T�e Na�ure of T�ings: The Secrets of Friendship

In the CBC’s The Nature of Things latest documentary by filmmaker Judith Pyke, TheSecretsofFriendship, viewers meet some amazing scientists as they investigate the social lives of humans and other animals in the hunt for clues and patterns to decode the mysterious world of friendship. The documentary seeks to answer: What makes dogs our best friends? Do dolphins and humans have anything in common when it comes to friendship behaviours? Why do we have friends in the first place?

The article below by Vancouver Sun reporter, Shawn Conner, shares more insight into the documentary.

If there’s one thing that can be said about living through a nearly two-year lockdown, it’s that you find out who your friends are — and what they mean to you.

“Friends have always been important in my life, and when we were in lockdown during COVID, I started missing them a lot,” filmmaker Judith Pyke says.

Beverley Fehr, a University of Winnipeg PhD psychologist who researches friendships, says that we’ve learned a lot about friendships since she published her book, Friendship Processes , in 1996.

“The assumption going into research on relationships and well-being was that marriage is the key player here. It was relatively much later when people started to look at benefits of friendship. And what we know now is that having close satisfying friendships is incredibly beneficial to our physical health and to our emotional and mental health.”

Something we are learning more about is the difference in how men and women approach friendship. TheSecretsof Friendshiptouches on Fehr’s experiments in how the sexes bond and their overall satisfaction with their friendships.

“One thing that’s pretty clear from the research is that men’s friendships, particularly with other men, are not as close as women’s friendships, not as intimate,” Fehr said.

“Also, when you ask people how happy they are with their friendship or how satisfied they are, men provide lower ratings than women. I was putting the pieces together and thinking well, is the reason that men aren’t as happy in their friendships because they cannot open up as much and cannot just share personal information? That led me to do the research featured in the documentary, this idea that we knew that women and men do friendships differently.”

~ Judith Pyke

“I also started noticing a lot of different conversations that people were having about aspects of their friendships that were being challenged by COVID. It got me really interested in why this is so important to us and what the science says about friendship. And when I started looking into the science of friendship, I was so fascinated and blown away by it, but I thought it was perfect for a documentary.”

Produced, directed, and co-written by Pyke, the documentary uncovers the latest research into friendships — how we form them, the benefits of having them, and the differences between how men and women approach them.

Research into friendships is a relatively recent phenomenon.

“It wasn’t that long ago that friendship was kind of an ‘F’ word in biology, and scientists were apprehensive about using the term to describe some of these relationships they were seeing — they would talk instead about ‘affiliative bonds.’”

There is more to the documentary, including some heartwarming findings about bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Australia and rhesus macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico. TheSecretsofFriendshipalso visits the ToddlerLab in London, where researchers investigate how infants form attachments. At UCLA, Canadian scientist Carolyn Parkinson explores whether brain scans can predict who will become friends. And for the dog-lovers out there, the documentary covers a canine cognition researcher in Tempe, Ariz., who asks: Do our dogs like us more than food?

For Pyke, the documentary made her realize even more just how important her friends are.

“And the research bears that out. Friendship is really important for living a good life, and it’s associated with all sorts of positive health outcomes, like longevity. You tend to live a longer life if you have solid, good healthy friendships.”