Is venting about a friend truly harmless, or is it actually a strategic move within the hierarchy of friendship? This question and more were explored in a talk by Jaimie Krems, a Psychology professor at Oklahoma State University, on Monday, Oct. 17: “An Evolutionary Social Science of Friendship.”
Friendships have long been largely ignored in psychology research, Krems explained, with mating studied five times as much. Even when friendship is studied, researchers have usually focused on a two-person dyad, ignoring that our interactions and our friends’ interactions with multiple other people must come into play.
Friendship is defined as “medium to long term communal bonds between conspecifics who provide preferential support,” Krems said. This means that our friends provide support to us, over supporting a stranger. She elaborated, “Our friends have a stake in our continued welfare, so they continue to help us” even when we’re in a weak position, because we will later return the favor.
Therefore, to reap benefits, Krems points out that “you shouldn’t just compete for socially desirable friends, you need friends who prioritize you.” We have cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support, as well as making decisions to side with the friend most likely to support you later.
For example, when two people in a friend group are fighting, we take the side of whoever generally values us, and will likely support us in the future. This ranking is not necessarily the same as your own ranking of friends, or even who you think is right in the dispute.
“You’re not making these decisions coldly, consciously,” Krems was quick to clarify “it’s more of ‘I like you, I support you.’” She stressed that these are cognitive mechanisms that have likely developed over time because they’re evolutionarily beneficial.
When people are asked about friend preferences, they reliably pick things like kind and trustworthy and disfavor vicious or indifferent traits. However, Krems’ important finding is that these friend preferences actually correlate to how we want these people to treat us, not how they behave towards everyone.
Our real preferences have “target-specificity”: we are how friends behave towards us and how they treat us relative to others. While we rate the kind vs. vicious behavior similarly when self-directed and other-directed, the amplitude of our preferences are much lower: we don’t care as much. In fact, we rate “impartiality” as a good characteristic overall, but not when directed toward ourselves.
When rating how we want friends to behave toward an enemy, our preferences actually reverse. Someone who is vicious toward our enemies can be a good ally, while someone who is too trustworthy might keep a secret that is harmful to us.
Therefore, it makes sense that friendship jealously exists across cultures, eras and possibly even species, as Krems explains. It’s likely adaptive to ensure that our friends prioritize us when giving support or resources.
Social venting is expressing grievances about a mutual friend (the target) to someone (the receiver). We think it focuses on ourselves and our own frustrations, which obscures it as an act of aggression. In fact, venting buffers our own reputation.
Communicating negative information about the target harms their reputation and weakens the receiver-target bond. Simultaneously, it bolsters the venter’s relationship with the receiver, because of the sense of camaderie/trust universal to opening up to someone about your troubles.
Venting is the only way we can simultaneously improve our relationship with a friend while weakening their relationship with someone else. “Our friends support us better when they like us better than their other friends,” Krems said, which leads to competition within a friend group.
Directly trash-talking a target does allow you to weaken their status. However, you are then perceived as aggressive, so the trade-off is not worth it. If you vent about non-social things, you get the same closeness boost, but you cannot change anything about the target.
Krems concludes that social venting is the most efficient way to boost yourself in the friendship rankings, so to speak, and can likely benefit you the next time that receiver friend decides to share some homemade cookies. Whether this is an ethical thing to do, and if we should reign in this behavior in favor of being a nice person, is another matter.
