Do You Really Know Your Friends?

Researchers suggest the answer may be 'no'. They have concluded that suggestions made by closest friends about matters of taste, such as movies and restaurants, are surprisingly off track.

Scientists discovered people tend to overestimate advices given by close friends. Andrew Gershoff of the University of Michigan and Gita Johar of Columbia University conducted a number of experiments, three of which are presented in their incoming paper "Do You Know Me? Consumer Calibration of Friends' Knowledge".

"We questioned pairs of individuals who had known each other for at least a month", professor Gershoff explained for Softpedia. "One individual was asked about what his or her partner knew in a number of categories including personal information about the first individual such as preferences for movies, restaurants, and activities, as well as impersonal information such as movie trivia."

Researchers compared a friend's knowledge of one's own tastes (personalized knowledge) to the friend's knowledge in a general domain (impersonal knowledge).

The researchers write: "First, participants overestimated their friends' knowledge about their tastes in movies as well as their general knowledge in the domain of geography. The degree of overestimation of one's tastes (personalized knowledge) was significantly higher for participants who had involved relationships with their friend compared to others. This effect was not found for impersonal knowledge. This suggests that a motivation to protect close relationships rather than a motivation to simply idealize close friends underlies the enhanced overestimation under high involvement. "

Thus, we don't simply believe that our friends know us better than they actually do, but in more personal issues we overestimate their knowledge even more. But why are we doing it?

The researchers argue that we're doing it in order to maintain our self image which, besides its internal aspects (such as what we think about our own talents), also has a social, relational aspect. "We want to believe we are important to others, particularly to others we care about. So when we think about our close friends, we are more motivated to think they know us well compared to our less close friends, and so we overestimate more for our close friends [and more in case of personal matters]."

Image credits: marina.disparue.net