YouTube / Channel 4In bad news for egoists everywhere, a somewhat depressing new study has revealed that half of your friends don’t actually view you as a mate in return.
So go right ahead and count up everybody you consider to be a friend, and then boom – cut it in half.
The dispiriting essay of social-psychology was originally published in PLoS One, and saw psychologists ask 84 college students in one class to rate every other person in the class on a scale from one to five – one meaning ‘I don’t know this person’ and five meaning ‘one of my best friends’, reports the Daily Times.
UniversalThe researchers considered somebody a friend if they were rated three or higher by somebody else in the class.
The students were also asked to write down their estimate for what the other person would rate them.
94 per cent of those asked ranked their number and their guess for the other person’s score equally, meaning that the majority stupidly thought that their friendship feelings were mutual.
Little did they know that in the sad reality, only 53 per cent of the friendship feelings were actually reciprocal as opposed to 47 per cent of them which were not – grim.
One of the researchers involved, Dr Shmueli, said:
We found that 95 percent of participants thought their relationships were reciprocal.If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case, only 50 per cent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.
Fortunately for me, I have no friends so technically nought per cent of my buddies don’t see me as a friend in return. As Alan Partridge would say, ‘I had the last laugh’.
