Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2022
At first sight friendship exists but, more than through looks, this bond is established through shared laughter, through the magical complicity in which an affinity appears immediately, points in common ... It is a "love at first sight" formed by positive interactions that will later be consolidated through emotional support and, above all, trust.
We will all have heard of love at first sight, the one where multiple nuances such as physical attraction, unconscious patterns and the always mysterious but undeniable power exerted by neurotransmitters are reconciled. So, a thing personality psychologists have recently wondered is whether something similar happens in friendship.
Let's think, for example, of all those social scenarios in which we move daily: work, study rooms, apartment buildings, gyms, parties, public transport ... Is it enough to make eye contact with someone to guess if they could be a good friend? Can these first impressions give us a reliable and accurate lead in this regard?
This same premise is what a group of social psychologists investigated in a paper that was published in the journal "Social Psychological and Personality Science". The results of this survey could not have been more interesting. It became clear, for example, that falling in love also exists in friendship. Human beings usually make quick judgments about which people are most similar to them in terms of friendship and they do so by evaluating certain aspects, small clues, subtle nuances ...
