Choose Your Friends Carefully

Advice about choosing friends sounds moralistic. The evidence behind it is not moral at all, it is just a fairly striking finding about how behaviour spreads.

Behaviours move through networks

Long-running studies tracking whole communities over decades found that things like smoking, drinking, exercise habits and body weight cluster in social groups in ways that are not explained by people simply choosing similar friends.

The effect is real though modest, and it operates through something simple. Your sense of what is normal is assembled from the people around you.

Normal is the mechanism

If everyone you see regularly works late, that becomes the baseline. If nobody around you reads, not reading feels ordinary. Your reference point is not the population, it is the twenty people you actually spend time with.

Which means those twenty are quietly setting your standards without anyone intending it.

The professional version

The same applies to what you consider an acceptable salary, an acceptable manager or an acceptable amount of nonsense to tolerate. People who move into a group with higher expectations usually find their own rise within a year.

This is not an argument for calculating friendships

Worth saying, because the advice curdles quickly. Choosing friends by what they can do for you produces a thin and unhappy life, and people can tell.

The narrower version is about attention rather than selection. Notice who you leave feeling better after seeing, and who you leave feeling smaller. Then give more time to the first group.

And it runs both ways

You are one of the twenty people setting someone else’s baseline. Which is a more useful thought than it first appears.