Most of Your Friends Don’t Actually See You as a Friend, Study shows

A scientific journal that was recently published by PLOS ONE found out that most of our friends do not actually like us, this was after the researchers conducted a survey to 600 students' participants in Israel, Europe, and US to analyze if they really treat and see their friends as their friends.

Friend is defined by Merriam-Webster as "a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations."

The findings of the study turned out to be that approximately 50% of your friends consider you as a friend.

So if you have a total of 10 friends, only 5 of them have a mutual understanding as you.

"It turns out that we're very bad at judging who our friends are," Dr. Erez Shmueli, one of the researchers.

"If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact, that's not the case." He added.

One-sided friendship is a very common thing as you would expect to happen to you any time, but its value cannot be compared with mutual ones, Shmueli explained.

In an experiment, it found out that people in one-sided relationship do not merely influence and cannot be influenced by one another, compared to as people with mutual relationships.

The study concluded that there are few easy ways to tell whether your friends are true or not.

By looking both at your social status and number of people you are in mutual relationships you can say that these are some good indicators to see if you are actually friends or not.


"The higher this difference is, the lower the likelihood of the friendship to be reciprocal." Dr. Shmueli wrote in an email.

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