The Science of Friendship

2/21/20 - From looking at our brain activity inside fMRI machines to mapping social networks, scientists are looking closely at friendship. Science journalist Lydia Denworth shares her look into the latest research finding what we know affectively to be true -- that friendship helps us live longer, better lives.

Transcript below.

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CREDITS

Producer: Gina Delvac

Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman

Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn

Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.

Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey

Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed

Merch Director: Caroline Knowles

Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci

Design Assistant: Brijae Morris

Ad sales: Midroll

LINKS

Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond by Lydia Denworth

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TRANSCRIPT: THE SCIENCE OF FRIENDSHIP

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(0:26)

Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.

Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.

Aminatou: She's Ann Friedman!

Ann: She is Aminatou Sow. On this week's agenda we are talking about the science of friendship with science journalist Lydia Denworth who's the author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

[Theme Song]

(1:10)

Ann: Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond is out now and is something that we read and informed a few of the sciencey parts of our own book about friendship so here I am with Lydia. 

[Interview Starts]

Ann: Lydia thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Lydia: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Ann: So I know you are a science journalist. I'm curious to hear why the science of friendship was something you wanted to delve into.

Lydia: You know part of my job as a journalist and as a science journalist in particular is to sort of go in and listen to scientists, especially when they talk to each other, and try to work out what they think is interesting and important and new. And this idea that there was a biology and evolutionary story to friendship was definitely that. About five years ago I went to a conference for social neuroscience and it was a lot about this.

And so I was really intrigued because I hadn't really thought about the biology of friendship which makes me like pretty much everybody else and I thought friendship? Huh. That seems like something I could dig into. And, you know, I'm at a point in my life where my kids are beginning to go off to college and I was losing my mother. I'm in transition a little bit. I mean I have my husband of many years but it did sort of seem like a wakeup call. Hey, maybe I'd better really, really make sure that I'm paying attention to my friends and I guess that I have my friendship house in order.

Ann: So it was personal for you as well is what you're saying basically?

Lydia: It was both, yeah. I mean it was work and it was personal and I thought that I would really like to become an expert on this.

Ann: And what was the conversation among scientists? I know you mentioned this moment five years ago but were they talking about friendship as something that was really well-understood on a level of neuroscience? Did they have a lot of questions? What about their conversation sparked your interest?

Lydia: They do have a lot of questions, scientists. Part of what they were talking about is the science of social behavior in general and then friendship in particular. I think what I thought was so interesting was that when it comes to friendship people have enjoyed friendship and celebrated friendship for thousands of years. And so it's not that nobody ever thought about it but we didn't think about it as sort of shaping our biology.

(3:50)

So social neuroscientists do work both in humans and animals. So that meaning is a little unusual in the scientific world because it brings together these two sort of different strands of science but that's actually the whole story about this new understanding of friendship is that by discovering friendship or something like it in a whole lot of other species it tells us that there's this much larger story to the phenomenon of friendship. And you know how when people think about evolution they usually think about survival of the fittest and competition and even though Darwin apparently never said survival of the fittest but hey, that's okay, that's how we understand it. And there has been competition and that is true. But cooperation turns out to be as important. So it's really also been survival of the friendliest and I just thought that was cool, this idea that if you're good at making friends and you have strong friendships then that's a skill that's sort of going to make life more pleasant but is actually going to make life longer and healthier and maybe more successful. That seemed really cool.

And the other thing is things like -- there's a lot of pieces to the science of friendship, so understanding the social brain better is something that really has taken off in the last 10 to 20 years. Concepts like empathy. We now understand that there's a neuroscience to empathy and that's really maybe in the last ten years that that's happened. And empathy and theory of mind, so theory of mind is the ability to understand that someone else has a perspective that's different than yours and it develops in kids around about the age of three or four. I mean it's a constant process but we think of children as having it from about three or four and that's not surprisingly when they begin to sort of make friends, right? Because they sort of understand people as someone separate.

(5:55)

So there's a whole lot more work that's been done on things like empathy, on these evolutionary questions, on the social brain, on loneliness. Maybe you're familiar. That's probably the thing that the wider world is most familiar with. There's been a lot of talk about the risks of loneliness and that's part of the story that interested me. But I also really liked the idea of focusing on the flip side, on the positives and the benefits of social connection, because they are two sides of the same coin. So loneliness is what goes wrong and friendship is what goes right.

Ann: I want to come back to loneliness but first I want to ask you to define this term the social brain because I think before I read your book I would've maybe not known exactly what you're talking about.

Lydia: Yes. So, you know, we often think about the brain as learning and memory and, you know, our senses. And it is all those things but it turns out that huge swaths of our brain are occupied with other people, with understanding other people, with figuring out what they're all about, with interpreting what they're saying.

Ann: That tracks with my experience, yes. [Laughs]

Lydia: Exactly. And sometimes obsessively. But this whole field of social neuroscience only began in the '90s and the brain in general, I mean the 1990s are considered the decade of the brain and it's because that is when technology just took off and we suddenly had MRIs and FMRI. FMRI is a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and it's that tube that you can stick someone in and you can actually look at their brain and the functional piece of it means that you can ask them to do some sort of task or to think about something then you can look at how their brain's activity changes while they're doing the task.

(7:48)

Now not surprisingly there are limits to the tasks one can undertake while lying in a tube in an MRI machine. [Laughs] But still that made so much possible that wasn't possible before and now the really latest work using that for friendship literally came out, oh, a year or two ago. There was this fascinating study by researchers at Dartmouth and UCLA that put people in an FMRI machine and looked at the way their brains processed video clips, different kinds of video clips, and they were able to predict out of all the people in their study who were all members of a graduate school program who was friends with who based on the way their brains processed the video clips.

Ann: That prompts the question for me of I guess it's a little bit of a friendship chicken or egg question that my co-host Aminatou and I are always thinking about which is are we friends because we're alike or are we alike because we're friends? That's my immediate next question when I hear about that MRI study.

Lydia: And that is the immediate next question that those scientists are asking.

Ann: So the answer is we don't know yet or they're working on it?

Lydia: They're working on it. We suspect that it's both as is so often the case. So it is absolutely true in friendship that we are drawn to people who are more similar to us than not. That does not mean that we cannot have friendships with people who are different and of course there's a wonderful richness to that. But historically and for most people we are drawn to people who are like us. We have a lot to talk about sort of off the bat. It's why I have a lot of friends who are middle-aged women with teenagers and creative jobs, especially writers.

But worldviews, shared worldviews, seem to be super important in the question of what brings people together as friends. We also know that when you spend time with someone conversation can bring your brains into alignment. So there's just the beginnings of studies showing the way the brain does change as you spend time together. So we suspect -- they suspect -- we, I don't get credit. I'm the reporter, not the neuroscientist.

Ann: That was the universal we right? We who are looking at this.

[10:10]

Lydia: We -- we, society, suspect that it is both. It is that you are sort of drawn to someone who processes the world the way you do but you also then become more like your friends. And I do just want to add the thing that I think is so cool about this particular study is what they did is they -- I said it's video clips that they showed. Well those video clips were very kind of different in feeling. You know, one was like a sort of crazy late night comedy skit and another was a news piece about pollution seen from outer space and one was a technology review and one was a piece of a mockumentary from Australia that was very dry humor.

The idea was that they're designed to appeal to different senses of humor and different kinds of people and things like that. You know, the same things that you would in your day-to-day life think oh, she laughed at that joke and I think that's funny. She thinks that's funny. The things that draw you together or the things you both have passions for, I don't know, for Gilmore Girls or whatever it is that bring you together. The fact that you like the same things, that's sort of obvious. What we didn't know was what would that look like in the brain?

And it turned out it wasn't just social parts or even just the social brain parts; it was almost everything. Especially your visual and auditory attention. So you are literally seeing and hearing the world more like your friends than the people that you're not close to -- as close to. And I just thought that was really cool.

Ann: Yeah, and it really tracks with something that we have talked about and written about a lot which is for us some of our deepest and most important friendships have been with people in whom from the very start we sensed this possibility of wanting to kind of go to the same place. So it's not even just we share a worldview or we think the same jokes are funny but maybe we have the same general life aspirations. We're both hungry in the same way for the same things. Maybe that means in a bigger political sense or maybe it means in terms of how we want to live our lives. I'm curious about that aspect too of like not just we're accepting the world as it is in front of us or interpreting it but I'm wondering if the science has anything to say about forward-looking as well.

(12:35)

Lydia: That -- see, you really are making a very good scientist Ann because that is the question. There's this neuroscientist at Dartmouth named Talia Wheatley who is leading this work. What she wants to do, and this is what sort of the technology is only just barely beginning to let us do, is to see what happens when friends come together in conversation and if you can pinpoint in their brain activity something new happening. She calls it like a walk in the woods and where do you end up? And the sort of dance of friendship that she's trying to actually capture and see.

So that requires looking at two people's brains at the same time while they're in natural conversation or interaction and that's hard to pull off although we're starting to be able to do that. So that's one answer. But it is also true that -- I mean I agree 100 percent with what you're saying that you gravitate to people who, yeah, want some of the same things out of life that you do I think. Hearing you say that makes me think all the way back to when my husband and I met in college and I feel like that was very much something that pulled us together. And there's a chemistry to friendship just like there's a chemistry to romance. There's that kind of let's walk through this life together.

(13:58)

Actually one of the concepts that I really liked and it's not a brand new one but that social or developmental psychologists who look at the lifespan developed is the idea that we all have a social convoy that travels through life with us. And in fact what happens is there's change in those people that travel with us but you are then sort of looking ahead at where you're going to be going in life.

Ann: Right. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about some of the terminology we use when it comes to friendship because I know terms like kinship or bonds, a lot of the ways that I would say I have kinship and I have bonds with all kinds of people, right? Not just my blood relatives; not just people who could legally be called family but friends. And those are the people who come to mind first in some instances more so than, you know, family or romantic partners. I'm curious about the language that some of these scientists use whether they're looking at the animal kingdom or trying to study humans and how do they draw those lines between okay, your convey is obviously a lot of different types of people. Is there a way of pinpointing the role of friends in particular as standing out among all these other social relationships?

Lydia: This is really an interesting piece of this whole science I feel like. To me -- so on some levels what happened with this work is it helped to clarify what friendship is because one reason scientists didn't study friendship for a long time in this kind of serious biological way or the neuroscience or the evolution of it is because friendship's a little bit hard to define and hard to measure. It's a little squishy. [Laughs] And it was seen as maybe a little soft.

(15:42)

But what has happened is as they've worked on it in multiple fields but especially in animals -- in other animals, in other species -- it's easier to strip away the complex variables of human life and sort of get down to the nitty-gritty. And at its simplest friendships basically include three things: they're long-lasting, they're positive in that they make us feel good, each partner in the relationship, and they're cooperative. So there's a reciprocity to them. That's the bit about you help me, I help you, we're there for each other when we need it. And that's really what friendship at its core is about: it's about helping us weather the stresses of day-to-day life.

So once you have that definition there's some clarity about what friendship is. But the other thing, and this gets to your question, is that this new science of friendship blurs the lines between relatives and romantic partners and friends because it's emphasizing the quality of the bond. And it's saying if you have a relationship with someone where it's positive and it's long-lasting and there's cooperation and you get a lot of benefit from it that's a friendship essentially.

And in fact the word friend is qualitative. The word sister or brother or spouse or cousin is categorical. It tells you something about our biological relationship or our legal relationship. If I wanted to describe my relationship with my husband or somebody wants to talk about their sister as their best friend they're saying that to tell you there's value added to the relationship right? That it's better than average. Because let's face it, not all family relationships are so great. Not all marriages are so wonderful. Hopefully for most people they are.

So what we know now is that I mentioned the social convoy, the people who sort of travel through life with you. Well most of us have in our inner circle just an average of maybe four people. It's like two to eight but the average is four and they're often half family and half friends. We sort of have a head start on those tight bonds with family just because you spend so much time together but it doesn't really matter who those people are. It's the quality of the relationship, not the origin of the relationship.

(18:10)

So on that level it could be just full of your really good friends, your inner circle. And then you have these sort of concentric circles moving out from you that could still be people about whom you care very much but you don't see as often or you're a little less close and so I kind of love for me friendship has suddenly become the template for all other relationships. And I mean by that if the quality bond is one that is positive and long-lasting and reciprocal then that's what you want your tightest relationships to look like, all of them. And those are the ones that are good for your health. I mean that's the other big, big takeaway from this book is that friendship is good for your health on so many levels and it helps you actually live longer. It gets inside your body and it changes the way your heart responds to things, the way your immune system responds to disease and your stress responses, your cognitive health, your mental health. Even the rate at which your cells age is affected by the quality of relationships in your life. And the bonds that do that, that have that magic power, are those really strong friendship-like bonds.

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(22:33)

Ann: So you mentioned this kind of concentric circles model of like a handful of people who are most intimate to you and then moving on outward. I think one thing that is often difficult for me to parse with research like this is in some ways it seems descriptive right? We looked at a population of people and most people had this number of people close to them. But then in other cases it's used in more of a prescriptive fashion and people say oh, it's only possible for humans to truly be intimately close to X number of people. And I would love to hear you talk about, as you interpret the science, what parts of it are about sort of the reality of the choices humans -- the human animals are making and what part of it is about what we have a capacity for or what we are maybe evolved to do. I don't know, what our social brain can handle if that makes sense.

Lydia: I think I understand what you're asking. For instance you're right that some of the first -- the early part of this science was just kind of identifying a phenomenon which was the idea that first of all friendship was something that we should define and measure, and then this idea that there was a link to health was interesting. But all there was at the beginning was an association. In science they call it a correlation right? So this is true and this is true at the same time and we don't know whether one is causing the other; we're just noticing that they're happening at the same time.

(24:05)

And so the early work in this was really just that. It was just identifying a phenomenon and then the -- and that was the work that really showed it was actually focused on something very clear-cut. It was about mortality and it was either you're alive or you're dead after the end of say a decade-long study. And what they found generally was that the people with more connections were more likely to still be alive ten years later than people who were more socially isolated. And people said oh that's interesting, why would that be?

But the second thing that the science has done, and this is what's been happening more recently, is it's digging into why would that be true? What could it be that social relationships are doing to change the way your body responds to disease? And an early theory in humans was a concept called social support which is basically what you think of about friendship, like if you have a friend around maybe you're more likely to go for a run with her because she says hey, come on, let's go do this, you know? I mean it works the other way too. Maybe you stay and have an extra drink at the bar when you shouldn't right? And most critically maybe you're healthier if you have more friends just because that means a friend is there to drive you to the hospital should you need to go.

But then what happened that is so interesting is when you started looking at this -- when evolutionary biologists and primatologists started looking at this in other species what they found was that even baboons with the strongest social bonds are healthier, live longer, and have more and healthier babies and in evolutionary terms you cannot do better than reproductive success and longevity. But the thing is baboons do not drive each other to the hospital right? So something else had to be going on, something deeper.

(25:55)

And so that's kind of what these biologists are trying to figure out. And there's still a bunch we don't know about it but if you see something in enough different species and your study it from enough different angles and you keep getting the same result you start to be able to make some claims about cause. And so that's kind of where we are now is that there are some pieces of this where we really can see that this one -- that having good friends causes you to be healthier and to live longer and in these very specific ways.

Ann: One of the parts I love in your book is your very measured take on how social media and the various ways we use the Internet affects our social brains. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Lydia: Well thank you, I'm glad you think so because I will admit that when I was working on this book everybody said "Oh, you're writing a book about friendship? I can't wait to hear what you have to say about social media." And I was kind of dreading it wading into this. It just felt like a quagmire. It feels like this thing that everybody is hysterical about. I thought how am I going to figure out what the real story is here? There are a bunch of studies that say it's bad for you and there's studies that say it's good for you.

But happily for me what happened in the last -- even just in the last year or two was that there's this new raft of science that really is telling a very clear story. It's saying that the early work linking social media to well-being in general, and well-being is kind of a big term, it encompases a bunch of things including relationships, but that's where there's been these kind of hysterical media articles that are based on only slightly less hysterical scientific reports. But some of those turned out to be either sloppy or -- well they're blunt instruments let's say. And that's normal when science is new. I mean we haven't had social media for not even 15, 20 years yet and so the first study that linked social media use and well-being was just done in 2006.

(28:13)

And those early studies, they did things like just count up all the time people spent on digital technology or social media without looking at what they were doing and with whom. And that means that a kid playing Grand Theft Auto counts the same as you talking to Amina over the Internet. And we hope those are not the same right? And that you talking to Amina improves your friendship, the other might not, although even video game playing I've realized doesn't deserve at least parents' sort of scorn. You know, we're all victims of generation.

And the other thing that's true is historically we have such a tendency as a society to freak out over technological innovation and if you go back and you look at the context and you look at the history you see we did the same thing about television. It's going to dumb down civilization. We did the same thing about radio. We apparently did the same thing even about comic books and Socrates and Plato famously complained about writing things down because it was going to ruin everybody's memory.

So when you start to see the forest for the trees you're like oh, well, you know, maybe we should put this in context. And what this new science of social media has shown really very clearly is on a population level it's just not that terrible for us. And for relationships in particular it's actually on balance a positive and in fact the impact on relationships is stronger to the good than any of the negative impacts of social media use and digital technology.

(29:50)

And so that means for instance that people who have bigger networks online tend to have bigger social networks offline. That people who use social media as another way of communicating with friends that they see in other ways, they strengthen those bonds. It also turns out, and people studied this and asked the question, that we are not stupid. We know the difference between an actual friend and a distant Facebook friend, somebody you met 30 years ago that you haven't seen since in person. Those are not the same.

And in fact it turns out I think the number was 40 percent of people's actual friends were also Facebook friends. And so there are people for whom it's a bigger problem but what we're seeing is maybe those problems exist offline too. So somebody with a propensity for depression and anxiety maybe has that more exacerbated by social media use, but it's really important if you're looking for solutions to know if the problem is caused by the social media or begins somewhere else right?

And so we need to be asking smarter questions, more nuanced questions. We need more rigorous statistical analysis from a scientific point-of-view. We need sort of a science and social media 2.0 and we're starting to get it which is great. So we're going to ask better questions about context and content and then we'll really be able to know which are the things that we should be worrying about and here's the things we don't need to worry about. And let me go on the record saying put down your damn phone when you're with your friend in person. Don't be looking at your phone when you're talking to somebody in person. Absolutely true and that is one way people worry, worry, worry about relationships.

And so I think it's like we're learning about that skill. We're learning this is getting in the way and we're going to have to sort of scale that back, but eye contact really matters. It primes the social brain we were talking about.

(31:50)

Ann: I want to make a slight pivot from the world wide web to this web metaphor for group dynamics in friendship. You know, before even learning a thing about the science of friend groups, you know, we would refer to our extended friend group as a lady web or as a friend web.

Lydia: [Laughs] I love it.

Ann: And I was delighted to see that this web metaphor is also a way that scientists look at and interpret social groups and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about all the complicated ways that scientists try and break down and look at how we are connected to each other.

Lydia: Right. So right at the beginning when I was getting interested in this, sitting there at this meeting five years ago, a meeting of social neuroscientists, I went into it thinking that most of what neuroscientists are spending their time doing is mapping the connections inside the brain. And they are. That's what the Brain Initiative is all about and all this stuff, you know? And we have trillions of synapses and we're just beginning to get a handle on what's going on there.

But listening to them talk about social behavior you realize that now what they're doing is mapping the web of connections out of our bodies to other people and understanding the ripple effects of how that -- what those relationships are like, how that comes back to you and your body and your brain. And that web is invisible right? And yet it's incredibly powerful.

And then the other thing that's happened that really makes the web metaphor come alive is there's a whole field called social network analysis that has been able to . . . well it's been enabled by the much stronger computing power we have now. There was a researcher maybe in the early 1980s or the '70s who was studying one of these large populations of rhesus macaques that I feature in the book, that's a kind of monkey, and he was literally mapping out by hand who was connected to who of these monkeys.

(34:00)

But now these same researchers on the same island watching those same -- or the descendants of those same monkeys -- they take all this information and they watch them in the field and they put it into these little handheld computers then they upload it into this software program and they hit a button and they get this incredible map of thousands of monkeys, you know? And who's connected to who and who hung out with who.

Then there's all these different ways that you can adjust it but you can really see what's happening because of those relationships. You can see the monkeys that are on the periphery. You see them if you're there and you're watching the monkeys, you see the guy that's always off on the edge and never grooming with anybody and never seems to interact. And then on the chart he's a little circle out on the edges and he's not connected. There's no lines connecting him to anybody else.

Ann: Aww.

Lydia: I know, poor guy. [Laughs] Or by comparison the monkeys that are sort of smack in the center of the group, there's all sorts of technical terms that social network scientists use for this but basically the centrality of some animals and humans -- you can do the exact same thing with humans right? -- and you map out these social networks and you see there are some people that are much more strongly connected to certain people or to more people or that their friends tend to know each other more. Their friends tend to be friends. There's all kinds of ways you can measure it.

So we've got all these ways technology has enabled this new science because we can see inside the brain. Like I said we can map social connections to a much greater degree. There's still sort of questions about exactly what that's going to tell us, like you can create these amazing maps and there's definitely some real things we're finding out, but I think that science is really quite new as well. So there's much more to come. Stay tuned.

(36:00)

Ann: One last question for you and it's also kind of a confession which is the words evolution and biology that appear in the subtitle to your book, when those words are applied to social relationships or gender roles or things that to me feel way more complicated than what can be seen on an MRI readout, I get my defenses up.

Lydia: Yeah.

Ann: Like personally, me speaking, I sort of say look, not everything is as essentialist or as defeatist in that kind of humans are built a certain way as sometimes biology or evolutionary science can make it seem. And I'm curious about what you would say the limits are to what we can understand about friendship through science if there are any.

Lydia: Sure. No, you're right. One of the reasons that there was a sort of early version of this science and they called it sociology then that came under such fire when it was first developed in the '70s, kind of for the reasons you were saying, this idea that human nature dictates certain kinds of behavior, that was offensive. It was sort of frightening to people. It seemed politically incorrect. And so they kind of have changed the name. Most people don't call it sociobiology anymore mainly because it just got such a bad name that they were like let's call it behavioral ecology or ethology, other things. There's a bunch of other terms people use.

What I say about it is this: there's a danger in being too reductionist for sure but it's also true that understanding the impulses that people have is important and I think we have to be honest about it. The nice thing is that human beings have the wisdom to kind of change our behavior because of that. I think being aware of your tendencies can help you combat them sometimes.

(37:55)

And so for instance, just as an example, the neuroscience of empathy and this new study of empathy is really interesting and there's all these great things about empathy. I mean you must have empathy in order to have friends and to have close social bonds. It's a critical piece of the social brain. And what happens in empathy is you kind of -- there's partly a sort of merging of the self and the other in your brain. And there's different kinds of empathy. There's a sort of fundamental body empathy. That's that bit when like somebody yawns then you yawn too, things like that. Or in fact they did this -- I don't know who comes up with this stuff for science but there was a study of the relatives of firewalkers, so people who as a stunt will walk with bare feet across flaming coals, and the person walking across the fire, their heart is beating faster and their family members' hearts are also beating faster in the audience right? That's also a kind of empathy that's like the most fundamental kind.

But then you get all the way from that to theory of mind and this more cognitive empathy where you can understand what somebody else is thinking and then you get to compassion and wanting to take action because of what's happening to somebody else. So those are kind of within this umbrella of empathy.

But the knock on empathy is that one of the things it has revealed is that we have a tendency to -- an us/them kind of mentality, and that actually we form in-groups and out-groups and that's not just things like the Jews and the Arabs in the West Bank; that's like if scientists dress one set of participants in a study in red shirts and another set in green shirts they will compete with each other. The red shirts will want to beat the green shirts because they sort of get put in a group together and then they feel a comradery with their group, an in-group thing, then they exclude -- they work against the out group.

(40:00)

And of course there are real dangers to that but I don't think the answer lies in not knowing that that's our tendency. I think the answer lies in understanding it as well as we can and then recognizing when it is holding us back. That's the thing that humans have that other species don't. We have the ability to rise above some of these things. And I know that that is what these evolutionary biologists who study this would say.

The reason why I have evolution and biology in the subtitle is because that is what's new about this science. This biology, understanding the link to health, understanding the larger story of the survival of the friendliest, and mostly I think it's an optimistic view of human nature for the most part.

Ann: Right, we get to choose.

Lydia: We get to choose and it tells us that friendship should be a priority. It tells us this is really important in your life. This is not a frivolous kind of side benefit that's just fun. This is as important for your health as diet and exercise. This is part of how human beings evolved in the world to interact is to make friends and we do it for a reason. I'm like giving myself and I'm hoping I'm giving everybody permission to go hang out with your friends and not to feel that that's lesser and should be less of a priority than doing your work every night or being with your kids. Get a babysitter sometimes. Go out with your friends. Your biology will be better for you. Health will be better. Your friends' health will be better and, you know, you'll probably come back to your work refreshed and come back to your kids in a better frame of mind.

I also think by the way parents have to model friendship for kids. They have to model that it's an important value in their own lives and if they're always subsuming their own need for friendship to their family then they're sending the wrong message.

(41:55)

Ann: I love that and I could ask you a million more questions but I'm afraid we're out of time. I want to thank you so much for being on the show.

Lydia: Well thank you for having me. It's been great.

[Interview Ends]

Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.