Imagine that you are riding in the passenger seat of a close friend’s car. She is driving 75 miles per hour but the posted speed limit is only 25. Before you can say anything, however, she runs straight into a pedestrian crossing the street.
You are the only witness to the accident. Your friend’s lawyer says if you testify in court that she was driving the speed limit, your friend will receive a drastically reduced sentence.
How far would you go for friendship? Would you tell the truth in court, sending your friend to prison? Or would you lie to the judge out of loyalty?
Your answer might reflect where you grew up. Studies have shown that in Switzerland and the U.S., 90 percent of respondents say they would take the honest route in this dilemma. But in other countries, such as Russia and Venezuala, 50 to 70 percent of people say it would be unethical not to help a friend.
“Everyone thinks that telling the truth is a pretty important thing. And everyone thinks it’s important to help friends. But how we resolve these conflicts can differ quite a bit,” says Daniel Hruschka, a professor in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC).
"A lot of our western stereotypes about friendship turn out not to be important in other places."
Hruschka has been studying friendship since graduate school, where he wrote his dissertation on friendships in an Atlanta high school. Since then he has expanded his research to examine attitudes about friendship all over the world.
Recently, Hruschka published an ambitious overview of the topic. His book, Friendship: Development, Ecology and Evolution of a Relationship (University of California Press), was released in 2010.
According to Hruschka, “theories of human evolution have generally neglected the importance of friendships in favor of relationships based on tit-for-tat exchange, biological relatedness or mating. Anthropologists have generally focused their studies more on kinship, marriage and romance.”
Given the scarcity of cross-cultural and experimental research on friendship, Hruschka pulled information from a wide variety of sources, including ethnographic descriptions, behavioral experiments, case studies, self-reports and even physiological experiments that examine biochemical changes in the brain.
As he gathered data, Hruschka found that people in many cultures do not share the same notions of friendship as westerners.
“A lot of our western stereotypes about friendship turn out not to be important in other places. We usually think of friendship as being voluntary. But there are many places in the world where your parents choose your friends for you. They tell you who you’re going to be friends with and there are ritual initiations, in much the same way that there are arranged marriages,” he says.
These friendship rituals can be as elaborate as a wedding. In parts of medieval Europe, for instance, friends could declare their relationship in a church ceremony. Other cultures participate in “blood brother” rituals.
“In fact, if you look at the ethnographic record, it’s almost more likely that a society would have a ritual than not. So the U.S. is kind of an outlier,” adds Hruschka.
Ending friendships is another way in which cultures differ. While American advice columnists typically recommend dropping “toxic” friends, these relationships are not so easily discarded in other places.
“Blood brothers among the Azande in Africa used to perform a ritual where they would dip a piece of bark in the blood of their friend and then consume it. The idea is that if you somehow hurt your friend or fail to help him, that blood will stay in your belly and it will rear up and cause sickness and illness and even death. So there’s an element of fear that’s added to breaking up with friends,” explains Hruschka.
Cultural differences in perceptions of friendship raise a troubling question. With so many different perspectives on friendship, can we even define the term? Hruschka says we can. He has consistently found three themes running through all friendships, whether arranged or chosen, ritualized or informal. They are:
- Providing unconditional aid and assistance when a friend is in need
- Gift-giving, which differs from aid in that gifts are often frivolous, like flowers or chocolates
- Mutual, positive feelings of goodwill
From an evolutionary perspective, Hruschka finds unconditional aid between friends to be particularly intriguing. Studies have shown that friends really do help each other regardless of past behaviors or expectations of future payback.
“So how in an evolutionary and economic sense do we avoid exploitation? Tit-for-tat is a great mechanism for preventing people from exploiting you. But if you have someone in your life and you help them unconditionally, what if they’re a false friend? How do you get around that?” he asks.
One answer to that question is a “courtship period” between friends in which they test each other and build up trust.
“If you think of your closest friend, it might be difficult to pinpoint that moment when you said, ‘This person is now my closest friend.’ There was a transformation that occurred, but sometimes it’s very difficult to understand how and when that happened,” says Hruschka.
Hruschka has no trouble identifying the transformation he underwent—the one that led him down the path to studying friendship. As an undergraduate, he studied mathematics, a far cry from the subjective world of human relationships.
“I thought math was the most beautiful, elegant thing in the world,” he says. “I thought it provided answers to everything. And then, my sophomore year, I got cancer. I had to go for chemotherapy treatments and I met other people who were dealing with cancer as well, many who had much worse cases than I did. And I realized that math couldn’t explain any of this.”
Hruschka became very interested in people’s experiences with illness and disease. After college, he received a fellowship to travel to Mongolia and study a group of healers called bonesetters.
“And that was what really sealed it for me. I enjoyed talking to people, doing interviews, finding out about their experiences and writing about it. After that I applied to anthropology grad school,” he says.
He originally planned to write his dissertation about the ways that social support helps people cope with illness. But as he did more research on social support and social networks, he realized there was very little work on the processes involved in the relationships themselves. So he set out to better understand this common tie that’s often mentioned in studies of public health.
"if you have someone in your life and you help them unconditionally, what if they’re a false friend? How do you get around that?”
Now, Hruschka considers himself fortunate to be able to combine all of his interests through ASU’s programs in Global Health, Sociocultural Anthropology, and Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences. All are part of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
“It may be the only anthropology program in the U.S. that has the applied math program with it, which is a very exciting combination,” he says. “It makes ASU a very attractive place to be.”
His latest project involves a deeper exploration of conflicts of values in a friendship, like the example used at the start of this story. The study involves questions similar to the passenger’s dilemma, but more culturally appropriate.
“We’re also doing behavioral experiments,” he says. “For ethical reasons, you can’t actually put a friend in a car and hit a pedestrian. But the problem with hypothetical stories is that people can say anything. So we developed a set of experiments that involve allocating money to different people in different groups to see how they deal with similar types of dilemmas.”
The study draws participants from villages in China, Bolivia, Iceland, Bangladesh and Fiji, a college in Bolivia, and university students and urban residents in Phoenix.
Hruschka notes that in earlier studies on the passenger’s dilemma, people’s answers were related to the level of social and economic uncertainty in their home country. He says that in the U.S., we might view lying for a friend as corrupt, a way of ensuring favors in the future.
“But when you actually talk to people, they really feel it’s morally wrong not to help a friend. It’s not just about self-interest,” he says.
He adds, “These decisions have real importance for how civil society runs—how court systems work, how markets work, what we view as corruption. So we’re trying to understand these issues in this study.”
Read about another study from Daniel Hruschka on the social “contagion” of obesity.
Hruschka has received funding for his work from the National Science Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute, the University of Chicago and the Templeton Foundation.
