Presented By: Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD)
RCGD Fall Seminar Series on the Science of Social Relationships: Jaime Arona Krems
Friendship and the supra-dyadic nature of challenges in close relationships
Jaime Arona Krems of UCLA joins the RCGD Fall Seminar Series on the Science of Social Relationships.
Social connection is as necessary as food, water, shelter. Friend connections have positive impacts on health, happiness, and economic mobility. Friends can also buffer people against the high individual and societal costs of loneliness. But, in part because social psychology, relationship science, and evolutionary behavioral work have prioritized romantic and kin relationships, we know less about how friendship works among adults. My research aims to redress this gap by uncovering the design of friendship psychology. I begin from the premise that having friends—and enjoying the related benefits—requires people to solve multiple, likely recurrent challenges (e.g., finding, making, keeping friends). I also introduce the ‘embedded dyad framework’, which improves our ability to describe what these challenges look like: Just as better describing the shape of a lock allows us to generate better-informed predictions about the design of its key, better describing the shapes of friendship challenges allows us to generate better-informed predictions about how people solve them—or, really, the cognitive design of the tools that people use to solve them. In particular, this framework increases our descriptive power by providing a more ecologically-valid view of the social relationship landscape—one emphasizing that dyads, the typical focus of relationships work, exist embedded in wider, often densely interconnected networks. Therein, one’s dyadic partners—here, friends—frequently interact with other people, and these friend-other interactions can influence one’s friends, friendships, and outcomes. Thus, friendship challenges are likely to possess not only well-studied dyadic components (e.g., getting friends to like us), but also comparatively overlooked supra-dyadic ones (e.g., getting friends to like us more than they like their other friends). I discuss how this knowledge affects three key friendship challenges: finding, making, and maintaining friends, and I introduce implications for understanding the growth of friendlessness.
About the series:
Humans are social animals and from the earliest days of life, are dependent on the quality of social relationships with significant others: family, kin, friends, and a growing social network of online acquaintances. But, how do we conduct research and come to understand the social processes transpiring in these significant social connections with others? What are the consequences for individual development and mental health outcomes of having close intimate relationships in one’s life? There is also a darker side to some relationships in the form of violence, aggression, and conflict. How do we study these processes? Social media and artificial intelligence have opened up new ways of thinking about “what is a social relationship?” and how many of these “friends” can one truly have.
The speakers for this series will focus on different types of social relationships, spanning family and parent-child relationships, friendships, peer networks, romantic relationships, attachment relationships, and the use of online media to maintain social connections. Although several speakers are senior scholars with extensive research backgrounds in the field, many are junior scholars who are traversing new paths into the science of social relationships. Please join us Mondays to learn more about the exciting field of social relationships!
These events are held Mondays from 3:30 to 5.
In person: ISR Thompson 1430, unless otherwise specified.
Organized by Brenda Volling and Richard Gonzalez.
As permissions allow, seminars are later posted to our YouTube playlist.
Social connection is as necessary as food, water, shelter. Friend connections have positive impacts on health, happiness, and economic mobility. Friends can also buffer people against the high individual and societal costs of loneliness. But, in part because social psychology, relationship science, and evolutionary behavioral work have prioritized romantic and kin relationships, we know less about how friendship works among adults. My research aims to redress this gap by uncovering the design of friendship psychology. I begin from the premise that having friends—and enjoying the related benefits—requires people to solve multiple, likely recurrent challenges (e.g., finding, making, keeping friends). I also introduce the ‘embedded dyad framework’, which improves our ability to describe what these challenges look like: Just as better describing the shape of a lock allows us to generate better-informed predictions about the design of its key, better describing the shapes of friendship challenges allows us to generate better-informed predictions about how people solve them—or, really, the cognitive design of the tools that people use to solve them. In particular, this framework increases our descriptive power by providing a more ecologically-valid view of the social relationship landscape—one emphasizing that dyads, the typical focus of relationships work, exist embedded in wider, often densely interconnected networks. Therein, one’s dyadic partners—here, friends—frequently interact with other people, and these friend-other interactions can influence one’s friends, friendships, and outcomes. Thus, friendship challenges are likely to possess not only well-studied dyadic components (e.g., getting friends to like us), but also comparatively overlooked supra-dyadic ones (e.g., getting friends to like us more than they like their other friends). I discuss how this knowledge affects three key friendship challenges: finding, making, and maintaining friends, and I introduce implications for understanding the growth of friendlessness.
About the series:
Humans are social animals and from the earliest days of life, are dependent on the quality of social relationships with significant others: family, kin, friends, and a growing social network of online acquaintances. But, how do we conduct research and come to understand the social processes transpiring in these significant social connections with others? What are the consequences for individual development and mental health outcomes of having close intimate relationships in one’s life? There is also a darker side to some relationships in the form of violence, aggression, and conflict. How do we study these processes? Social media and artificial intelligence have opened up new ways of thinking about “what is a social relationship?” and how many of these “friends” can one truly have.
The speakers for this series will focus on different types of social relationships, spanning family and parent-child relationships, friendships, peer networks, romantic relationships, attachment relationships, and the use of online media to maintain social connections. Although several speakers are senior scholars with extensive research backgrounds in the field, many are junior scholars who are traversing new paths into the science of social relationships. Please join us Mondays to learn more about the exciting field of social relationships!
These events are held Mondays from 3:30 to 5.
In person: ISR Thompson 1430, unless otherwise specified.
Organized by Brenda Volling and Richard Gonzalez.
As permissions allow, seminars are later posted to our YouTube playlist.
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