The Unique Psychology of Best Friendship

Samuel Dale

It is both intuitive and commonly inferred in research that best friendship is just the superlative of friendship: a best friend is simply one’s closest friend. To challenge this assumption, the present study aimed to determine whether people view best friendship as a different type of relationship than friendship. To test how people view these relationships, I drew divergent predictions about expected behaviours for each from reciprocal altruism, in which friendships are exchange relationships; and alliance theory, in which friendships are alliances for conflict. In a mixed-methods online survey, 70 participants responded to a series of questions about their close friendships and indicated their reactions to hypothetical scenarios involving those friends. Inconsistent with a superlative notion, not everyone claimed to have a best friend (n = 6). Furthermore, those who had a best friend assigned distinctly greater importance to 1st ranked friends than those who did not have a best friend. However, there was little evidence across measures that friends and best friends uphold different expectations. Behaviours which predicted someone’s support as an ally largely outstripped behaviours which predicted someone’s profitability in driving participant reactions. Researchers should take steps to account for the perceptual boundary between friends and best friends when constructing measures or generalising their results. Broadly speaking, best friends occupy a privileged niche in human social cognition, reflecting their distinct value to survival in an ancestral environment.

The Unique Psychology of Best Friendship

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