May 13: Jennifer Arter, "You can pick your friends..." An evolutionary framework for human friendship

Jennifer Arter, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Psychology, will present her research: Abstract: Many species employ conditional strategies for reproduction or survival. In other words, each individual “chooses” one of several possible phenotypes in order to maximize survival or reproductive advantage given the specific ecological niche (e.g., Moran, 1992). Can conditional strategies explain individual variation in humans’ selection of their friends? Evidence suggests that individuals are sensitive to characteristics of the self, friend, and environmental conditions when choosing friends (Fehr, 1996; Rose, 1985; Verbrugge, 1977), and that a person’s economic, social, and environmental circumstances influence how they form and organize their friendships (Adams & Allan, 1998; Feld & Carter, 1998). In this dissertation I hypothesized that humans have evolved a definable range of conditional friendship strategies, and that an individual’s strategy will relate to her traits and to features of her social and non-social environment. I also hypothesized that individuals would be able to perceive and detect reliable signals (Cronk, 2005; Searcy & Nowicki, 2005; Smith, 1994) of these strategies in others, enabling them to choose friends whose traits are most desirable to them. Results partly supported these hypotheses; individuals do seem to have a reliable range of friendship preferences which relate to their own traits, and they do seem able to pick up on others’ signals of these strategies, but it is not clear whether preferences for others’ signals are more global or vary more by individual. The studies in this dissertation propose and begin to test a novel theoretical framework for studying human friendship, and they suggest avenues for future work that should capitalize on the framework of evolutionary social psychology described here. 3105 Tolman Hall 12:00-1:30pm