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。拥有朋友与更好的身心健康、更长寿和更强的经济流动性有关。友谊还可以对抗孤独，一种被描述为我们这个时代具有决定性的公共卫生问题的流行病。事实上，大约十分之四的美国人是孤独的，因此面临着活得更短、更不充实的风险。这个项目通过部署一个新的理论框架，揭示了友谊的心理学。这个框架强调，朋友对是过去工作的重点，它生活在更广泛的社交世界中，在那里，每个朋友都可以与其他人的网络互动。因此，寻找、结交和保持朋友的挑战比人们想象的要复杂得多，这是之前的研究发现的。这些挑战可能既包括更简单且研究充分的双人因素(让朋友喜欢我们)，也包括较少研究的多人因素(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重要但未被研究的社会关系，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。一是确定人们实现友谊必须解决的各种挑战。第二是更好地描述这些复杂的挑战是什么样子。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，并通过机器学习和网络分析等前沿方法，研究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开发旨在改善心理健康、身体健康和经济流动性的干预措施。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.