Acquaintances and friends: Balancing social exploration and exploitation

Описание: "Close friendships are essential for well-being and are often built on shared interests, identities, or experiences. But interacting with new and diverse social partners also offers benefits, like novelty, a sense of belonging, and future friendship. A healthy social network therefore balances social exploitation (investing in familiar relationships) and social exploration (interacting with strangers and embracing differences). In this talk, Adrienne Wood (University of Virginia) presents survey and experience sampling data that suggests preferences for spending time with friends versus acquaintances predict distinct patterns in well-being and social network structure. Despite its benefits, social exploration comes with challenges: it can be harder to connect and or find common ground with dissimilar others. Drawing on sociocentric network data, the research shows that successful exploration hinges not just on who we meet, but how we perceive them: perceived similarity, more than actual similarity, predicts outcomes like belonging and even shared laughter. These findings suggest that the explore-exploit tradeoff in social life is not just about who we spend time with, but how we bridge the unfamiliar into the familiar.
This talk was given on Nov. 10, 2025, as part of the Group Dynamics Seminar series, considered one of the longest-running seminar series in the social sciences. It has been running uninterruptedly since it was founded by Kurt Lewin in the 1920s in Berlin.

Since its establishment in 1948, the Research Center for Group Dynamics’ mission has been to advance the understanding of human behavior in social contexts. Learn more about RCGD and its interdisciplinary Group Dynamics Seminars."