how connection developsWhat helps a friendship move from enjoying someone’s company to feeling that you can really talk?
Yale psychologist Laurie Santos explores that question with Derek Thompson on Plain English. Their discussion brings together the opportunities we make for friendship, our expectations of other people and the place of solitude in a satisfying social life.
More room for friendship in ordinary life
Santos questions the social rules that can narrow men’s opportunities for friendship. If getting together seems to require a game or a sporting event, much of ordinary life falls outside the invitation. She treats this as a cultural pattern that can change, with considerable variation among men.
The 2021 American Perspectives Survey gives that discussion some context. Thirty percent of men and 48 percent of women reported a private conversation with a friend about their personal feelings in the preceding week. Twenty-one percent of men and 41 percent of women reported receiving emotional support from a friend. These are differences in reported experiences, not measures of anyone’s capacity for closeness.
The same report also describes friendship taking shape in familiar settings. Among Americans with close friends, 54 percent had met a close friend at their own or their spouse’s workplace, and 40 percent had made one through existing friends. Even during the pandemic, when 47 percent reported losing touch with at least a few friends, 46 percent reported making a new friend. Loss and new possibility were both part of the picture.
A friendship can have more than one setting. Friends who usually meet for a particular activity might also enjoy each other’s company while making dinner. That would give them another occasion to talk without needing to find a new shared interest first.
Conversations can go better than we expect
What happens when a conversation becomes more personal? In research by Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, strangers predicted how a conversation would feel, then had the conversation and assessed the experience. Participants generally expected more awkwardness and less connection than they actually experienced. Their expectations were especially pessimistic about deeper discussions.
The researchers also had people try both relatively shallow and relatively deep conversations with different partners. In one experiment, participants expected to prefer the shallow conversation. Afterward, they preferred the deeper one. They felt closer to that partner and more interested in becoming friends. Happiness ratings did not differ significantly between the two conversations in that experiment, so the additional closeness did not simply mean that every measure of enjoyment improved.
Participants had expected less interest in their answers than their partners actually showed. Expecting indifference can close off a conversation both people might welcome.
A related study led by Erica Boothby examined what people thought after a conversation. Researchers asked participants how much they liked their partner and how much they believed their partner liked them. People consistently underestimated the liking coming back toward them. The researchers called this the liking gap.
The pattern appeared among strangers in a laboratory, members of the public attending a workshop and students getting to know their dorm mates. Among the students, it lasted for several months before disappearing at the final assessment. In other studies in the series, participants’ attention to their own conversational shortcomings helped explain the gap. A conversation could leave someone replaying a clumsy remark while the other person had enjoyed their company.
Being known includes being imperfect
Sharing something difficult introduces another difference between how an experience feels from inside and how it looks to someone else. Psychologist Anna Bruk and her colleagues Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless studied evaluations of vulnerability, including asking for help and admitting a mistake. People tended to evaluate their own vulnerability more negatively than vulnerability shown by others. The researchers named this the beautiful mess effect.
Bruk emphasizes the importance of a safe setting and a responsive person. That context matters to the possibility of being understood. A friend needs enough information to know what is happening, and enough room to respond. Santos makes a similar distinction between a private request for help and taking over a group conversation with personal complaints.
Friendship can include welcome time alone
Making room for friends can coexist with enjoying solitude. Research by Micaela Rodriguez, Kathryn Schertz and Ethan Kross examined how beliefs about being alone relate to the experience of loneliness.
In an experiment, people read an article describing benefits of time alone, risks of time alone or an unrelated subject. Reading about benefits produced more positive beliefs about being alone than either comparison. The risks article did not produce a statistically clear difference from the unrelated article. The experiment tested beliefs, rather than whether reading an article relieved loneliness.
A separate study followed young adults through two weeks of daily life. Those with more negative beliefs about being alone tended to become lonelier after time alone. Those with more positive beliefs tended to become less lonely. Further studies across several countries found a similar relationship between beliefs, time alone and loneliness. These observations cannot establish that changing a belief causes the change in loneliness, but they show why hours alone tell only part of the story.
A quiet afternoon can be something to enjoy in a life that also includes friendship. Enjoying it need not become a judgment about the quality of that social life.
Happiness with other people in it
Santos also considers happiness as something pursued through relationships and concern for others. A study by Brett Ford, Iris Mauss and colleagues helps explain why the meaning of that pursuit matters.
Undergraduates in the United States, Germany, Russia and East Asia answered questions about their motivation to pursue happiness, their well-being and how socially they understood happiness. Greater motivation was associated with lower well-being in the United States, higher well-being in Russia and East Asia, and no significant difference in Germany. In the Russian and East Asian samples, stronger motivation was also associated with a more socially engaged understanding of happiness. Those differences helped account for the contrasting patterns.
The study describes associations within those student samples. Its contribution is the distinction between wanting to be happy and what that desire leads someone to value. Friendship gives that distinction an ordinary form. An afternoon together can be worthwhile because a friend had time to explain what mattered, someone offered help, or both people enjoyed the conversation.
Sources
Plain English with Derek Thompson. (2026, June 2). The Surprising Truth About America’s Friendship Crisis. Interview with Laurie Santos. Publisher’s episode page.
Cox, D. A. (2021). The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. Survey Center on American Life.
Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow? Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742–1756.
Bruk, A. (2021, November 1). Other people don’t think you’re a mess. Scientific American. The researcher’s account of work with Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless.
Rodriguez, M., Schertz, K. E., & Kross, E. (2025). How people think about being alone shapes their experience of loneliness. Nature Communications, 16, 1594.
Ford, B. Q., and colleagues. (2015). Culture shapes whether the pursuit of happiness predicts higher or lower well-being. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.