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Sometimes we want vicious friends: People have nuanced preferences for how they want their friends to behave toward them versus others

2023; Elsevier BV; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.02.008

1879-0607

Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka K. Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon A. Merrie, Keelah E. G. Williams, Daniel Sznycer,

Social and Intergroup Psychology

Intuition and research alike suggest that people prefer friends to be prosocial—particularly kind and trustworthy. Here, we examine these preferences in light of the fact that dyadic friendships are embedded in wider social networks. Because our friends recurrently interact with other people, and these friend-other interactions can have various positive and negative effects on us, people should possess distinct preferences not only for how our friends behave toward us but also for how friends behave toward different other people (e.g., strangers, rivals). In six studies (N = 1183; two pre-registered) with complementary designs and cross-national samples (U.S. community, U.S. student, India community), we find: (a) When the targets of best friends' behavior are not specified, people's friend preferences track how one wants friends to behave toward oneself. Replicating patterns found in past work, (b) people generally want friends to be kinder and more trustworthy than not. But (c) people also want friends to be more prosocial toward oneself than toward others, and (d) people sometimes prefer friends who are more vicious than prosocial, for instance, toward one's enemies. These findings challenge some long-held conclusions about friend preferences, expand the known range of traits preferred in close relationship partners, and enrich our understanding of what it means to deem people, for example, "kind," as such evaluative personality concepts may by default be indexed to the self.