A source evaluation and research plan.

Kurzban, Robert, and Peter DeScioli, comps. “Research Suggests Friendships Are Built on Alliances.” Penn News. N.p., 3 Feb. 2011.

The article suggests that friendships are built on alliances. On a website called MySpace, people are allowed to tank their friends in order of preference which is then displayed on their profile. Research showed the ranking system followed a tit-for-tat policy. If you ranked a friend highly, he/she would do so too. This brought the authors to the conclusion that friendships are often built on alliances.  “If Saudi Arabia is allies with the United States, it’s not just concerned about its relationship with the United States.  It’s also concerned about the relationship that the United States has with other nations such as Iran.” The article concludes that the same logic applies to friendship. Friends seem to compete in order to be ‘called’ the better friend.

The article suggests that friendship is merely a means of convenience for most people. The reason I choose this article for my research was because Friendship means so much to all of us, it is an integral part of life. We can’t live without our fiends. It is surprising and demeaning to see it being compared to a tit-for-tat policy. I truly believe that friendship is a genuine bond between two or more people, and those who have people to bank upon are the luckiest people on the face of the Earth!

The research is very superficial in my opinion. The friendship seen on social networking sights is more on the lines of acquaintanceship. A friendship is a mutual relationship, so it is very likely that if you like a friend a particular amount, the friend also likes you the same amount because your relation with that friend is at that level. This does not necessarily mean that friends evaluate each other’s preferences and then make their own decisions.

In my research paper, I aim to analyze that friendships are not purely based on benefits or alliances genuinely capable of caring for each other.  If friends are put in a situation where saving their friend from trouble would require them to take the blame on themselves. Their actions will then be observed to see whether friendship can involve genuine care and love for each other. If the friends choose not to help their from jeopardy and be selfish, then the research article would be proven right that friendships are in fact built on alliances.