#77 - Uncovering the Secrets of American Friendships in 2024 [Harvard Visiting Scholar, Dr. Jeff Hall]

Hello, and welcome to the Talk to People Podcast.

This is your host, Chris Miller.

And if you haven't been here in the past few weeks, well, you're not alone because neither have I.

But I'm very excited to be back with a brand new episode featuring one of my favorite conversations I've had on this podcast, with Dr.

Jeffrey Hall.

Jeff Hall is a Communication Professor at the University of Kansas.

He runs the Relationships and Technology Lab.

You can see him on the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, on the Atlantic, really everywhere.

Recently, he spent a lot of his time at Harvard, where he was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Institute, and we get the privilege of talking to him.

Today is National Friendship Day, and whenever I say today, I mean July 30th.

Not only is it National Friendship Day, but it's Annie's birthday.

So shout out to Annie from wherever you're listening to.

Be sure to give her a message and tell her happy belated birthday.

If you are one of the rare ones who is listening to this on the day it releases, then be sure to say happy birthday.

I had a ton of fun in this conversation.

You can expect to hear what friendship is, why it's so important.

A lot of the struggles many of us are facing with friends, a survey that surveyed over 4,000 people regarding friendship and what we can learn, the average number of friends, where people are most making friends, and some of the biggest challenges we will be facing down the road regarding friendship.

If you don't have a friend, I'd love to be your friend.

You can always e-mail me at talktopeoplepodcast.gmail.com or follow us on socials.

If you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel, be sure to subscribe.

I will be putting up this video of me shooting this intro in addition to a few different activities around this conversation.

Without further ado, Jeff Hall.

Well, it's about to be National Friendship Day.

It is.

And we are with an expert.

So we're going to start from the base and move all the way up.

You're about to have an article being published about this specifically.

That's right.

And this is going to come out on the same day of your article.

That's right.

Okay.

So simultaneously spearheading, we are going to get to the bottom of friendship.

So let's start at the basics.

What is friendship?

It's a great question.

So there are two elements of friendship I always tell people.

One is that mutual liking.

So both people have to like each other enough.

And the second is essentially is you have to have spent enough time together to actually know the person well enough to be sure that you have met casual friend status.

So you would say, this person isn't just an acquaintance, I would consider them a friend.

So once you get there, everything else about friendship is something that sort of develops organically through a process of what you and the other person want to share together.

And friendship is what many people think of intuitive.

You're a professor at a university, but many people who have never stepped on university know what a friend is.

But it's also kind of loose as to the definition, right?

There's not a lot of science behind it.

But what you're doing is you are trying to encapsulate and address and really put it into data, how exactly friendship works.

Yeah.

And my intention more than anything is to really, I've called myself kind of a friendship evangelist.

I've been thinking so much about how important it is to have friends in our lives.

There are lots of kind of counterintuitive things about friendship, such as that people think that they happen naturally and organically, yet they seem really hard.

And lots of people feel that they're hard or difficult to maintain.

People understand that they're really important, but they put them really low on the priority list in terms of what they want to do with their time or how they allocate their effort in relationships.

Friendship is also so much less studied than what we know about things about family and what we know about romantic partners.

Friendship is like a latecomer in every sort of sense, yet it has this kind of fascinating characteristic that allows it to develop in so many different forms and so many different ways of expression that I think that people find it...

You know, everyone wants to be a good friend and everyone wants to have friends.

So it's something we all want to have, but we all kind of don't really understand how it works, even the researchers.

And whenever you're trying to figure out how it works, what's that process like?

Because that's pretty overwhelming and intimidating.

Yeah, it can be.

I think when I've thought about it a lot, I started out doing things based on friendship expectations.

So my kind of baseline understanding of friendship came from the idea that we all have certain expectations that we want from friends.

And those things seem to be across cultural, it seemed to be across generations, it seems to be across different age groups.

There are developmental levels of friendship from children to young adults.

But once you're a young adult, basically loyalty, a person has positive, genuine regard for you, like they like you as you, and someone who basically you pick out of others.

Basically, they're special to you in some way, they're unique.

And those characteristics of friendships kind of form the basis of it.

What's curious is that the basis of friendship, when we research it and think about it, we usually hold the standard to like our best friend.

Think about what loyalty means.

Loyalty is a pretty intense construct in terms of what that requires.

But we also think of our friends as somebody who like we play softball with or basketball with, or someone who's our office colleague or someone who's our neighbor.

So what's odd is that when we think of friendship, we think of it on a superlative or really idealized form.

But we experience friendship in all these various forms, which are much, much easier.

So I'll give you an example.

If you ask somebody what would be an ideal friendship characteristic, self-disclosure would come up.

So I want somebody I can talk to, listens to me, I can go and confide my secrets in.

But you wouldn't tell your secrets to all your friends.

Most of your friends you wouldn't.

In fact, you only would tell a small group of people, maybe only one other person in your life some really intimate things.

Yet, when we think about what self-disclosure means at that lower level of friendship for our casual friends, we don't even know what that exactly happens.

How does that occur?

You're going to have to negotiate it.

So is it okay that I tell you this?

Or is this TMI?

Or are we close enough for you to be confide like this?

Or it's also why we say things when we talk to people like, oh, I'm fine.

Or you skip over the details.

Or I've been going through a rough time, but I don't really want to go into that.

So we do a lot of masking and hiding around our information because our standards for friendship are so high.

Yet, we want someone to be that person, even if we barely enact it in our own lives.

Okay.

That's tricky, right?

Because self-disclosure is required for a close friendship, but you don't want to self-disclose with people who aren't your close friends.

Exactly.

Right.

That goes for a lot of things.

You don't want to trust and be loyal to someone who is a false friend.

There's the idea of there being fair weather friends.

There's the idea of friendship betrayals.

So all of these things give us little checks about, well, maybe I don't want to share with this person or I won't want to trust this person.

So I think what's fascinating about friendship is that friendship seems to be this ongoing process of negotiation of what it means to be a friend that does not have a lot of rules, that does not have a clear cultural set of understandings of what we're supposed to do in our friendship, and varies a lot between people.

So not just between cultures in the United States versus other countries or even within the United States, but also individuals have very idiosyncratic rules for friendship, like that's a deal breaker, or that's something I just can't tolerate in a friend.

And another person might be like, well, if I didn't have a friend who could give me a hard time and still like me, I wouldn't want them.

But another person says, a friend who criticizes me, never, no way.

If they're giving me a hard time, I can't cope.

So what's fascinating is that there aren't a lot of rules of friendship that apply to all levels of friendship equally, and there's not a lot of friends that are so similar to each other that we would say, this is absolutely true for every single type of friend.

So we even have friends, like I'm sure you do, and as I do, that do different things for us.

I talk to this person, I play basketball with that person, I hang out with that person, but if I talk to this person about anything intimate, they're like, I can't, I'm not, no, I'll pass.

You know what I mean?

So what's interesting is we understand the variability of our friendships, which makes it even harder to figure out what does it mean to have a friend and how to keep a friend.

Yeah.

And why are friends necessary?

So the research on this is really transparent.

You know, it's long life, you know, it tends to predict things like, you know, being happier, tends healthier.

Friends also help us cope with the losses and pains.

They do a lot of things to do, help us cope with the struggles that we have in life.

There are incredible source of resources for information, for support, for help, material support, you know, to have backup, to learn from, to grow from.

Friends are also really critical for identity processes, particularly in young adulthood and adolescence, where we figure out who we are.

And we have friends we can, is this who I am?

And do you see me this way?

And is this okay to you that I am being this person?

And I want your acceptance.

And I think as older adults, we kind of, interestingly, I find now that I'm, you know, 47 and not 27, my friends help remind me of who I've always been.

They ground me in a sense of where I was when I was very young and where I was when I was in my 20s.

And they help remind me of the continuity of self that I carry into the future.

And man, I am so appreciative for that.

Like, they almost in some ways help me have a touchstone to the past.

So friends are incredible, not just for all the reasons around happiness and health and well-being, but also incredible in terms of what they do for identities.

And they make our lives better if we spend time with them.

So we know what friendship is.

We know why they're needed.

And then the question is always, well, how do you actually make the friends?

That's right.

And where?

One of the things I really liked about your article is you talked about, or you surveyed people where they were making their friends.

And this is a really obvious thing after the fact.

But I never, I was like really glad that you put how they met a friend through a friend.

That's right.

And I didn't think about that.

You know, like I always hear like church, work, a bar, a club, all of that.

But really we do.

It's interest, right?

Like you meet one friend and then you're more likely to make another friend because you already have a friend.

That's right.

So the I was actually just talking to a reporter about this not too long ago.

And I think our research really helps to kind of think about this and that there are kind of four pathways.

So the first most common pathway is the institutional pathway, and that's work and school.

So the number one way that we meet friends is school.

And for young adults, this is much more pervasive than it is for older adults.

And this is why I kept my piece of paper for everyone wondering, why do I have this piece of paper in front of me?

Because I want to get this right.

When we have our student respondents in this study, of the places that they met their friends, 65% of their friends they met at school.

So these are people who are first and second year college.

When we're talking to adults, though, it's only 20%.

So if we think of...

And 20...

And these adults, by the way, were average age of about 47.

So if you think about it, what that means is that most of your friends at your young adulthood come from school.

But as time goes on, the places that you meet new friends and bring new friends in your life goes up and up and up, and school goes down and down and down, with the exception of the friends you keep from your time earlier in school.

By comparison, the other major pathway for adults is work.

So the adult respondents had work as one of the most important places, which was, in that case, it was 16% of adults or of the adults' friends were friends they made at work, only 7% of students.

So pathway one is institutions.

Pathway two is people.

As you mentioned, friends of friends is a big one.

I was actually kind of surprised that not just friends of friends, friends of family, friends of your romantic partner, friends of your kids, and also the idea of the parents of your kids.

And I went through that period of my life just recently, where I befriended my kids' friends' parents.

Because let's play together, let's have fun together, let's get to know you, because our kids get along and we can get along too.

The third pathway is your hobbies and your interests.

And I think this one gets a lot of attention for people looking to make new friends.

And hobbies and interests, I also included people in terms of your church, which is our synagogue or place of worship, which is about 4%, online, which is about 6%, so people meet friends online, clubs and organizations, about 6%, and then also kind of sports, sporting clubs, you know, the basketball team we just talked about, and I know that you've done before to meet friends at 1%.

And then the final group is where you are.

The last group is you meet people in your neighborhood, you meet people who are in your same building, you meet people who are your roommate.

So 10% of people said that their friendships came from that.

So if you add all of those together, they're a little bit higher than 100%.

And the reason is that basically we allow people to make more than one pick, right?

So if you went to school, you met someone at school, but also maybe at a club or at an organization.

So the idea is we let people actually pick more than one if they felt like that was appropriate.

So younger people are meeting most of their friends at school.

That's right.

Older people are meeting most of their friends if they could pick one category, it would be work.

That's right.

Okay.

Then what was surprising about your survey, which how many people?

We had nearly 4,000 respondents.

Now I'm thinking about it, it's even more than that.

The way that it worked is you identified up to, in the first year of the study, seven friends.

So you would say, this is my friend, and then you get a bunch of characteristics about them, like where you met them.

Then the second year, we had up to five friends, but then we asked, have you made a new friend in the next year?

We added that to the whole.

That's cool.

You could have as many as seven in the first year, or five in the second year plus one, if you had a new friend.

Okay.

You survey thousands of people.

You learn that young people are more likely to make friends, or typically make friends at school, or older people who aren't in school will make friends at work.

But another thing that we saw was the majority of people who answered this had friends, and they had on average five friends.

That's right.

So one of the big things about this study that my co-authors and I, I want to give a shout out to Natalie Pennington and to Amanda Holstrom, who were co-authors on this and they helped create the money, they helped create the survey, they helped analyze the data, and this team has been awesome.

We actually did our first project during COVID, during lockdown.

We were such a great group to work together that we kept working on this, and the American Friendship Project was born out of that.

And we found that 98% of people had at least one friend.

And this is big because there have been recent reports about the plummeting rates of friendship.

My co-author, Natalie Pennington, actually spent some time with the data from where those kind of claims came from and found that it was creating restrictions on who you could call a friend that really prevented people from describing the friendship as they experienced it.

So they were actually kind of pushing down that number.

The other thing is some of the other reports that have suggested that people's friendship circles are declining have really been methodological artifacts, meaning as we shifted from face-to-face survey collection, like I'm sitting across from you and you're a participant in the study and I'm filling out the survey, versus online, it dramatically changes the dynamic of how people answer questions because people really feel like, well, I can just skip through or, how much more do I have to answer of this before I get paid?

So they try to find ways to not respond in ways that they think they're going to have to put more work in answering the survey, which means that they oftentimes try to take shortcuts to depress the amounts of friends they're going to report, especially if you have to then say, for every friend you report, you got to say, where did you meet them?

Who is this person?

All this other stuff, it's more work.

So the other part about this, which is kind of exciting if you think about it from these kind of doom and gloom reports, is that 58% of people said that they had five or more friends.

That's great.

Like that's outstanding that people have a lot of friends that they can count on.

And I would point out that this is basically a very similar number that's been reported since 1970 to 2010.

So it's not the case that we have seen this dramatic shift of time, or of the number of friends going down, or the number of people who are friendless going up.

So what I think is kind of exciting about sharing these data with the public and kind of getting involved in these conversations is saying, maybe we shouldn't be focused on the things about how we don't have any friends.

And instead, what our study found is that people are longing to spend more time with their friends.

They are happy with their friends, they have friends, they're just not spending the kind of time with their friends as they would like.

And this is really good to hear.

It's hopeful and it's a lot different than what I have been hearing, which is more bleak.

And even I was listening to with Putnam and Bowling Alone.

Yeah.

And him, he was just on New York Times and The Surgeon General.

And we see a lot of the loneliness epidemic and the friendship recession.

But what I'm hearing you say is that from the data, it's not in a recession.

Well, in that particular way of thinking about the number of friends or the number of people friendless.

So this is what's the tricky thing.

When we think about loneliness, loneliness comes from two things.

One is that you either don't have relationship partners, or two is that you're not spending any time with them.

So I'll give you an example in the study that we did.

Forty-four percent of the people in our study across the three different groups that we had, wished that they had more time with their friends.

Forty-two percent wished for more closeness amongst their friends, and thirty-six percent said they had difficulty maintaining friendships in this time in their lives.

If we think about what these statistics suggest is that there is a substantial number of people, about two-fifths in the American public, who have friends, right, and maybe as many as five and more, right, but they're just not prioritizing friendship in their life.

They're not developing the kind of intimacy in their life.

And so the reason that I think this is an optimistic story is that we can do something about that.

You know, I've been on many, many interviews and otherwise and said how hard it is to make friends.

Like, I've been quoted multiple times saying, it's hard to make friends.

It takes many hours to make friends.

You've got to put yourself out there.

It comes with a lot of vulnerability.

But instead saying, you have friends.

You're just not spending the time that you might like with them or you're not establishing closeness and intimacy that you might like.

We can do something about that.

And as a communication researcher, as an educator, I'm excited to think about the idea that I can help people think about closeness and maintenance of friendship.

Maybe in some ways it's easier than is the hard route, which is try to create brand new friends from scratch.

Although we have evidence on that too, and people are doing that too.

They're making new friends too.

And like you said, you have friends, which you survey thousands of people.

Only 2% of them said they didn't have any friends.

That's right.

Which is a very small number.

And for the 2%, you can make friends.

It's true.

You can certainly make friends.

Do you like having that pivot from, it's hard to make friends, but it's worth it, to you have friends, we just need to prioritize them more?

I think that that's been a message that I've been sharing for a long time.

And what I'm excited about this study is I have the data to back it up.

Right.

I'll give you another example.

I get asked questions a lot of times about friendship breakup.

Right?

And I want to give you 2 pieces of statistics, 2 statistics that I think are really interesting on this, right?

Lots of people have experienced losing touch with a friend over the course of the year.

We asked them more questions in this, but we framed it very neutrally.

We didn't say to them, did you break up with a friend, or did you have a fight with a friend, or whatever?

We said, did you lose touch with a friend over the course of the last year?

And in that case, what we had was the number of people who had basically lost or lost touch with a friend in the last year is about 40 percent overall.

Seventy-four percent of our student sample had it, and that makes sense.

You leave high school, you go to college, you're losing touch with those friends, they've fallen out of your life, they used to be part of your daily routine, and that's something that I really think a lot about and care a lot about is building routines around friendship.

For adults, that number was about 36 percent that they had lost a friend.

By contrast, we ask people, how many people aren't getting along with their friends right now?

Like are you actually actively disagreeing in conflict with your friends?

Only six percent said that they're in conflict with their friends, but people are losing their friends or losing touch with their friends.

This is fundamentally not an issue where people are having, at least very often, breakups, fights, conflicts that deteriorate their friendships or leave them more alone or frustrated.

Although that undoubtedly happens, and undoubtedly that's a very painful experience.

Instead, as a matter of course, as a matter of life, as we go from one part of our life to the next, we lose our friends.

People move away, people start new jobs, people get married, people have kids, and all of these are friendship killers, but they're also some of the best things in life.

So I think what's really important is we think about this from an advocacy for friendship.

The evangelist in me comes out and I say, it's true, yes, most of us have lost touch with a friend in the last year.

But guess what?

It's not because we're fighting with our friends, it's because it's tough to prioritize them.

It feels like our lives are very busy and we're just not putting the kind of maintenance effort we could be putting into it.

Which would explain why people have friends, yet they could still feel lonely.

Exactly.

It makes a ton of sense that people would say, I have friends, but I feel lonely in my life.

It absolutely makes sense because you need both.

Yeah.

I love how much you love evangelizing friendship, and it gets me excited.

I wonder, what do you think it is about you that gets you wired to talk about this?

And research it as much as you do.

Yeah.

That's a good question.

Part of it is, I think, when I did those initial studies on friendship expectations, I was trying to understand something about myself.

I always have loved good conversation.

I've always cared deeply about my friends.

I've always been comfortable going deeper into getting to know somebody.

It's just been something that's part of who I am and how I'm wired.

In those early studies, I tried to understand, well, why aren't other people this way?

And I learned from those studies that not everybody defines friendship the same way, as we talked about.

Some people don't crave that kind of intimacy that I do.

And some people are just not going to prioritize hanging out with other people if they have a choice of activities to do.

And that's not to disparage people, but it brought insight to me about why things are the way they are.

I took a long detour and I studied flirting for a long time, and I wrote a book, Five Flirting Styles.

I got a lot of attention around that.

And I abandoned that work because I found I just at some point felt that it was, it wasn't speaking to me in a way that made me feel passionate.

It made me feel like I think I was giving reasonable and fair advice about how to be reflective about how we communicate attraction, but it wasn't making me go, there's something important in our lives that we should be doing right now, and we can do it.

And I have some thoughts and answers about how we could be doing it.

And friendship has been that thing.

I think that that's, I think it's very personal for me.

I think it's because I also love the fact that I got to talk about my research, which I care about.

But I would add a third piece to the reason I think that I'm, that I get to talk about it as much as I do, because it's really intriguing to people right now.

I think particularly since the pandemic, these last four years have been rugged, and people feel as if they're adrift socially.

The loneliness epidemic that you're talking about is real, and it's particularly high for young Americans right now.

Like it's higher for youth than it has been in the past.

So older generations tend to not be having as increased rates of loneliness as young people are.

But I say all this to say is that I think that I'm excited and excited to talk about it, in part because people are excited to talk about it, and they want to know how to do something about it.

And I'm like, I got something to share.

I have some things that I can say, and I think that that makes me feel valued, and we all want to feel like our work is valuable.

I was looking at your paper, and I saw relational closeness.

Yeah.

Could you talk a little bit about how that works?

Yeah.

I've actually heard this come up more than a few times.

And I think part of what's tricky about this is that people, because that friendship is not institutionalized and culturally agreed upon and what constitutes it, it's also hard to apply labels to it in a way that really work and work across.

And I'll give you an example.

My co-author, Natalie Pennington, on this is leading a paper right now where she looks at people who say their romantic partner is their best friend.

What's interesting is if you ask the average person, do you think it's okay that your romantic partner is your best friend, you might get one of two responses.

Of course, your best friend should be your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, right?

That's important because that's the kind of love you're looking for.

The other is, that's kind of sad, right?

You don't have a best friend that's not your partner, that's sad, right?

What's interesting about Natalie's study is that she's not finding hardly any differences in terms of people's life satisfaction, their sense of loneliness, their sense of belongingness in this world, whether they call their romantic partner their best friend or not, when compared to people who have a romantic partner but just didn't list them as a friend, because they could have.

We gave them five to seven slots to put in their romantic partner.

If they didn't, they're not less happy.

They're not less satisfied with their life.

But that's the kind of great example that I'm talking about.

People use that label best friend in a way that for some people, like I would never call my wife my best friend.

Other people, like I absolutely would call my wife my best friend.

And why don't you too?

And I think that that applies for all levels of friendship.

The reason that I can say this person is a close friend but not a best friend really is kind of an arbitrary thing.

We had people in our study that said, this is my best friend and this is my best friend, and this is my best friend.

And other people like, no, no, I just prefer close for all of them.

I don't want best because I don't want to differentiate between them.

They're all close.

And that makes sense as well because I think people who say, I don't want to pick just one because that's not fair to any others.

Why not?

So what I think is lovely and fluid and organic about friendship is also the thing that creates miscommunication.

Maybe a little bit potentially people film kind of left out or like, hey, I thought I was your best friend.

But in fact, I think the best types of friendships are the ones that can joke about it.

So if someone's be like, I thought you're the best friend.

You're like, you are.

Don't worry.

Just don't tell the other person.

Just to be able to understand that every relationship you've got is significant and meaningful to you.

And it doesn't really mean anything.

It's the enjoyment you're getting out of the person right then and there.

Everybody's going to be wondering what about social media and the digital landscape and how that affects friendship.

Yeah, happy to.

Yeah.

So let's dive in.

Yeah, let's do it.

So the first thing I'd say is the study found that about 40% of people lived either in a different city or further away from one of their top friends.

That's a lot.

If you think about how many long distance friendships proportionally, that is a lot of people that people just cannot access without a long drive or a plane flight.

And some of them are even international, right?

You have to go on another continent to be able to spend time with your friend.

What this means is that we rely on media.

For those relationships, relying on media of some type, of some sort to keep in contact is really important.

What we found were the three things that you might guess were the most common ways to maintain friendships with media.

One was texting.

It was very popular.

So about 60% were texting once a month or more with their friend.

63% were making phone calls once a month or more.

And 65% were face-to-face contact once a month or more.

So we're using these kind of nice sort of combination of media, which are actually really good for the process of maintaining friendships.

I'm a major advocate of the text.

It's one of the ways that my research on social media and what I did at Harvard crosses over with what I do in friendship.

I think we should send text to our friends just to say, hey, I love you.

I'm thinking of you.

My graduate student Jess Dominguez did one on why it's fun to just send memes, send little clips of stuff that you're enjoying.

You can send voice notes if that's the thing that you like.

Whatever it is that you want to use, do that because the truth is, is all of those little moments of connection that we make, especially with our long distance friends are important and valuable for keeping that relationship in our minds.

The two places where things were different though, were adults tend to prefer email, which is not shocking.

I've seen other studies where email probably because it's legacy in writing letters, particularly for older adults, it's a great way to check in with a friend.

My mom and her best friend for years sent correspondence between each other through paper mail and then they switched over to email and they still do that even, and they live in different states.

While young people actually, students preferred video chat, video calls.

Video chat, I think also got a bad name because during the pandemic, we all had to do it.

I think we all were like, oh my god, I don't want to get another video call.

Yeah.

I think people found that actually over time as they got used to it, they liked it and then they actually prefer it for some types of interactions.

I see more and more KU students walking down the street with it on as they're walking down.

It's funny is the debate when in the early 2000s was should you take a phone call publicly, now we're back into a new form, a video call publicly.

Is that acceptable?

Is that a good etiquette?

But which leads me to social media.

Social media was not favored by most people, was not engaged with very often, and part of it is that you can't see what's going on with someone through social media unless they post.

Lots of research has suggested that posting is a very infrequent thing for most social media users, and for those who, there's like an asymptotic curve.

So some people post a lot, lots of people post very little, but they still enjoy being an audience member, seeing what other people have posted and shared.

And this has been true for a while.

My concern is that as TikTok, short videos through things like YouTube, Instagram reels are taking over.

So rather than it being content shared that was photo based of friends, it's now largely done by content creators and influencers.

Facebook has now forced us to look at more and more real content that we didn't even pick.

And so we see less stuff by friends and the people who used to be a Facebook friend, which is kind of funny to think about it.

The bottom line is that research that I've done, both with the researchers who are on this paper and I've done another wise, would say that social media probably plays very little role in maintaining long-term meaningful friendships with one another.

But it has two or three really important functions that aren't about maintaining it, but about having a way to contact somebody.

So I'll give you an example.

When I went back to Boston for this fellowship, there were two guys from my fraternity, one of which just moved to Boston, and the other one was living there.

I wouldn't have known either of them were there, had I not known on Facebook that they had moved and they live there.

Because I only saw family pictures and updates occasionally, I knew what was going on in their life in that way you do.

But I had two great evenings with them, and it was so much fun watching USC football again, and going to have Italian food in Boston with them.

I got to meet their families.

It was awesome.

But I wouldn't have been able to do that had not the social media presence, the address book, been possible.

Because they weren't in my phone for texting, I didn't have their phone number, and they moved enough times, I didn't have their address.

So I think that when we think about social media's role, my argument generally is it plays very little if no role overall in our loneliness, in our connection, in our maintenance.

But it plays a crucial role in keeping relationships in our able to be contacted and in our kind of emotional cognitive space.

There are people who were once part of my life who are still part of my life because of it, which I think is a good thing.

But it doesn't tend to strengthen that relationship and it also doesn't tend to make you personally feel like you're a happier or less lonely person.

You're not really initiating new relationships or new friendships in social media, and you're really even not maintaining them.

You're just being made aware of what's going on because I don't post all that often.

I know Andy doesn't post all that often.

I'll post up reels that I thought were funny.

But other than that, TikTok, even LinkedIn nowadays is all presenting stuff that they think you're going to engage with rather than your actual people.

Something that I like that you talk about often is the term social media.

It's just growing and growing.

Everything that we can consider social media is, every year it gets bigger and bigger.

Snapchat is a thing now, TikTok is a thing now.

You know it.

It's fascinating to me how long that term stuck around social media despite it being so broad.

Yeah.

I think it's because it continues to have new platforms.

It has new instantiations of old ways of doing things, new competitors.

There's something I've written about a lot, which I find kind of interesting that this is even happening, is social media has now kind of like taken over the text.

So now in Europe particularly WhatsApp is huge.

It's Weibo in China, and it's very much a group texting kind of platform.

Yeah.

What's odd about these things is there's also when I was at Harvard, one of the things that...

Oh, and by the way, you have a right to tell me to stop saying when I was at Harvard, because what I have noticed is everyone who's ever gone to Harvard will say, when I was at Harvard, so this is going to be the last time in this interview I'll say that.

You're the first on the podcast to say that routinely, or you're the first to say that and actually be factual.

Yeah, I want to call myself on this nonsense before it gets any farther.

But that all said, when I was there, there were a lot of robust conversations about the idea that as we enter into the twilight of the social networking era, as all those groups and otherwise seem to collapse, people are rebuilding them privately through group chat.

So what's exciting in some level is what we once knew as the things that people do on Facebook, on Instagram, to a lesser degree, on Snapchat, if you were an adolescent, are now being done as adults through group chat type programs to maintain friendships, share pictures, share memes, joke around and be part of it.

Some really great researcher in adolescence have found that these things can create tensions, right?

You can be part of two different group chats, and maybe even know something about one clique of your friends in one group.

You don't want to share with another one.

There's some privacy issues.

There's some issues about who contributes and what's said.

Those things are not easy for adolescents to navigate, but I would say that they weren't easy when it was Facebook either.

It's always a little hard.

It's just that it's in private now, and at least in private amongst five, six people rather than private to 200, 300, 500 friends, and that's what I would call public.

So what I'm getting at is that I think the reason, the robustness that you think about social media has to do with the fact that it's protean.

It keeps changing and shifting shapes as time goes on.

What about, this is like research that you're privy to, and I always try to like allude to it, but I don't know it as well as you do.

Sure.

There's a lot of different mediums that we can interact with people on, the phone call, the face-to-face, the video chat, the text.

What's the research on that regarding, I know you mentioned making friends, people use this, but is there research saying like effectiveness or yeah?

Yeah.

So I did a paper recently that looked at when does basically interpersonal media satisfy the need to belong.

The argument being, if we talk on these different channels, under what circumstances do we actually have our needs met?

So the need to belong argument goes, I want to feel connected, therefore I take action, and does that action change my sense of connection?

So it's not enough to say, I think it's going to work.

It's not enough to say I go to it to try to work.

It doesn't actually work in terms of when we watch people's change of behavior over time.

What this project did was it found the only channel which consistently performed, whether you were feeling lonely or connected, whether it was at the daily level or yearly level, whether it was a hard time in your life or easy time in your life, was the phone call.

I have been tickled when people quote me on basically like, call your friends.

I see that sometimes in argument, like in paper articles or when people ask for me to share my insights, I'm like, create opportunities to make routine phone calls to your friends.

A lot of people don't want to do that because it's uncomfortable.

There's a large group of people like, I don't know what we talk about, I don't know how we do it.

But I can tell you that not only it is the most robust way to maintain long-distance friendships, if you have no other way of communicating with them, but every call you make makes it easier the next time you talk to them, because you have something to talk about, you have something to share.

Now, of those other ones, this is another big take home of that project, but of my thinking on this generally, it's better than nothing.

If all you've got in you is a text, send it.

If all you've got in is to check in on a group chat, do it.

The only one that I'm not 100 percent sure that is better than nothing is looking at their stuff on social media.

There is some research to think that that might make you go, well, I remember our good times together, I can see that they're happy right now, and that makes me feel less alone.

There is some research that says that that inspires a sense of further disconnection because you are not talking to them, you're only reflecting on what they have and what you don't.

Sometimes called FOMO, but not really, it's more like envy.

Yeah.

But there's a third option which is simply that it doesn't matter because it's such a small and non-salient thing that you do.

Why would we really think that it moves the needle on our connection if we have a deep sense of desire to connect?

As I said, I'm an advocate for the text in part because I'm like, if that's all you have to offer, do it because it can make a difference.

It's better than being alone.

Something I've noticed is when I ask people who their best friends are, a lot of them are friends from high school or college despite being 29.

It makes me think, you've had seven, eight years since you graduated college, but your best friend is someone who doesn't even live near you.

True.

I think that's really interesting is even me, whenever I think about some of my best friends.

I wonder if that is the trend for a lot of people.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a really incredible meta-analysis that looks at the size of people's social network over their lifetimes, and we peak in terms of our highest number of people in our network, or in our early 20s, and then we about 25.

So between 15 and 25, we acquire lots and lots and lots of relationships.

Then it peaks at 25, and for the rest of your life, it goes down, and we lose about a friend a decade from 25 until around 70.

That's not great, right?

But it speaks to how fruitful that time in our lives are.

The people who are developmental theorists would argue that there are also huge developmental things that are going on.

Psychologists and developmental psychologists are called like developmental tasks or things that you're supposed to accomplish.

In the ages between 15 and 25, you're figuring out who you are, you're figuring out what you're going to do with your life, you're figuring your career out, you're dating people, learning about your romantic preferences or who you'd be good match with.

You're trying on new identities, you're trying on new styles, you're trying on new music, you're learning all kinds of things about your career through college, if you go to college or maybe the military or through other experiences that people have to grow and change.

When you have people side by side going through those things, not only does it create an opportunity for a ton of time, which is part of my overall perspective, you need time to develop these things, but you also encounter them with a deep amount of openness.

So those times in your life have three critical characteristics.

One, a ton of free time.

Second, a motivation to explore and understand your identity.

Third, ton of available people.

Right?

You are surrounded by more people at that stage of your life who are single, open to making friends, and of your similar age than you will ever be again in your life.

Yeah.

You...

In our last conversation, we talked about how loneliness, it's a systems issue.

There's so much changing around us from the Internet and us not being able to, or us getting stuff on Amazon so we don't interact with people, to less walkable cities, to virtual work, and we can keep going and how it's being put on the individual.

Who should we be expecting more from?

What system should be doing more to fix or to address or improve?

Well, that is it.

I mean, I think that's a $20,000 question right now.

I'm part of a working group that's trying to figure out guidelines about how to promote social health and well-being.

And what was interesting is that the amount of research about walkable communities, about places to interact, about having civic engagement and all those things, what's hard is even if people know that to be true, what's really difficult is figuring out how to create policy initiatives, which meaningfully does something different.

Walkability is a great example of that.

You know, there was a really cool article in The Atlantic that talked about this person reflecting on when they were in college and they walked everywhere, took the bus, and then they also were surrounded by 20,000 or 30,000 other young people doing the same thing.

He found people all the time.

There were people everywhere all the time.

And you talked to them and you interacted with them and you met new people and you smiled and flirted and all that great stuff that comes along with your life.

He was talking about now he lived in Houston and all he did was drive.

So is, do we want to design a walkable city?

Yeah, but is it realistic to have a walkable city for everybody?

Probably not.

You know, another study, which kind of goes against this though, is that in there's a really, really good study that just came out just this month.

And what it found was that when people live in high density housing, they actually are less likely to be interacting with people in high density housing that they're in because they're overwhelmed.

There's just too many people for them to possibly talk to or get to know.

So, as a consequence, if you lived with people, right, you're a romantic partner, your kids, a friend, a roommate, what you liked, you tended to have plenty of social opportunities.

But if you lived in the same building with a ton of people, you interact less.

So, what's weird is that urban density also, which is also walkable, in the case in which that if you live in a city that you could everyone get around, you're also in a place where there's tons of people on the sidewalks.

That's probably too many.

So, what's strange is that I don't know that there are hard and fast rules about the kind of institutional pressures that we can be putting on urban planners or architects or about senior living centers or about campuses or about city planners.

And even if we could identify what those causal factors were, I'm not sure that there's a lot of dialogue right now that says that people want to spend the kind of money that it would require to do that.

There seems to be a continuing interest in building houses and suburbs, which generally are for driving and for getting there, than there are about having that kind of thing.

Yeah, because it makes me wonder, I know of independently run organizations like Skip the Small Talk, where they get people together in these large metro cities and they have a deck of cards with conversation topics, right?

And they go through and 90 minutes of getting to know people, which is really cool.

But it makes me wonder, with the Surgeon General saying, hey, this is a cause of concern.

Yeah.

Then, just like legislations passed for cigarettes, right?

I was watching a video when Obama had passed this big thing about cigarettes and making it more difficult to get.

And well, now we have this big health concern with loneliness that the Surgeon General just said.

So then I was like, well, shouldn't there be respect of legislation passed?

Like, what would that even look like?

What would that even look like?

And I think, and that's where I will admit that my expertise is lacking.

I'm just not, I'm not aware of what could be done.

I will tell you what, you know, Andy Morella and I wrote in The Social Biome, which is coming out this year about this, is our attitude has been to think about, and we work with this metaphor of food a lot, because the idea that we're trying to get is social nutrition is real, that we can actually think about it measurably, that there are good scientific evidence that a nutritious social life is a healthier, happier, more longer lasting life.

And we actually are recommending that people think of it in the sense of just like you're eating your greens along with your treats, make sure you prioritize connection and conversation along with your work, your family, your immediate demands about money or about whatever stressors or things that you're dealing with.

Because I think a lot of people perceive it as it will just happen by matter of course.

It will just happen organically.

It will happen just because in college it was so easy or high school so easy, so it should happen now.

What Andy and I are trying to convey to people is that it's really important that you say to yourself, I'm doing this because it's something that's important and valuable to me.

I'm going to do it even if it's uncomfortable, even if I haven't made a good habit of it in the past because being social is good for me.

Now, will that help?

I hope.

That's our best answer, is to break down some of the barriers about why people don't, to give people seven clear strategies of how to be social.

But I also, as I said in our prior podcast, there are much bigger issues afoot that an individual can't change.

Some of them are things that we don't necessarily want to think are bad, like family sizes are shrinking.

It's not inherently a bad thing, but it means you have less siblings.

And in our survey, for example, siblings were like four or five percent of people said sibling was one of their closest friends.

They don't have them.

People used to have a lot more cousins.

And in our survey, one percent of people identified extended family, specifically cousins, as being their friends.

I have a friend who is my cousin, or a cousin who I would consider a very close friend who lives in the area.

So what I'm saying is, as family size shrink and we have less siblings and less cousins, that's not inherently bad.

And I don't know that we should have policy decisions to do something about that.

It's a reality that we're living in, which means that we have to take it upon ourselves in order to make healthy decisions around being social.

I wonder that too, because if I want people who are my age, to be better at making friends and a certain act, if I could have someone do more of one thing whenever they watch anything I make or listen to something I make, would be to somehow take on more inquisitiveness about the people around them.

I want to impart social curiosity in some way.

That's a good mission, by the way.

Yeah, like impart the realization and the knowledge that humans are such interesting people.

I think humans in New York did that really well, where just a picture of someone and a paragraph of conversation they had, and the picture, you may not think of that paragraph, right?

And it helps us understand like, okay, there's more than meets the eye and all that jazz, but I'd love to do that.

So I often think to myself, well, like I host the soccer program and 20 guys get to show up Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that's really powerful and effective.

And honestly, out of everything I've done the past year, I think that's the thing that's brought most success because it's all relational.

But then I like the podcast and talking about it and the YouTube and but it's like, but really how can we move the needle most effectively and efficiently?

And I think it's a trap, like whenever I start thinking about it because like inherently it's not efficient, right?

Like friendship.

It shouldn't be efficient.

It shouldn't be.

Right.

Right.

Inherently, it's not.

And in fact, if you had a friend who sat down with you and like, let's go through the bullets, Chris.

Right.

I'm not interested in your life.

I just want the bullet points and the summary.

I only got 10 minutes.

You'd be like, what?

What?

I thought we were going to hang out.

We're going to have a meal.

We're going to have a drink.

We're going to play pool.

What the hell?

I think it's Robert Putnam with Bowling Alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like even in the interview, the interviewee or the interviewer post him the question like, hey, at one point in time, you're sitting in Bill Clinton, the Oval Office of Bill Clinton.

I read that interview too.

It was great, wasn't it?

Yeah.

It was really good.

But she was saying like, and the president had this and he knew about it, and even Obama whenever he came in, yet still people are lonely.

Yeah.

He's like, I just think it's like an unfair question, right?

I think if I remember correctly, Putnam said, if you're looking to me to answers, I'm not the guy.

Yeah.

Right?

I don't feel good about being a Cassandra that was right.

I don't feel good about the fact that I don't have answers.

And he had a good sense of humor at it.

I mean, he's had a lifetime of service, and his most recent book is also excellent, The Upswing, and I recommend that to everybody too.

But he didn't have answers.

But he did say something in that interview that I immediately copied and sent to my co-author, Andy, who co-wrote the social biome with me.

He said, basically, if there's one thing that we want to try to do is we need to impart on people the importance of feeling obligated to one another.

Yeah.

He says, that's it.

Whether that's obligated in the sense that I care whether or not there are people who are not eating in my hometown or in the world, or whether I care about whether or not people will have a home to sleep in tonight, or whether I care whether my friend needs company, or whether my friend basically deserves to have someone listen to them when they tell them about their hardships or whatever.

When we reframe our thinking around the idea that embracing our obligations to one another is actually how we live a more meaningful life, that's the pathway that Putnam offered in the interview, and it's exactly what Andy and I espouse in our book.

I would add to this, what's weird is when I talk about obligation, it's weird because I think that it's almost a bad word.

Right.

I want to be obligated to other people.

But I think what's curious about thinking of obligations of friendships specifically rather than trying to make these structural changes around the number of people in a family or our work lives or our walkability or working, how many hours we work.

Instead, I can say what I want every individual reader of my book to take away from it or from any podcast or anything that I do, is to go, all I'm asking you to do is dial up your obligation to your friends.

That means checking in on them, that means showing care for them, that means for being forgiving of them, that means sharing your company with them, and remembering that being in their company, you don't just give to yourself, you give to other people.

That's what's really a point that we make in the book, is that the loss of social time is multiplicative, because it's not just one person who loses that time, we both lose that time together.

Creating obligations for interaction, for checking in and routines, that's the message that I feel I'm most equipped to advocate for.

For all the other changes, structural, socioeconomic, poverty, mental health, I know that there are some excellent, amazing workers, researchers, advocates.

I saw them in the place in Boston.

I've seen them here.

They're everywhere.

They're working hard on this.

I just know that my limited contribution to this is one about social obligation, and I feel strongly that we should just dial up the notches a bit.

Yeah, that's really good, and you're playing your part with that.

I think at some point, we'll have a chorus of people saying, call someone, it's like personal responsibility.

We function better when we have more responsibility, counter-intuitively.

Yes.

They say, the heavier the load, the straighter the truck drives.

It's like the more we got going on, the better we're going to be.

Robert Putnam says, join a running club.

There's very simple things.

Call someone, like you said, last time you came on, you said, don't be a flake.

They're very simple things that we need to abide by.

But I love the idea of this whole entire book and your corpus of research, you attune to this one concept of social obligation to one another.

And it is a pejorative whenever we think about it, like, oh, don't feel obligated, like a really negative thing, when really what you're saying is feel obligated.

Yeah, we need one another and we need to step up for one another and to be there for one another.

I think about what this is, I'll give you just little ways in which this manifests.

There have been times where there's like a party and I'm invited to it.

I spent the calendar for a long time.

I've had a hard week.

I don't want to go.

I'm busy.

I don't want to do this, tired.

But then I think I always am glad to see people show up to the parties that I host.

If no one showed up to my party, I would feel like a loser.

I'm coming.

You clean everything, your house is ready.

That's right.

If no one shows up, that hurts your feelings.

I go to weddings because I like weddings, but I go because I'm saying, I am happy that you invited me.

I go to celebrations of people's retirements, or people's moving away, or their kids' graduation.

I go because even if I had a bad day or a bad week, I'm saying to that person, you are worth honoring.

That's the little ways that what I mean by this manifesting an obligation.

That's not me being like, that is partly me saying, don't be a flake, for sure.

But it's also me saying, this is not an onerous act of pain.

This is merely you following through on the commitments we have to each other, and seeing those commitments as something that are worth having.

That's what I think of, and I think the term friendship evangelist is a nice term because you are saying like, hey, this is what matters, here's the value, and that's something I really think about often is each individual is so valuable, right?

They bring so much to the table.

We all have different lived stories and experiences that we can learn from one another, and together collectively, we are our best.

When we live by ourselves, when we live alone, we won't be our best.

Yeah.

Well, it depends on your philosophy about what life is about and what you're doing with this life.

And I try to be very open to the possibility that we all have different versions of what we're supposed to be doing in this life.

But for me, when I get down to the nitty gritty, I have a philosophy built with my friends from college, where I called it basically Sphere of Influence.

And the idea is that at the time of my life, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed about the idea that some of the worst things in the world were never going to be fixed.

And I still am overwhelmed with the idea that my time on this earth is limited.

It's not forever.

And if I spend almost any time with those thoughts, those are really awful, terrifying, soul-crushing thoughts.

And with my friends in college, the Sphere of Influence philosophy came out to say, but the only people I really ever matter to, temporally, existentially, morally, are to the people who I have the most influence over.

Who are those people?

People I see every day, people who are in my family, the people who are my friends.

And if I choose every day to try to impart what I can offer to the Sphere of Influence, that's really the only thing that matters.

Because everything else is temporary, and we're all going to die anyway, and life is short, and even our most meaningful accomplishments will be forgotten.

I have come to accept that over my years, but the circle of influence philosophy has never left.

So in some ways, what I'm saying is that we should broaden our circle just a little.

Our sphere of influence is maybe bigger than we can even imagine, because research says that our sphere of influence includes being kind and wanting to know something about the barista's life or their day.

It means saying a cheerful hello to your Uber driver rather than just checking that you're the right person in the right car, or giving them the instructions.

Asking a question and then waiting to have them answer and listening.

The sphere of influence doesn't require that much of an extension to offer those graces in our lives, but I have come to believe that empirical evidence lines up with what actions we can do.

So I'm trying to impart that wisdom on other people.

So if they want to broaden their own sphere of influence, they have some way to do it.

Every week, I see Wall Street Journal, New York Times, you're everywhere.

But when people listen to this, what are resources you could advise them to check out to be better at it?

Yeah.

There was a really fun New York Times.

I worked with Katherine Peterson from the New York Times, and we did a five-day friendship challenge, which was really fun, and they have other excellent friendship experts on there, and I recommend it if you have access to it.

They can just Google five-day friendship challenge.

Yeah.

Hopefully, you won't hit a paywall and you'll find it.

I'll add you, the sixth friendship challenge that didn't make it into Katherine Peterson's story is host a party.

Apropos of our conversation, one other one you can do is if you really want to be ambitious, host a party because it's a lot of work.

It is.

But it's worth doing.

The other way that I think resources that you can check out is that, you know, I think that there are some really good books.

There's Platonic by Marissa Franco, which I think is a fine book talking about the importance of friendship.

I think it's very informed and it's research informed.

And I've heard her speak and I think that she has a lot of great insight to offer.

But it depends on kind of like how deep of a dose you want to get of all these things, because there's a lot of things to know.

But I hope that all everyone here will at least consider the possibility of, you know, the looking at or trying to remember the social biome when it comes out next year.

I think it has these seven ideas about how to have healthier social biome.

It talks about obligation and choice and social energy.

It talks about balance and obligation.

It talks about how important it is for our health and well-being and why.

And it's a book that Andy and I wrote and I'm very proud of.

So I hope and it has a very hopeful ending.

So those would be the things.

You know, start small, the friendship challenge, right?

Read an entire book, you know, for now, it's Franco, but in the long run, hopefully, you'll check out the social biome.

Hey, let's go get some pizza.

Definitely, man.

Thank you.

You bet.