Study finds your friends aren't really your friends

Apparently, half the people you consider friends don't feel the same way about you

A study conducted by Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will make you question every friendship you’ve ever had.

The researchers found that as many as half of the people we consider to be our friends may not think of us in the same way.

Researchers surveyed a class of 84 college students and asked them to rank every student in the class on a scale of zero (“we’re strangers”) to five (“this person is one of my best friends”). They then had to guess how other students ranked them.

The results, which were recently published in the journal PLoS One, revealed that at least 50 percent of friendships, are not reciprocated.

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"We found that 95 percent of participants thought that their relationships were reciprocal," Dr Shmueli says. "If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that's not the case -- only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category," said Dr Erez Shmueli.

Overall, the highest rate of reciprocal friendships was 53 percent, while the lowest rate was a staggering 34 percent.

“These findings suggest a profound inability of people to perceive friendship reciprocity, perhaps because the possibility of non-reciprocal friendship challenges one-self image,” the authors wrote.

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The researchers believed that reciprocal relationships may also affect social pressures and human behavior.

To test this theory, the researchers took their data one step further by creating a friendship algorithm that predicted one-sided vs. mutual friendships. They then applied it to a real-life social setting, to see if the type of friendship could predict influence on whether or not a person exercised.

"Reciprocal relationships are important because of social influence," says Dr Shmueli, who utilised the "FunFit" social experiment in the course of the research. "In this experiment that analyses different incentives for exercising, we found that friendship pressure far outweighed money in terms of motivation. We found, not surprisingly, that those pressured by reciprocal friends exercised more and enjoyed greater progress than those with unilateral friendship ties."

So, if you want to stay fit, make sure you exercise with your real friends.

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