Lockdown may have lasting effects on friendships

Lockdown – “Friendships can deteriorate very quickly if you don’t invest in them – it probably only takes about three months,” says evolutionary psychologist Prof Robin Dunbar.

So the social strain of lockdown, while hopefully short-term, could have some long-term effects on some friendships, he says.

In a paper in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings A, Prof Dunbar has delved into the ways in which our social connections will be changed by lockdown.

The University of Oxford academic’s insight into those effects comes from a social world far from Zoom quizzes and Whatsapp groups. The roots of our friendships, he says, lie in the social lives of non-human primates.

For many of those primates, strong social bonds – being part of a “stable group” – means protection from predators and rivals.

That goes some way to revealing why many of us treasure our closest friends as though our lives depend on them. In our evolutionary history, they did.

And those bonds require a great deal of maintenance.

In both monkeys and humans, research shows that the quality of a relationship – measured by how likely a fellow monkey, ape or human is to step up and defend you – depends directly on the time invested in it.

“We have to see people surprisingly often to maintain a friendship,” explains Prof Dunbar, from the University of Oxford. And, because nurturing friendships requires all that time and cognitive capacity, we can only keep up a limited number of social connections.

“In lockdown, many people are forming new friendships with people on their street and in their community for the first time,” says Prof Dunbar.

“So when we emerge from lockdown, some of our more marginal friendships might be replaced by some of these new ones.”

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

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