Types of Friends and What Makes a Good Friend

Hall built his list in three studies (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2012, doi:10.1177/0265407512448274). He first gathered 30 existing scales of what people expect from friends and tested them with 307 people. Then he cut 181 items from earlier research down to 51 that measured six factors, with 401 people, and confirmed the six-factor structure with an international sample of 668. The structure held for women and men and across ages. His names for the six are symmetrical reciprocity, communion, enjoyment, instrumental aid, similarity and agency.

Hall measured what people want from a friend. Our Friendship Test turns each of the six into statements about what you do as a friend: 48 statements, about 8 minutes. The statements are ours, not Hall's. The one you give most is your friend type, which is free when you finish; the full profile scores all six. It describes the kind of friend you are, not how good a friend you are.

The oldest list of friend types is still quoted, and it holds up. In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, written in the 4th century BC, Aristotle says "There are therefore three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable" (W. D. Ross translation).

Friendships of utility exist because each person is useful to the other: the coworker you eat lunch with, the neighbor you swap keys with. Friendships of pleasure exist because the time together is enjoyable: the weekend soccer team, the friend you only ever see for drinks. Aristotle's judgment on both: "Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves". Change jobs or quit the team and many of them fade, which matches most people's experience of their twenties.

The third kind is friendship based on character, where each person likes the other for who they are. "Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue," he writes, and he adds that such friendships are rare and slow, because people "cannot know each other till they have 'eaten salt together'". More than two thousand years later, research on the hours it takes to make a close friend, below, says something similar.

We'd add one thing. Utility and pleasure friendships aren't failures. Most close friendships start as one of them.

Lists of good friend traits run long, but most of them reduce to Hall's six standards. Here is how we'd put them as things you can see.

A good friend keeps confidences, so what you tell them doesn't reach a third person. The give-and-take evens out over months, not every week. They are honest with you when it would be easier not to be. They listen to the whole story before offering advice, and ask whether you want advice at all. They're glad about your good news, not quietly competing with it. They turn up for the practical things (the hospital visit, the move) as well as the fun ones. And they keep in touch when nothing is going on, which matters more than it sounds (see the research on reaching out below).

You won't find all of these in every friend, and expecting it is one way friendships end. What matters is that a friend meets the standards you care about most. Someone who values closeness can feel let down by a friend who is loyal and fun but never asks how they're really doing, even though that friend is doing nothing wrong by their own standards.

On averages: Hall's meta-analysis of sex differences found that women, on the whole, expect somewhat more of their same-sex friends than men do, with a small overall difference (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, doi:10.1177/0265407510386192). Small means there is a lot of overlap between any two people.

Fewer than the number of people you'd invite to a wedding. Robin Dunbar's research proposes that social networks come in layers, each roughly three times the size of the one inside it. In an analysis of human grouping patterns, Zhou, Sornette, Hill and Dunbar found preferred group sizes of about 3 to 5, 9 to 15 and 30 to 45, and so on outward (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2005, doi:10.1098/rspb.2004.2970). Dunbar describes the innermost layer as the handful of people you'd turn to in a crisis.

The outer figure, "Dunbar's number" of about 150, is the most famous and the weakest part. It came from extrapolating brain size against group size in primates (Dunbar, Journal of Human Evolution, 1992). When Patrik Lindenfors, Andreas Wartel and Johan Lind re-ran that kind of analysis on other datasets with different methods, their estimates ranged so widely, with 95% confidence intervals of 4 to 520 and 2 to 336, that they concluded specifying any one number is futile (Biology Letters, 2021, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158). We'd trust the small inner circle more than the 150.

How many people actually have: in a May 2021 survey of 2,019 US adults by the Survey Center on American Life, 49% said they had three or fewer close friends, 12% said none and 13% said ten or more. In a 1990 Gallup survey the figures were 27% with three or fewer, 3% with none and 33% with ten or more. The two surveys asked in different ways (online versus by phone), so the size of the drop is uncertain, but the direction is clear.

Every friendship has lopsided seasons: a new baby, an illness, a breakup. A one-sided friendship is when the lopsided season never ends. The signs we'd look for are patterns over months, not single events.

You always make the plans, and if you stopped, you'd stop seeing them. They get in touch when they need something and go quiet when you do, which is what people mean by a fair-weather friend, and what Aristotle meant by a friendship of utility. Things you told them in confidence come back to you from other people. Your good news gets a change of subject or a story that tops it. And you regularly come away from time together feeling worse about yourself.

The last sign has some research behind it. Holt-Lunstad, Uchino, Smith and Hicks brought 107 adults into the lab, each with a same-sex friend who was either supportive or one they felt ambivalent about (Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2007, doi:10.1007/BF02879910). Blood pressure rose most when people discussed a negative event with an ambivalent friend, and those who brought ambivalent friends had higher resting heart rates. The authors suggest people may not fully relax around ambivalent friends.

Before ending a friendship, it is often worth saying the thing once, plainly: "I've noticed I'm always the one who calls." Some friends don't realize. The ones who do, and don't change, have answered the question.

The honest answer is time, and more of it than people expect. Jeffrey Hall studied 355 adults who had recently moved and 112 first-year university students, tracking how many hours they spent with new acquaintances (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2018, doi:10.1177/0265407518761225). As the University of Kansas reported the study, it took roughly 50 hours together to become a casual friend, about 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close friend. Time spent on leisure counted for much more than time working side by side, and certain kinds of everyday talk predicted growing closeness.

Two hundred hours is the reason adult friendships are hard. School and university hand you those hours; jobs, children and commutes take them away. So the practical advice follows from the arithmetic: pick something that repeats (a weekly class, a team, a volunteer shift), so you see the same people without having to arrange it, and turn one of those meetings into a coffee or a walk.

Two findings make the first moves easier. After a conversation with someone new, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them, a "liking gap" found by Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark that lasted for months among new university roommates (Psychological Science, 2018, doi:10.1177/0956797618783714). And Peggy Liu and colleagues found in preregistered experiments that people underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out to, with the gap largest for people they're less close to (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023, doi:10.1037/pspi0000402). Send the message.

Keeping friends takes contact too. In an 18-month study of 25 students moving from school to university, Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar found that emotional closeness to friends fell more than closeness to family when contact dropped (Evolution and Human Behavior, 2011, doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.08.005). It was a small study, but it fits what most people notice after a move. If social situations or being liked are where you get stuck, our tests on those look at the specific parts.

The research on why friends matter is strong. A meta-analysis of 148 studies with 308,849 participants by Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton found a 50% increased likelihood of survival over the study periods for people with stronger social relationships (PLoS Medicine, 2010, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316). That covers all social ties, not friends alone, and it is an association across populations, not a promise for one person.

What friendship research can't do is grade your friendships. Hall's six standards describe what people expect, and two good friends can expect very different things. A type from our test, or any test, says what you tend to give as a friend; it doesn't say you're a better or worse friend than someone with another type, and it can't see the other half of the friendship. It also reflects how you answered on the day. If you want to understand how closeness works for you more broadly, our attachment style test and the love languages guide look at the same questions from the side of romantic relationships, and what are core values covers why friends with different priorities can still get on.