Your Friends Are Less Like You Than You Think
Real personality overlap among friends was tiny, but people imagined much more of it.
PsyPost - Psychology News · New psychology study challenges a major assumption about why we bond with our friendsYou think your friends share your personality more than they do. The study found people overestimated similarity for almost every trait.
The finding comes from Hyewon Yang, a psychologist who recently earned her doctorate at Michigan State University, and her colleagues. They recruited 371 groups of four friends, 1,484 people in all, and asked each person to rate themselves and each of their three friends on five broad traits like outgoingness, kindness, and curiosity.
That design let them separate actual similarity, based on two friends' own separate self-ratings, from perceived similarity, based on one person's belief that a friend shares a trait. Real overlap was modest, with correlations of just 0.05 to 0.10, a measure of how closely two people's scores track, and friends showed no significant match on extraversion. What people believed they shared with friends ran well above what the separate self-ratings showed, for nearly all traits.
People see more of themselves in their friends than is really there.
Questions people ask
Do friends share any personality traits at all?
Yes, a little. Friends were modestly alike on four of five broad traits, with openness showing the strongest link. The exception was extraversion, where outgoing people were no more likely to have outgoing friends.
Does thinking you are alike make the friendship happier?
No. In this study, neither real similarity nor perceived similarity predicted higher friendship satisfaction. What mattered more was having positive traits, like kindness and reliability, and seeing those traits in a friend.
Why do we overestimate the similarity?
The study documented the gap but did not test why it happens. As general context, and not a finding of this study, people often assume close others see the world as they do. The authors note that shared hobbies may bring people with similar openness together, but that is about actual overlap, not why perception runs higher.