CAREER: Going Beyond the Dyad: A Network Theory for Understanding the Challenges of Friendship

人们常常认为友谊是理所当然的。拥有朋友能带来更好的身心健康、更长的寿命和更大的经济流动性。友谊还能对抗孤独，孤独感是一种流行病，被描述为我们这个时代一个决定性的公共卫生问题。事实上，大约每10个美国人中就有4个是孤独的，因此他们面临着寿命更短、更不充实的风险。这个项目通过部署一个新的理论框架来揭示友谊的心理学。这一框架强调，过去一直是研究重点的朋友对生活在更广阔的社交世界中，每个朋友都可以与其他人进行互动。因此，之前的研究发现，寻找、结交和保持朋友的挑战比人们想象的要复杂得多。这些挑战可能既包括简单且研究得很充分的两个人组成部分（让朋友喜欢我们），也包括较少研究的多人组成部分（让朋友更喜欢我们，而不是他们喜欢其他朋友）。这个研究项目通过关注这些至关重要但研究不足的社会关系，填补了我们对友谊如何运作的基本理解的主要空白。该项目有三个目标。一是确定人们必须解决的各种挑战，以实现友谊。第二个是更好地描述这些复杂的挑战是什么样的。这两个目标支持第三个目标，即对人们如何解决这些友谊挑战产生新的见解。该项目通过一系列跨文化调查、实验室实验，以及机器学习和网络分析等尖端方法，探讨了友谊面临的挑战及其解决方案。科学传播部分有助于传播科学发现并培训下一代心理科学家与公众接触。更好地了解友谊的社会动态，有助于制定旨在改善心理健康、身体健康和经济流动性的干预措施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

People often take friendship for granted. Having friends is linked to better mental and physical health, longer life, and increased economic mobility. Friendship also combats loneliness, an epidemic that has been described as a defining public health concern of our time. Indeed, about 4 in 10 Americans are lonely, and therefore at risk of living shorter, less fulling lives. This project shines a light on the psychology of friendship by deploying a new theoretical framework. This framework emphasizes that friend pairs, which have been the focus of past work, live in wider social worlds, where each friend can interact with a network of other people. As a result, the challenges of finding, making, and keeping friends are more complex than one might think, and that previous research has found. These challenges might involve both simpler and well-studied two-person components (getting friends to like us) but also lesser-studied multi-person components (getting friends to like us better than they like their other friends). This program of research fills major gaps in our basic understanding of how friendship works by focusing on these vital but understudied social relationships. The project has three aims. One is to identify the various challenges that people must solve to realize friendships. A second is to better describe what these complex challenges look like. These two aims support a third aim of generating new insights into how people solve these friendship challenges. This project examines friendship challenges and their solutions in a series of cross-cultural surveys, laboratory experiments, and via cutting-edge methods such as machine learning and network analysis. A science communication component helps to disseminate scientific findings and train the next generation of psychological scientists to engage with the public. Achieving a better understanding of the social dynamics of friendship informs the development of interventions aimed at improving mental health, physical health, and economic mobility.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.