, uh I don't care.

Gender Patterns And “Man Keeping”

Heather Anne 53:09

But this is something that's sort of like, you know, everybody this is friendships affect everybody, whether you have lots of friends, whether you don't, um it you know, research has shown the benefits of friendship and your health. And I know personally, for me, the reason why I survived most of this stuff from my childhood is because of my friends. I whether they knew it or not, and I was fortunate enough to come back and um thank a lot of my friends that were there for me. They didn't know what was going on at home, but over the years I've been able to thank them for what they did in my life. And it was amazing. Just it's the same as the old girlfriend from high school, and you know, what she did for me on the day we buried my dad, his funeral is remarkable and something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. So I'm very fortunate. I'm very thankful that Jamie came on and and and we were able to talk about this topic and look forward to having her on again on another episode. Please subscribe and support our podcast. Join us here each week, my friend, where you're sure to get a smile from lessons learned to mishaps. The adventures go on from here on the professor and Heather Anne.