Friends and Mates, When Do We Need Them? Investment Across Social Contexts

Abstract

Friendships are extremely adaptive, but come at great cost. Examining real life friendship choices, may not accurately represent how individuals deal with the tradeoffs involved in having a wide social network, therefore the present studies used a series of budget allocation tasks. In these tasks, participants spent tokens on types of friends and/or mates in varying degrees of budgets. Varying the budgets determined which social relationships were viewed and necessities and which were viewed as luxuries. Furthermore, investment in social relationships may change given the context; therefore the present studies used different scenarios for each budget. Studies one and two examined friendships only and found that across scenarios close friends were treated as luxuries and necessities. Studies three and four examined friends and mates and found that across scenarios long-term mates were viewed as necessities and close friends were viewed as luxuries. These findings shed light on the adaptive tradeoffs involved in choosing which types of friends and mates to invest in given availability of energy and social context.