How Friendship Differs Across Cultures

• Do friends come and go?
• Do friends need to pay you back with gifts?
• Are friends required to provide advice and practical support? 
• How many friends do you have?
• Who do you share your life’s story with?
• Is it possible to live a life without enemies? 

You might think it depends on the level of friendship. A good friend will pay for your food, whereas a best friend will eat your food. A good friend will stop you from doing something stupid, but a best friend will do it with you. And so on.

But reactions to these jokes and answers depend on culture. Yes, friendships are universal, but the ways they form and function are not.

Universally, friendships positively impact health (mental and physical) and can give you a sense of purpose and control over one’s life.1 However, friend networks can also increase the chances of substance abuse, smoking, and obesity.2

These findings make sense. My friends are why I’ve climbed higher mountains, questioned more beliefs, made it through heartache, forgotten too many nights, woken up in strangers’ basements (yes, plural), and ended up in different cities by accident.

… But let’s continue with what’s universal.

No matter the culture, most of us are subject to the mere exposure effect (we like people we see more often). People tend to be attracted to those similar to them (socioeconomic background, religion, interests, personality, and so on). Plus, attractive people have an easier time making friends.5 Of course, there are individual exceptions, but these findings are true across cultures.

What varies, however, is what is expected from a friend, how quick we are to drop a friend, how easy it is to get into the inner circle, how many friends we have, how often we socialize, how we socialize, and who we consider enemies.

Before we get into all that, we need to understand the four elementary forms of relationships.

1. Communal sharing. In communal sharing, every person is treated the same and has identical rights and privileges as every other group member. The resources tend to be pooled as belonging to the larger whole that transcends each member. This is common in many Western family households.Some Westerners might comment, “This is BS! I was a middle child, and I can guarantee equal rights and privileges don’t exist. My family forgot me in a park after a game of hide-and-seek. Twice!” I’m sorry to hear that. Apparently, the researchers forgot about middle children as well.But now that I’ve taken this brave stance for the unnoticed let’s continue.
2. Equality-matching is based on balance and reciprocity. People keep track of what is exchanged and are motivated to pay people back in equivalent terms. Although equality-matching is the least familiar of the four relational structures to Westerners, it is common in many cultures worldwide.Equality matching is emphasized more in many traditional subsistence societies around the world, where elaborate rituals are often involved in the reciprocal exchange of equally valued goods. For example, among the Trobriand Islanders, men take long, dangerous, open-ocean journeys to exchange shell necklaces with no "practical" value. Later on, the person who received the necklace must go on a similarly dangerous journey to exchange a similarly valued (and not especially practical) gift. Likewise, East Asians also show stronger motivations for equality matching—they are more likely than North Americans to be reluctant to accept gifts because of their obligation to reciprocate the gesture.6
3. Market pricing is distinctive as it concerns proportionality and ratios. All the features of benefits that are exchanged can be reduced to a single underlying dimension, usually money. Similar to equality matching, people expect to ultimately receive something equivalent to what they have been given; however, in market pricing, both sides of the exchange usually occur at once, and different kinds of goods can be exchanged. For example, I can purchase your pound of coffee with a sack of flour and six seashells because we have calculated that both sides of the transaction are equal in value. Because market pricing can operate without close relations between two individuals, it is prevalent in more individualistic societies.
4. Authority-ranking. Relationships and people are linearly ordered along a hierarchical social dimension. People with higher ranking have prestige and privileges that those with lower ranking do not; however, subordinates are often entitled to protection and care from those above. This is common in families and organizations from more hierarchical cultures than egalitarian. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Korea, for example.

Of course, all four of these can happen in a single relationship. At a family dinner, each person might be allowed to eat until they’re satisfied (communal sharing), the father might sit at the head of the table (authority ranking), and each person gets the same amount of dessert (equality matching). And a child might be paid $1.00 each time they unload the dishwasher (market pricing). However, by age twelve, I learned this last example is very North American.

“You have the brutaliteit to ask for money voor je eigen familie te helpen,” said my father with indignation in his voice and pain in his eyes.

“I just know a lot of kids who get paid for chores,” I muttered.

“And do you also know a lot of kids who visit een nieuw land each year? Do you also know a lot of kids die elke avond samen met hun familie dineren? This fucking sick culture.

“I didn’t choose to live here.”

“You should be ashamed.”

And I was. I was sick with shame and confusion. What kind of sicko accepts money in return for helping loved ones? Why do the other parents promote this? Why do families eat in front of the TV? How do my parents have time to cook every night?

Several years later, the questions only increased. Why are some Canadian parents charging their kids rent the second they turn 18? Why is my Spanish buddy still living at home at 30? Why did my friend send me a bill down to the cent when he was a student? Why did that same friend not offer to pitch in once he was rich? Why was I attracted to his bluntness, but mine ended the friendship? When is it someone’s culture or socioeconomic situation, and when is someone just an asshole?

We uncovered which cultures adopt more communal sharing, authority ranking, equality-matching, and market pricing. We understand that all four can happen within one culture during a single event. And we know why asking my dad for chore money was a bad idea.

The degree to which we adhere to the four elementary forms of relationships parallels two self-concepts: Independent and interdependent.

Independent self-concept = Western individuals (mostly) expressing how unique they are while making decisions based on what they want, even if they conflict with the expectations of their social groups.

This sounds a bit selfish, but it’s also reflected in one of my favourite hip-hop songs.

Here’s part of it if you don’t have time to listen right now.

It's all about you
So every morning that you wake before the first step that you take
Just think it's all what you make it, and you'll make it through

This life will leave you stressed out, left out, with your neck out
Ain't nothing changed
Real life, so we deal right, but it feels like,
It's something strange
Wondering the dumbest things and let everything
Get under our skin
Trouble again, trying to impress, somebody else,
It's fucked in the head
So do you, you'll never make everyone happy, it just won't happen
At the end of the day, when all say is said
You better be ready to go back at em
I learned slow, my verse shows, my growth, my wisdom
If you positive or negative, it don't make a difference not when you living
Cause some of the most successful people on this planet
Will kill themselves, or somebody else
Life they really couldn't manage
Then we got bums, alcoholics, on the streets
With no stress, no where to rest, no where to dress
No where to sleep
And they said, fuck my morals. I'm drinking away my sorrows
I'm living life and I'm happy, I ain't thinking - about tomorrow
Do you

Interdependent self-construal = Mostly Non-western individuals (but this is changing) understanding their sense of self as part of a group or society and adhering to social norms.

This sounds a bit conformist and easy to control, but this sense of interconnectedness and coming together in unity has created some masterpieces.

Unity by Diego Rivera

Fuji from Kanaya on the Tokaido Highway from The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai,

Art, like friendship and love, has a mystical component we shouldn’t explain. That universal magic of friendship doesn’t change, but the ability to choose friends does.

People with independent self-concepts become friends when it’s advantageous (it’s fun, they share interests, the relationship can create future opportunities, and so on). They remain independent individuals if there’s no reason to form a friendship.

However, those with interdependent self-concepts often form friendships based on their in-group. They don’t have as much freedom to move from group to group and must maintain the relationships often chosen for them. This self-concept is most prevalent in collectivistic cultures and relates to low relationship mobility.

In cultures with low relationship mobility, relationships are perceived to exist naturally without negotiation, and the commitments and obligations will continue to guide them. For example, most Ghanaians emphasized a friend as someone who provides practical support, but a minority of Americans emphasized this.2 Several studies also point to Americans having more friends than Chinese and German adults. This is because America has high relationship mobility.

A characteristic of cultures where independent selves predominate, people have the freedom to move between relationships (high relational mobility). If one particular relationship is found to be insufficiently rewarding to devote appropriate relationship-maintenance efforts, it might be neglected and wither away. People can just move on to form new relationships with others.

This relational mobility and ease of moving from one friend to the next is also related to residential mobility.

Een Belg is geboren met een baksteen in zijn maag

In some contexts, people are literally more physically mobile — they are more likely to change their place of residence. On one side, we have Belgians. “People born with a brick in their stomach.”

There are few things more important to a Belgian than their home, which to many is a house, not an apartment. Whereas the Dutch are EVERYWHERE, Belgians often stick to the region or town they grew up in.

My parents? Not so much. My father was raised to travel through literature and thrown on transportation vessels at fourteen. However, he grew up in one house and has had the same best friend for over fifty years—this wasn’t the case for my mother. At six, she had to leave Argentina, the country and family she knew, and go to Belgium. From a young age, she learned to be residentially mobile and relationally mobile.

“I always saw people and relationships as phases. They come into your life, and then they go. I never bothered keeping in touch with friends. It didn’t even cross my mind,” my mother told me.

This started to change when she met my father, but they ended up in Canada—one of the most relationally and residentially mobile countries.

Americans and Canadians are outliers when it comes to residential mobility. Many people move across the country or province (which is still larger than most countries) to attend university the second they turn 18. It’s also more common to change residency depending on work, the housing market, and so on.

In a fascinating series of studies, the cultural psychologist Shige Oishi demonstrated many diverse consequences that emerge when people change their residence. This evidence is available by contrasting communities where people frequently change residences with those where people stay more settled and by comparing individuals who have moved multiple times in their lives with those who have not moved at all. 

For example, studies of American college students find that compared with those who have not moved before, those who have moved multiple times in their lives (1) show more conditional loyalty to their colleges (that is, they identify with their colleges only when they are described positively, but not when they are described negatively; (2) have more Facebook friends on campus (and continue to acquire more new Facebook friends over time; (3) view their personality traits (which are immediately apparent upon meeting them) to be a more central part of their identity than their group memberships (which take more time to learn from someone), and (4) prefer large national chain stores, which are the same wherever you go (e.g., Starbucks, Walmart, Barnes & Noble), over local regional stores.

Although I lived in three different continents, four cities, and seven homes by the time I was nine, none of these results were true for me. But I’ll get into my personal experiences with friendship in the next article.

What I do agree with is this: although those with low relational and residential mobility have a greater chance of forming lifelong friendships, the effects aren’t always positive. If you can’t stand each other anymore, you still have to continue the relationship, albeit the negative feelings.

The best way for Westerners to wrap their head around this is with in-laws. Some people can’t spend more than a day or even a dinner with their in-laws but still need to maintain a relationship with them.

I, on the other hand, lived with my in-laws for four years (including the months my partner was living with a handsome Italian and tall, blonde Swede). But you can read about those experiences in my book Living with the In-Laws.

I’m not sure how many Westerners or Americans have full-blown enemyships, but whereas only 26% of Americans reported having enemies, 71% of Ghanaians claimed they were the target of enemies.9  Americans who did feel they had enemies were more likely than the Ghanaians to view those enemies as coming from outside their group. However, Ghanaians often saw their enemies as coming from within their groups.

FYI, those stats come from 2005, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that percentage has doubled since the culture wars became the primary focus of many ‘culture’ and ‘political’ writers in America.

Although I don’t have any enemies (that I know of), residential + relational mobility has impacted my friendships. This, together with my eurolatinish parents having raised me in small-town Canada, gave me a truly unique and admittedly messed up approach to friendship.

You read the research—culture significantly impacts these answers. But today, I’m leaving the research out of it and going all Freudian on you.

Ew, please don’t—

No, I won’t imply you want sex with your parents. I will share my thoughts and experiences as though they’re The Truth without citing empirical evidence.

So, like an opinion piece?

Yup. Well, kind of. I can’t help but cite research. But we’ll get into my Eurolatinish POV.

As a third-culture kid raised in a conservative Canadian town by a mother with three passports and a Belgian father who behaves like a Latino, I had a lot of questions.

Why are some Canadian parents charging their kids rent the second they turn 18? 2. Why is my Spanish buddy still living at home at the age of 30? 3. Why did my friend send me a bill down to the cent when he was a student? 4. Why did that same friend not offer to pitch in once he was rich? 5. Why was I attracted to his bluntness, but mine ended the friendship? 6. When is it someone’s culture or socioeconomic situation, and when is someone just an asshole?

The cultural psychology studies gave us ideas, but now I’ll answer based on experience (which may be very different than yours, so please comment).

1. Canadian parents are more likely to charge their kids rent the second they turn 18 because 1. DISCIPLINE AND RESPONSIBILITY (at least, that’s what the Canadians I asked answered). 2. THEY LIVE IN A CULTURE THAT VALUES MONEY OVER FAMILY (at least, that’s what the Europeans and South Americans I asked answered).
2. Spanish people live at home until they’re thirty because 1. If they’re boys, they’d rather pay for an Audie than rent, and their mothers still do their laundry (that’s what many of us guiris1 say.) 2. They’re lazy southern Europeans taking EU money from the hardworking Northerners (you can guess who says that). 3. The economy has gone downhill (everyone can agree). 4. They don’t want to live more than a block away from their parents unless it’s their Erasmus year (Many Spanish people admit this).
3. My friend charged me down to the cent because—

I don’t have answers I can summarize in a few sentences for the last four questions. I know that many Asian and African cultures have clear rules around reciprocity, but the West messes with my head.

I was lucky to be raised in an upper-middle-class environment, but then I decided to become a writer. I’ve befriended people from old money, no money, the nouveau riche, wealthy rednecks, broke-ass rednecks, leftist elites, poor communists, desperate criminals, and rich criminals. From my experience, reciprocity rules in the West are equally variable from class to class and milieu to milieu.

Some people will take you for dinner and expect you to pay for the next one. Others will split the bill down to the cent. Some people will offer everything they have without expecting anything in return, and others will use their gifts against you.

That is why I can’t answer:

Why did my friend send me a bill down to the cent when he was a student? Why did that same friend not offer to pitch in once he was rich?

Money was the trigger for losing a close friend, but it wasn’t what made it unrepairable.

The problem with Eurolatinish people is that we’re as passionate and emotional as Latinos but as blunt and conflict-oriented as the Dutch and French.

There’s a common misconception that Latin people like conflict because they’re loud when they speak. Yes, Latin people are expressive, but most Latin American countries are on the conflict-avoidant side of the cultural scale. They have a culture of simpatía, which emphasizes maintaining harmonious relationships and expressive displays of graciousness, hospitality, and personal harmony.

Like Latin Americans, I make a ton of eye contact, express positive emotions easily, and love to talk. But unlike Latin Americans, I like people to shut up when an important task is at hand (this is common with European Americans—particularly Protestants4). I’m also quite blunt and love heated conflict with intelligent, open-minded people.

And that was my role in ending the friendship.

Friend: Hi Nolan. I don’t appreciate you asking me to pitch in 24 hours after I got home.

Me: YOU DON’T APPRECIATE IT? I DON’T FUCKING APPRECIATE IT! You can send me bills down to a cent when you pay, but I can’t even ask you to pitch in when I pay? Just like the only beer you ever offered me, you’re a Sneaky fucking Weasel!

Friend: We see it differently.

I assumed we had a strong enough friendship to yell at each other, grumble for a day, and then hug it out—like my family does.

I was wrong.

He also has a nomadic soul and lived on three continents as a child, making him residentially mobile. As mentioned earlier, high residential mobility can cause conditional loyalty, and high relational mobility can cause people to view relationships as phases. This was true for my mother until recently (since my brother and I left the nest). And this was true for my friend.

I was a phase. Once I made him feel bad, he was no longer obliged to be my friend. And who can blame him? He was primarily raised in a culture with high relational mobility, and I can’t help but be the blunt European and fiery “white Latino.”

However, the places where I was raised didn’t define my relational or residential mobility. I wasn’t born with a “baksteen in zijn maag” like many other Belgians, nor can I view friends as phases like many North Americans. I can’t always close chapters, but I can write them.

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