Grace Zhang (gracezhg), Grace Zhang (gracexz), Alix Cui, Godsfavour Simon
Friendship maintenance mediates the relationship between compassion for others and happiness
Marlyn Sanchez, Andrew Haynes, Jennifer C. Parada, Melikşah Demir
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10055620
- Behaviors such as self-disclosure, supportiveness, and spending time together were identified as additional strategies and routines most commonly affiliated with friendship maintenance
- The other-centered mindset allows individuals to place less emphasis on the self and instead focus on and help others
- People with high compassion for others strengthen a sense of we-ness already existing in close friendships
- How study analyzed Friendship Maintenance
- Assessing four relationship maintenance dimensions:
- How often do you reminisce about things you did together in the past (Positivity)
- How often do you support your friend through a difficult time (Supportiveness)
- Openness (How often do you repair misunderstandings)
- Interaction (How often do you make an effort to spend time even when you are busy)
- CFO was positively associated with friendship maintenance, and both variables were positively related to happiness for men and women in both samples
Beyond Being There
Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/142750.142769
- Explores the fallacy of using technology to emulate or replace in-person human interactions (“Being There”)
- Instead proposes the novel concept of “Beyond Being There,” which seeks to leverage technology to enhance relationships and interactions in ways that are physically impossible.
- Could give us insight about how technology can be used to synthesize virtual and physical interactions, instead of thinking of one as a substitute or entirely distinct from another
Two Social Lives: How Differences Between Online and Offline Interaction Influence Social Outcomes
Alicea Lieberman, Juliana Schroeder
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X1930065X?via%3Dihub
- Explores structural differences between online and offline interactions and what interpersonal factors are affected as a result (eg. fewer nonverbal cues, more opportunity to form wider social ties, implications of those effects on interaction dynamics)
- Can give insights on how people have been affected by spending so much time online in the past couple years, and how their behavior has implicitly changed as a result and how that may affect their offline interactions now.
- Might give us insight as to how in-person social interaction compares to online
Friendship Maintenance: An Analysis of Individual and Dyad Behaviors
Debra Oswald, Eddie Clark, Cheryl Kelly
- Investigates friendship maintenance behaviors on both the individual and pair level
- Gives us research-backed ideas of what behaviors we can encourage in our users
- Most of the research so far conducted on maintaining relationships has been for romantic relationships, but some of these can be applied to also non-romantic ones as well
- Considers the following different models
- Four factor model of positivity, supportiveness, openness, and interaction
- Maintenance strategies subcategory: changing the external environment, communication, metacommunication, avoidance of metacommunication, antisocial strategies, prosocial strategies, ceremonies, spontaneity, togetherness, seeking/allowing autonomy, and seeking outside help
- Behavioral content important in friendships: companionship, consideration/utility, communication or self disclosure, and affection (expressing sentiments or emotional bonds between the dyad)
- Four maintenance categories: proximity, affection, interaction, and friendship self maintenance
- People are more motivated to maintain friendships they are already close to
- Perception is a factor, one person may think they are maintaining a lot while the other doesn’t see it that way – perceived equity is a factor
- The closest friendships are ones where both engage in approximately the same type and frequency of maintenance behaviors
Managing Your Friendships, With Software
Kaitlyn Tiffany
- The need for managing your friendships is emerging in a world where our network is growing faster than ever
- “I want a dating app where all I can see is the person’s metadata”
- “I want to organize the people I know. I feel simultaneously like I miss every person I’ve ever met, and like I could go without seeing any of them again.”
- The Google Calendar invite I sent my former roommate so we wouldn’t forget to have a conversation next Thursday
- “Sometimes I feel paralyzed by the thought of unstructured, unmediated interaction with friends,”
- “There are times when I think about reaching out to someone who I haven’t talked to in a while but then look at their social media profiles and feel sated.”
- Having a database to look at makes her feel less alone, she told me. And it helps her to organize her time so that she can be literally alone less.
- Inspired by CRMs, which were a way of keeping track of all the ways an individual customer interacts with a business and maintaining contact with them
- A personal CRM is the same thing, but for your personal life—networking, dating, making new friends, making friends with people who could also turn out to be valuable professional connections, going on dates with people who turned out to be useless professional connections
- There are now so many personal-CRM apps, you might need a spreadsheet to keep track of all their names and taglines—each a little remix of the others
- The idea of people as self-contained collections of data points and offloading your brain into a computer, quantifying other people, and mediating relationships with software
- Personal information and privacy concerns
The Development and Maintenance of Friendship
Robert B Hayes
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407584011005
- Behaviorally examines how friendships between college students do or do not form and get maintained
- Found that the breadth (amount) of interaction and the depth (intimacy level) of their interaction were positively correlated with ratings of friendship continuation
- After only 6 weeks did pairs reach their peak for intimacy
- Pairs that successfully remained friends maintained their interaction within each of the behavior categories during weeks 3-6 of their acquaintanceship, while pairs that did not remain friends did not
- As friendship develops, the bond becomes less dependent on the quantity of behaviors the pair performed and more responsive to the quality of their interaction
- Ends of terms/quarters during school are opportune times for discontinuing personal relationships
- Found that of the 4, affection is the most valuable function in initiating and maintaining the bond
- Gives us pointers as to how we can encourage behaviors that promote friendship continuation, and be mindful around behaviors that don’t
Making Time for Friends: A Scientific How-To Guide for Maintaining and Strengthening Friendship in Adulthood
Kristin Elinkowski & Madison Romney
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1186&context=mapp_capstone
- Provides “research-supported, real-world strategies for maintaining and strengthening friendships in adulthood.”
- Doesn’t specifically focus on college students, but may have ideas that are relevant and/or applicable
- One strategy for maintaining friendships is having consistent communication. This is done by:
- Listening empathically and actively
- Expressing optimism
- Fostering reciprocal communication
- Another strategy for maintaining friendships is by having shared experiences, which can be done by:
- Cultivating positivity resonance
- Exercising together
- Incorporating play into your experiences
- One strategy for strengthening friendships is by offering & providing support. This can be done by:
- Capitalizing on positive experiences, events, and news
- Being present and supportive through hardship and loss
- Responding in an active constructive manner
- Recognizing, appreciating, and cultivating character strengths
- Another strategy for strengthening friendships is by being vulnerable, which can be done by
- Provide cues/responses marked by empathy, care, and love
- Fostering trust
- Engaging in a mutuality of self-disclosure
Social Media use and friendship closeness in adolescent daily lives
Loes Pouwels, Patti M. Valkenburg, Ine Beyens, Irene I. van Driel, & Loes Keijsers
https://www.project-awesome.nl/images/nieuws/Pouwels_et_al_in_press.pdf
- Adolescents reported six times per day for three weeks on their social media app of choice use in the previous hour and their momentary experiences of friendship closeness
- Cross-sectional studies showed that adolescents who spent more time on social media than their peers experienced higher levels of friendship closeness
- Adolescents who spent more time on messaging and who displayed higher rates of Facebook relationship maintenance behavior also showed higher levels of friendship closeness six months later according to longitudinal studies
- Transformation framework explain that social media use may be related to momentary fluctuations in friendship closeness due to the accessibility affordance of social media
- Positive feedback and emotional support from peers are among the most important building blocks of friendship closeness (Rousseau et al 2019)
- Many studies have conceptualized time spent with social media or online relationship maintenance behavior as a proxy for time spent with close friends via social media.
What is a Personal CRM and Why Do You Need One?
Megan Ranger
https://www.nimble.com/blog/personal-crm/
- Meeting people on a regular basis, but it is difficult to keep track of all these interactions
- Personal CRM can help us organize all our contacts from various different places into one place and also ties our contacts with the history of communications and upcoming calendar events
- Example problems solved:
- Unify contacts from various different places into one place
- Automatically link contacts with calendar and email
- Auto-enriches contacts with social and other data to save time on data entry
- Replace spreadsheets, post it notes, and other ineffective ways of contact organization
- Main benefits:
- Organized
- Stay top of mind (lasting connection if you remember birthday, congratulate them on a promotion, acknowledge their major life moments, etc.
Predictors of social-zapping behavior: Dark Triad, impulsivity, and procrastination facets contribute to the tendency toward last-minute cancellations
Silke Mullerab, Dario Stolzea, Matthias Brandab
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920305250
- “Social zapping”: the tendency to cancel appointments at short notice in favor of supposedly better alternatives is referred to as “social zapping”
- positively associated with maximizing tendencies and problematic social networks use.
- Measures included the Dark Triad – Dirty Dozen scale, Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, Maximization scale, Pure Procrastination Scale, Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) scale, and the Social Zapping Scale.
- The Dark Triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) are commonly associated with negative psychosocial outcomes including interpersonal difficulties and antisocial tactics.
- SZ predicted by personality traits that promote self-serving and impulsive behaviors.
- tendencies to lose focus and to follow own interests at the expense of others especially contribute to making short notice cancellations if a more promising option erupts.
The Calendar Mindset: Scheduling Takes the Fun Out and Puts the Work In
Gabriella Tonietto, Selin Malkoc
- Consumers are scheduling not only work activities, which are traditionally scheduled, but also their leisure activities.
- scheduling is quickly becoming the default for leisure activities, such that restaurant reservations are made days in advance and even off-times for movies sell out with prepurchased tickets.
- How does scheduling influence the way leisure activities are construed, evaluated, and experienced?
- Scheduling a leisure activity (vs. experiencing it impromptu) can have unintended negative
- leisure activities start to feel like work, which decreases the utility consumers obtain in terms of both excitement in anticipation of the activity and experienced enjoyment.
- scheduling temporally structures otherwise free-flowing leisure activities, making them feel more like work
- Decrease in anticipation and consumption utility can be remedied by “roughly scheduling” (i.e., without prespecified times) in a manner that does not temporally structure leisure activities, thus indicating that the effect is driven by a detriment from scheduling and not by a boost from spontaneity.
- Setting only a start time (compared with setting both start and end times) is enough structure to reduce the flexibility and free-flowing nature of leisure activities.
Pardon the Interruption: Goal Proximity, Perceived Spare Time, and Impatience
Ji Hoon Jhang and John G. Lynch Jr.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/679308
- Being close to attaining a goal to complete a focal task:
- increases the attractiveness of that task compared to an interrupting task,
- makes people less willing to take on some otherwise attractive interruption than if they were farther away from completion,
- causes them to perceive that in that moment they have little spare time.
- Consumers immersed in goal pursuit are affected by local progress on an individual subgoal that supports an overarching goal even if this has no effect on the timing of attaining the overarching goal.
- Observers do not appreciate the motivating power of proximity to completing subgoals, and this leads them to mispredict the behavior of others
- At a distance, it would seem to be no contest in a competition between the attractive “interruption” of dinner with his family and the temporarily focal activity of answering e-mail. But in the middle of answering e-mail, it seems terribly important to finish, and he feels almost too busy for dinner.
- this mystifying behavior often is caused by the power of goal proximity when pursuing some focal task.
- Goals like going home to dinner may seem straightforward when viewed in isolation, but these goals invariably occur in competition with others.
- The relative attractiveness of two actions changes when one becomes focal and the other becomes an “interruption” to the process of pursuing the now-focal goal.
- this mystifying behavior often is caused by the power of goal proximity when pursuing some focal task.
- Goal proximity increases irritation at being interrupted and makes one perceive no “spare time” for it, changing perceptions of relative spare time now versus in the future.
- coming closer to achieving some goal makes one’s focal task increase in attractiveness relative to an interrupting task that might otherwise be seen as attractive.
- this causes consumers to be willing to incur costs to avoid or delay the interrupting task.
- coming closer to achieving a goal makes one perceive less spare time now, while leaving perceptions of spare time in the future unaffected.
- This changes impressions of relative spare time now and in the future.
- when one’s current task is a “subgoal” that is part of a chain of tasks necessary to achieve some overall goal, consumers are sensitive to closeness to finishing that subgoal task even when they could pause it without delaying or threatening the attainment of the overall goal.
Following Through on Good Intentions: The Power of Planning Prompts
Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17995
- Prompts to form and recall a plan can increase individuals’ responsiveness to reminders to make and attend beneficial appointments.
- Forgetfulness and procrastination frequently prevent individuals from engaging in beneficial behaviors
- When forgetfulness prevents people from following through on their plans, it is typically attributable to one of two types of memory failures:
- (a) transience, the tendency to lose access to information as time passes, or
- (b) absent-mindedness, the tendency to engage in “inattentive or shallow processing that contributes to weak memories of ongoing events or forgetting to do things in the future”
- planning prompts have the power to help people overcome forgetfulness and follow through on their plans even when that follow-through is in the distant future, requires multiple steps, and involves a costly, unpleasant action
Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences
Suzanne Shu, Ayelet Gneezy
- The tendency to procrastinate applies not only to aversive tasks but also to positive experiences with immediate benefits.
- procrastination may also occur for enjoyable, positive utility tasks in which costs and benefits are experienced within close temporal proximity
- the driving factor is the difference in perceived costs for temporally close versus temporally far outcomes.
- Effort required to complete the activity appears small when it is far off, making it is easy for a person to imagine completing it sometime in the future.
- the same costs become more salient as the activity approaches in time, such that the overall net benefits appear smaller than they did previously.
- As a result, the person procrastinates doing the activity until a future time when the costs again appear small.
- Only when faced with a strict deadline (e.g., the sign-up deadline or the end of the exhibition) does the person stop procrastinating.
- The resultant repeated deferral lowers overall utility by causing people to miss out on what would otherwise be a positive experience.
- This behavior is a counterexample to the literature on impulsiveness and immediate gratification, in which people are unwilling to accept any delay for positive experiences.
- This myopic behavior, also called “present bias,” tends to occur most often for experiences with immediate positive benefits but no immediate costs.
- shorter expiration dates, rather than longer ones, are more successful at encouraging people to indulge and enjoy the positive experiences they otherwise might neglect to appreciate. (like gift cards, limited time exhibits, etc)
Internet Communication Versus Face-to-face Interaction in Quality of Life
Paul S. N. Lee, Louis Leung, Venhwei Lo, Chengyu Xiong & Tingjun Wu
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-010-9618-3
- Study conducted on 4 Chinese cities
- Does internet communication, like face-to-face interactions, enhance quality of life?
- Internet use for interpersonal communication cannot predict people’s quality of life
- face-to-face interaction can predict quality of life
- The use of the Internet for interpersonal communication cannot replace face-to-face communication in improving quality of life
- Online communication has an adverse effect on people’s perceived life quality.
- The relative lack of strong ties or in-depth quality in Internet communication cannot be a reason for the negative effect of online communication on life quality
- The absence of nonverbal cues, lack of warmth, and less demand for engagement in Internet communication results in impersonality, shallow interactions, and difficulty in building social support, are reasons for the negative contribution of online communication to perceived quality of life.
- Offline social interactions and support are positively related to perceived life quality.
- “Internet communication [alone?] cannot be used to develop close relationships or social support” (p. 13)
