People have poor perception of friendship

                Only half of the people you think are your buddies consider you their friend, according to a new study which suggests that people have a very poor perception of friendship ties. It turns out that we are very bad at judging who our friends are. The study was done in collaboration with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

                Researchers conducted extensive social experiments and analysed the data for, other studies to determine the percentage of reciprocal friendships and their impact on human behavior. They examined six friendship surveys from some 600 students in Israel, Europe and the US to assess friendship levels and expectations of reciprocity.

                They then developed an algorithm that examines several objective features of a perceived friendship and were able to distinguish between the two different kinds of friendship – unidirectional or reciprocal. If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that is not the case – only 50% of those polled marched up in the bidirectional friendship category. There algorithm not only tells us whether a friendship is reciprocal or not. It also determines in which direction the friendship is ‘felt’ in unilateral friendship.