The Psychology of Friendship
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by: Guest
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Word Count: 710
With social networking the very crux of modern virtual living, it is simply not possible to avoid a psychology of friendship.
Yet friendship like love depends on the single factor of attraction and in this case, it is more of a mental and emotional rather than physical attraction.
Among maybe thousands of students we meet in school or a few hundred we meet at the workplace, we finally become close and attain a level of friendship with very few or limited people.
Apart from the fact that there is this unconscious and intuitive filter which we exercise when we choose our friends or lovers, we also do get consciously attracted to people with whom we develop long lasting relationships and friendships.
There could be a narcissistic theory to this as we choose friends who may look, talk or think like we do and usually there is this mental rapport from the very beginning.
Now this liking could have several gradations and in some cases you would simply like to remain as contact as in social networking.
However this is the first superficial layer of friendship just as you would smile at or share a piece of news with a complete stranger in a train without ever keeping in touch or meeting again.
Most of your social network friends who you do not know would be such random friends and strangers who you meet once and share a random conversation in a flight or a train or a bus would also be such random friends.
Most people we meet in our lives would be such random friends.
This sort of friendship fulfils our basic social interaction and communication needs.
These, your listeners who choose to communicate with you are your random friends and they fulfil your interaction and communication needs.
This sort of friendship is with people you regularly communicate with and you are also most likely interested in their activities.
This is the second level of friendship and second type of friendship and although there is expectation from this sort of relation, there may not be any clear idea as to what expectations there are.
These friends fulfil our power and recognition needs as with such friends we are assured that there are people in the world who care about us and are interested in our lives, dreams and achievements.
In this sort of friendship there could be many expectations and there is sometimes an intuitive emotional connection.
The close or proximal friends would know most details of your life and this sort of friendship entails expectations of sharing which may or may not be realistically possible.
These close or proximal friends or stage of friendship fulfils our basic security, love and safety needs.
Some individuals have more random friends than others and are thus of outgoing extroverted personality.
However their primary needs are for social interaction and communication.
Such individuals have a wide range of social contacts with expectations but few random contacts and they are of mixed extroverted-introverted personality pattern.
The primary need for such individuals is power or recognition.
This preference is the basis of their social personality and would define the kind of friendship they choose to have.
Such individuals may have limited social contacts and very few random contacts and may not enjoy leadership positions.
Such individuals could be very creative as well but this creativity may lead to complex ideas and highlight the subjective.
From these three friendship patterns it is possible to delineate these three types of social personality based on social interactions.
Yet in the future psychology would not be able to avoid such research and with increased importance of social networking and virtual friendship, psychology will have to study how friendships are formed, why certain people become our friends and why different levels of friendship are attained with different individuals.
Research studies will also have to be conducted to determine whether people with more random friends are ever curious creative types seeking communication and whether people with more distal friends and fewer random friends seek power and achievement and whether introverted individuals primarily lean on emotional security.
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