Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Long before nights out, group chats or trips to the mall were a thing, friends were simply the people you hunted with, foraged with, or cooperated with in order to survive in the wilderness.
According to new research, we still carry the evolutionary preferences developed during the Stone Age, and are automatically drawn towards friendships with people who seem like they’d be useful cave companions.
Of course, real friendships develop and deepen over time and are influenced by an array of factors such as personal chemistry, common interests, and shared experiences. However, the study authors hypothesized that our first impressions of potential pals are still shaped by our ancestral needs.
In other words, because friendships were so important to our prehistoric survival, we all carry an innate attraction to individuals who seem competent, cooperative and strong – even if we no longer have any need for our friends to display these particular traits.
To test this assumption, the researchers paired 156 college students with same-sex strangers for a 30-minute one-on-one interaction.
After the encounter, participants were asked how strongly they wanted to be the other person’s friend, while also rating that person for traits such as prosociality, physical dominance, and other characteristics that would have been beneficial to ancient hunter-gatherers.
Overall, participants were more likely to want to be buddies with people who seemed cooperative, dominant, attractive, and of higher social status. This suggests that friendship preferences are still innately driven by an ancestral need for allies who might help us survive in a prehistoric setting.
Results also indicated that men were more likely than women to want to share their contact details with their new acquaintance, which may reflect an enhanced sociality in males that evolved in order to facilitate bonding with hunting partners or warring comrades.
In a second experiment, the authors asked 444 people to state their major life goal, before rating photographs of unfamiliar same-sex individuals as potential friends. A second group then assessed these same photographs for traits associated with ancestral productivity.
Once again, people were more drawn towards friendships with people who seemed like they would be decent hunter-gatherers, even if this was irrelevant to their actual life goals. Such a finding suggests that our desire to befriend a person is not influenced by our actual needs, but by our ancestral attraction to individuals who look like they’d thrive in the Stone Age.
These days, of course, we require a completely different set of attributes in order to get by in life, and someone who is adept at computer programming may make a more useful companion than a person with big muscles.
The researchers therefore conclude that our continued attraction to hunter-gatherer types represents a “significant mismatch between our evolved minds and our present ecologies.”
The study has been published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
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