We suggest that you think of someone you have recently met in the last six months. Now think, where did you meet her? Was it at work, at school or anywhere else? Do you keep your phone number today? How often do you talk to him or her? We regret to tell you that all these questions are not important in themselves, we are just trying to find out how long it took you and that person to be friends .
From being strangers to being friends in 50 hours
You already know that in Supercurioso, we really like trying to answer all those curious questions that we all often do, and this is one of them How long does it take to be friends? We have been researching and have come up with one of the most moving scientific studies we have read.
Communication studies professor Jeffrey Hall wanted, like us, to answer a single question: how much time do we need to make a friend? In order to answer it, he studied two very different groups of people. The first group consisted of 355 adults who agreed to participate in the research. To be selected, they must have moved to a new city within the last six months and have been forced to seek new friendships. Hall was collecting data by asking questions like: "Did you meet at work?" Or "How much time do you spend together?".
The second group of people was made up of younger people. In particular, there were 112 freshmen students who had just moved to a specific city to attend their university. These first-year students were asked about two people they had met in the last two weeks and asking the same kind of questions as group 1.
These questions continued in the following weeks to discover if they had become better friends or not. The data obtained in both groups showed a fairly clear idea of how to start and how a friendship develops.
The conclusions of Hall's research
According to Jeffrey Hall the average to make a friend of the casual type, or rather an acquaintance, takes more or less between 40 and 60 hours. Passed between 80 and 100 hours that acquaintance happens to become a friend and after about 200 hours we can consider it as Close friend . But not everything can be measured mathematically, in addition to the amount of time we spend, it is also important the quality of it, which will make the links between us stronger.
In the same way that a large snowball is gaining speed and volume as it goes down the slope, our friendship will grow as we spend more time with that person . As acquaintances become friends and these in turn become close friends, they end up spending more time together and forging more and more friendship. This fact was much more evident among the second group that investigated Hall, who could realize that they were willing to spend up to a third of their time with their new friends.
Friends forever
The fact of making friends is not a vital need that the human being needs , such as sleeping, or eating but obviously man is a social animal with a clear and strong biological impulse to make connections . According to a 2015 study, which Hall used to carry out his research, having friends has a positive effect on people's lives but the type of friends depends on their age.
As we have seen in the study carried out by Hall in two groups of people of very different ages, the group of young people was more willing to dedicate more hours to their new friends than the group of older people. This is because for young people the number of friends is more important than the quality of them. On the other hand, he was able to clarify the study, when those same young people get older, only 10 more years, the concept changes. For people aged 30 or so, the importance falls on the quality of friendships and not so much on quantity.
What do you think of our article about the time it takes to be friends? Have you ever raised it? What do you give your most importance, quality or quantity? Either way, whether you are from small circles or have a million friends, you know that in our Supercurioso team you can count on a few.