Bad friends?

Bad friends? Which friends are viewed as helping (or hindering) progress toward fundamental goals
Jaimie Arona Krems, Jamie Katz, Eric Y. Aglozo, Tiffany Chin, Douglas T. Kenrick (Aug 2026)


Abstract

Friendship is often touted for its benefits to physical and mental health, longevity, and happiness. But not all friendships are good, and even the best carry costs (e.g., opportunity costs). Across three studies with U.S. student and online community participants (N = 1267), we explore how people view friendship's up- and downsides. Specifically, participants rated how much four different types of friends—hypothetical ideal, actual close, ambivalent, and former friends—helped or hindered one's progress toward fundamental life goals (e.g., self-protection, mate-seeking). We find: (1) all friendships are seen as exacting costs, but (2) good (ideal and close) friendships are characterized as providing net benefits, whereas bad (ambivalent and former) friendships are characterized as comparatively costly—particularly for status- and mate-seeking; (3) even bad friends are seen as facilitating certain goals (e.g., self-protection); and (4) friendships terminated by one's friends were seen as more beneficial than friendships terminated by participants. Contrary to views that friends fail to keep accounts of costs and benefits, people seem to be tracking the perceived benefits and costs that friends facilitate.

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"Thus, to understand friendship only by its upsides is to misunderstand it. The aims of this paper are not to dispute the value of friendship, but (a) to give a more complete accounting of its psychology—one cognizant of these possible costs. Additionally, (b) we aim to redress the inattention paid to the inherent downsides of these often-overlooked relationships, as, compared to romantic and family bonds, friendships remain chronically understudied in psychology and anthropology alike (Chopik, 2017; Hruschka, 2010)—with even less attention paid to the potential costs of friendships (Kim et al., 2023; Krems et al., 2026). We consider those costs, as well as benefits, within the framework of evolved fundamental motivations (Becker et al., 2026; Kenrick et al., 2010)."