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Do you have a friend in your circle who could be described as “perfect”? And if so, what are the qualities and character traits that qualify him as such? Scientists have become interested in the question.
What qualities do we appreciate in a good friend? Loyalty? Reliability? Honesty? To answer this question and define a person who could be described as a “perfect friend”, scientists conducted two studies.
Distinguish essential characteristics from more incidental ones
To determine the character traits that are truly essential to making a perfect friend, scientists carried out two separate studies. The first study included primarily undergraduate students at a large public university in the southwestern United States. These volunteers were subjected to a test allowing them to create their ideal friend, from a number of “friendship tokens”, more or less numerous between the participants.
These tokens could be divided between different traits to improve these characteristics in their ideal friend. These traits included:
- loyalty;
- reliability;
- honesty;
- forgiveness ;
- information sharing;
- emotional intelligence;
- and awareness of debt repayment.
Researchers found that traits such as loyalty, reliability and honesty emerged as fundamental necessities of friendship.
A second study to establish these first results
The second study replicated and extended the results of the first with a larger sample of 449 participants. This time, volunteers were presented with forced choice scenarios where they had to choose between two combinations of friends’ traits.
For example, is it better to have a friend who is always loyal but never reliable or a friend who is always reliable but never loyal? Each scenario pitted different traits of necessity against each other. This approach allowed researchers to observe which traits were systematically chosen over others. Here again, the same character traits were chosen by the participants.
Good in his body, good in his head!
Men and women made the same choice
Notable fact: men and women made the same choices. “Friendships – how we make them, what we seek and how we maintain them – are much more complex than they seem. says Jessica D. Ayers, assistant professor of psychological sciences at Boise State University and lead author of the study.
“We are just beginning to understand all of the decisions people must make when deciding whether to initiate or maintain a friendship with another person.” The team of researchers already wishes to continue this work in order to understand the importance of these character traits when a friendship ends. “My long-term goals are to continue to understand preferences for friendship initiation and maintenance, to ultimately understand whether violations of these preferences lead to friendship dissolution or whether the history surrounding dissolution is also more complex” concludes the scientist.
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