Text B

    A Friend in Need of Help

    You and Sol have been friends for over fifteen years. You went to high school together and now work in the same company pany. For the past several months , Sol has been very irritable and at times has shown his emotions by openly criticizing the company and some of his fellow workers. Most of the people in the office know that he sometimes drinks too much when he feels depressed about some of his personal and family problems.

    But recently Sol made a very nasty personal comment which hurt'one of the people in the office. No one said anything to him, but it was obvious that many people were angry at what he said and now have little sympathy for him .

    You are beginning to wonder whether you should say something to Sol. You don't consider him your best friend, but he might possibly lose his job because you didn't try to help him. On the other hand, you don't know whether Sol would think that you were interfering in his privatu iife by talking about his personal problems.
    What would you do in this situation?

Additioaal Information

    In fact, studies of friendship seem to implicate more eomplex factors. For exampte, one function friendship seems to futfil is that it supports the image we have of ourselves, and confirms the value of the attitudes we hold. Certainly we appear to project ourselves onto our friends; several studies have shown that we judge them to be more like us than they (objectively) are.

This suggests that we ought to choose friends who are similar to us ( 'birds of a feather' ) rather than those who would be complementary ( 'opposites attract' ) , a prediction which is supported by empirical evidence , at least so far as attitudes and beliefs are concerned. In one experiment, some developing friendships were monitored amongst first-year students living in the same hostel.

It was found that similarity of attitudes (towards politics, religion and ethics, pastimes and aesthetics) was a good predictor of what friendships would be established by the end of four months, though it had less to do with initial alliances - not surprisingly, since attitudes may not be obvious on first inspection.

    There have also been studies of pairings, both voluntary (married couples) ples ) and forced (student roommates ) , to see which remained together and which split up. Again, the evidence seems to favour similarity rather than complementarity as an omen of a successful relationship, though there is a complication: where marriage is concerned, once the field has been narrowed down to potential mates who come from similar backgrounds and share a broad range of attitudes and values, a degree of complementarity seems to become desirable.

When a couple are not just similar but almost identical, something else seems to be needed. Similarity can breed contempt; it has also been found that when we find others obnoxious, we dislike them more if they are like us than when they are dissimilar!

    The difficulty of linking friendship with similarity of personality probably reflects the complexity of our personalities: we have many facets and therefore require a disparate group of friends to support us. This of course can explain why we may have two close friends who have little in common, and indeed dislike each other. By and large, though, it looks as though we would do well to choose friends (and spouses) who resemble us. If this were not so, computer dating agencies would have gone out of business years ago.

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