The Neuroscience of Friendship

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Ty Lohr/LNP/LancasterOnline via AP

Lifelong friends catch up with each other while eating at Outback Steakhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, January 2020.

The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.

Alexander Heffner: We need more friends in our lives today in this digital environment.

Lydia Denworth: We do. As a science writer I mostly cover the brain. What neuroscience is mainly interested in these days is mapping connections in the brain and inside the brain. I went to a meeting about social neuroscience, which is a sort of newer field within neuroscience, that is about mapping connections in and outside of the brain, this kind of web of connections that we have with other people. I sat there at this meeting listening to them talking about all these elements of social behavior and what it does in the brain.

I was right at that moment sort of wedged in between a parent with Alzheimer’s disease and teenagers. So I was very buffeted day in day out by other people’s emotions and ups and downs. It made me think about the ways that people in our lives affect us, even our biology, the way they make your pulse pound and your adrenaline spike.

But then I also thought about here I am losing my parents and my kids are growing up and out: I better make sure I’ve got my friends. That’s one of the big topics that social neuroscience gets into—that’s really how I came to it. It was that kind of confluence of my personal life and the work I was already doing.

Heffner: You are giving rebirth to this science in the book and you’re acknowledging that friendship revitalizes us.

Denworth: Right. The newest part of the science is the biology, this question of how is it that a social relationship, which is not like food that you actually put in your body or exercise where you’re moving your muscles and you can understand why going for a run might affect your blood pressure. But why is it that a conversation with a good friend sort of gets inside your body and changes the way your body works? I mean it literally affects your blood pressure, your sleep, your stress responses, your immune system, all of those things.

Friendship for a long time was not studied seriously by biologists, anyway, because it’s very hard to measure. It’s hard to define—and science is all about measurement and definition. You need to know what it is you’re trying to measure in order to sort of make a statement about it. While friendship in human society has a lot of cultural aspects to it, and it’s not entirely cultural and that’s the way people imagined it for a long time. C.S. Lewis, the famous writer, he said, you know, friendship has no survival value, but it gives value to survival. In people, but also in other species, those with the strongest social bonds live longest, have the most reproductive success, which is the evolutionary measure that you want.

Heffner: That’s one thing that really struck me about the book and the subject because we are in this climate of increasing domestic terrorism, and, of course, lone wolf attacks where there are stories after stories of assassins who have massacred people because they were not, they didn’t have friends. So we need to understand the science of how we can relate socially to rebuild capital, social capital.

Denworth: It is so distressing to see these people who are so unconnected and or they think they’re connecting online with people who think like they do. But that is so different from what real true friendship is. But, you know, we’re not stupid. We know that our Facebook friend that we actually never see, you know, haven’t seen in years is not the same thing as your best friend that you call when something good or bad happens in your life. I am sure that kids who really feel connected are just much less likely to go down that path.

We need to understand, with children anyway, often we are pushing them to accomplish things and they seem obsessed with their friends. And as a parent we sometimes say, well, okay, your friends are great, but you know, you need to do this. That’s not untrue at times, but I do think it’s really important to stop and check ourselves and say, wait a minute, are we making sure that they are building relationships that they need?

Heffner: You said two things that interest me greatly. One is about feeling connected and the other is about friendships outside of the family.

Denworth: This new science of friendship both blurs the lines between family and friends and also helps us to try to understand the differences. So, the word friend is qualitative, right, it’s, it’s about a relationship and emotion. And it tells you if I call someone a friend, it tells you something about how I feel about them. It should. And if I, you know, refer to my husband or my son or my siblings, that those words are, they’re categorical. They tell you how we’re connected.

But they don’t actually tell you anything about the quality of our relationship, which is why when people like to say that their spouse is their best friend but they do that specifically to tell you that their marriage is good.

Heffner: Qualitatively, right?

Denworth: Qualitatively, exactly. To add to what you know about that marriage. And the truth is that marriage can, your spouse can be your best friend, but, also not, sadly in a bunch of cases. And, and in fact it for a long time we didn’t aspire to have our spouse be our best friend, you know, so but one of the things that is really important is quality. That’s why friendship can be a template for all other relationships because when you think of your closest friends, you really think about the positive, the way that you treat each other positively.

Heffner: Unfortunately, there are those who would feel connected by virtue of tribe only. When I mentioned the rise of bigotry and new racism, the new Jim Crow in this country, folks unfortunately can feel connected on chat rooms and then go out and massacre people because they’re not their same race or from the same country they’re from.

Denworth: The work on the neuroscience of empathy speaks to what you’re talking about here. Which is that first of all, we understand now that they’re there in many ways there’s positive elements of empathy. When we think of empathy, we think of it as a good thing, but it also carries with it that kind of us/them that, that, in-group and out-group sort of element and, and you can see it. What I hope is that understanding how our brains work and that we do bring implicit bias, all of us into the world. There’s a lot of research that shows that then you have to be aware of it and then you have to work to counter it a little bit.

Heffner: In this political climate there, people often riff on the strength of their friendship and whether or not politics can get in the way. I was wondering if that’s something that you grappled with, the fact that sometimes you need a base level of values.

Denworth: Of values, you do. In fact, I think one of the really interesting things is that worldview is one of the things that most draws us together with, with someone else.

Heffner: Where is the research going right now?

Denworth: The neuroscience really intrigues me. They’re trying to look at the brains of two people as they interact and essentially capture friendship while it’s happening. The idea is, is there some place that your brains go when you’re interacting with a friend that they wouldn’t get to on their own? And can we see it? Can we see it in a brain scanner? What we do know is that and just in the last year or two, we know that the way your brain processes the world is more similar to the way your friend’s brain processes the world than it is to people to whom you’re not as close.

The question is, do you and your friend process the world the same way and that’s part of what draws you together. I mean, you can’t know it; you can’t look at someone and say, I see how you are, you know, auditory cortex is operating but you, but you might end up being drawn to each other or do you become more similar as you are together? We don’t know the answer yet. They’re working on that, but it’s probably a little of both.