The alliance hypothesis for human friendship

Abstract

Background: Exploration of the cognitive systems underlying human friendship will be advanced by identifying the evolved functions these systems perform. Here we propose that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support groups for potential conflicts. We use game theory to identify computations about friends that can increase performance in multi-agent conflicts. This analysis suggests that people would benefit from: 1) ranking friends, 2) hiding friend-ranking, and 3) ranking friends according to their own position in partners' rankings. These possible tactics motivate the hypotheses that people possess egocentric and allocentric representations of the social world, that people are motivated to conceal this information, and that egocentric friend-ranking is determined by allocentric representations of partners' friend-rankings (more than others' traits).

Methodology/principal findings: We report results from three studies that confirm predictions derived from the alliance hypothesis. Our main empirical finding, replicated in three studies, was that people's rankings of their ten closest friends were predicted by their own perceived rank among their partners' other friends. This relationship remained strong after controlling for a variety of factors such as perceived similarity, familiarity, and benefits.

Conclusions/significance: Our results suggest that the alliance hypothesis merits further attention as a candidate explanation for human friendship.

Figure 1. Mean (SD) point allocations by friend-rank.

The null hypothesis that people do not rank their closest friends predicts a flat line at 10 points.

Figure 2. The change in aggregate point allocations caused by the public manipulation.

Bar values represent the public minus private difference divided by private points to give the percent change.