A vibrant social life and close friend­ships are an impor­tant part of stay­ing healthy, many recent stud­ies have shown, but what is strange about this is why this is the case, con­sid­er­ing that we’re surpis­ingly bad at judg­ing the beliefs, opin­ions and val­ues of our friends and part­ners.

A grow­ing body of exper­i­men­tal evi­dence sug­gests that, on the whole, we know sig­nif­i­cantly less about our friends, col­leagues, and even spouses than we think we do. […] We’re often com­pletely wrong about their likes and dis­likes, their polit­i­cal beliefs, their tastes, their cher­ished val­ues. We low­ball the ethics of our co-workers; we over­es­ti­mate how happy our hus­bands or wives are.

[…] While peo­ple do have some idea of the polit­i­cal beliefs of their friends, espe­cially their close friends, they also made sig­nif­i­cant errors. The most com­mon one is assum­ing their friends agreed with them on issues where they didn’t. Psy­chol­o­gists call this pro­jec­tion: in sit­u­a­tions where there’s any ambi­gu­ity, peo­ple tend to sim­ply project their feel­ings and thoughts onto oth­ers. The Friend Sense study found that this ten­dency was a stub­born one: its users incor­rectly assumed their friends agreed with them even if they had reg­u­larly dis­cussed polit­i­cal top­ics with them.

The arti­cle goes on to say that those of us who are most connected—the social mavens—are the least accu­rate judges of our friends’ char­ac­ters, but that this “selec­tive blind­ness” may be at the core of why friend­ships are so nourishing.

Sim­ply believ­ing we have lots of close friends brings the same ben­e­fits as actu­ally hav­ing them. In other words, if someone’s igno­rance of one of his “friends” extends so deeply that he’s not actu­ally aware that the per­son doesn’t like him, he may be bet­ter off for it. Even befriend­ing entirely fic­tional peo­ple seems to do some good — a paper pub­lished last year by researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Buf­falo and Miami Uni­ver­sity found that tele­vi­sion char­ac­ters actu­ally func­tion as “social sur­ro­gates” for view­ers, and watch­ing a favorite show can be an effec­tive way to alle­vi­ate loneliness.

And this social sur­ro­gacy with fic­tional char­ac­ters goes deeper than you might think (via The Frontal Cor­tex):

Lone­li­ness moti­vates indi­vid­u­als to seek out rela­tion­ships, even if those rela­tion­ships are not real. In a series of exper­i­ments, […] par­tic­i­pants were more likely to report watch­ing a favorite TV show when they were feel­ing lonely and reported being less likely to feel lonely while watch­ing. This pre­lim­i­nary evi­dence sug­gests that peo­ple spon­ta­neously seek out social sur­ro­gates when real inter­ac­tions are unavailable.

[…] Even though paraso­cial rela­tion­ships may offer a quick and easy fix for unmet belong­ing needs, indi­vid­u­als within these rela­tion­ships may not be spared the pain and anguish of rela­tion­ship dis­so­lu­tion. [Exam­in­ing] the responses of tele­vi­sion view­ers to the poten­tial loss of their favorite tele­vi­sion char­ac­ters, [it was] found that view­ers antic­i­pated expe­ri­enc­ing the same neg­a­tive reac­tions to paraso­cial breakups as they expe­ri­ence when their real social rela­tion­ships dissolve.

The con­clu­sion, it seems, is that what makes us happy and what makes friend­ships an impor­tant part of all-round health is not a deep knowl­edge of our friends’ char­ac­ters, but the illu­sion of that knowledge… and pos­si­bly pos­i­tive illusions:

Even in a close and strong rela­tion­ship like a mar­riage, a cer­tain amount of blind­ness may help. While the idea remains con­tro­ver­sial, some researchers argue for the value of so-called pos­i­tive illu­sions, the rosy image that some peo­ple hold, despite the avail­able evi­dence, about their roman­tic part­ners. The psy­chol­o­gist San­dra Mur­ray at the Uni­ver­sity of Buf­falo has found that cou­ples that main­tained pos­i­tive illu­sions about each other tended to be hap­pier than those that didn’t.

Note: Mind Hacks pro­vides one small caveat about the article: it’s the false con­sen­sus effect, not psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­jec­tion.

via Link Banana