Written by / First Psychology Writers
Editor / Tommy
Socializing with friends is inevitable throughout our lives.
Maslow, a famous psychologist, proposed that social needs are one of the five basic human needs, and everyone wants to connect with the outside world.
Some people are naturally boisterous, so their social circles are relatively large, and they often invite many friends to participate in banquets.
Others prefer to spend time with a pair of confidants, and this kind of small gathering is more intimate.
In this atmosphere of small gatherings, friends often share their thoughts and troubles invisibly in the cup change.
However, the number of friends does not mean the depth of friendship.
In a limited life, it is enough to have a few close friends, and others are likely to be just social friends, suitable for meals but not deep friendships.
For this reason, we should avoid gathering too many people when inviting friends to dinner.
This view comes from my own experience.
I've always been a person who loves to be lively.
I grew up in Guangzhou, and then returned to my hometown of Foshan to study in high school due to household registration problems. Because of my outgoing personality, I have made many friends in both Guangzhou and Foshan.
At first, I treated them as close friends and treated them sincerely.
Until one time, a friend from Foshan came to Guangzhou to look for me. Because I like to be lively, I invited some friends in Guangzhou, and the group reached more than a dozen people, and we sang KTV together and went to have morning tea together.
However, to my disappointment, among the dozen or so people, my friends in Foshan thought that I should pay for it, and my friends in Guangzhou did not say that they wanted to share the cost.
In the end, only two friends took the initiative to help me settle the bill, and the three of us shared the total cost equally, paying nearly 1,000 yuan each.
At that time, I was just a student who didn't have much money.
After this incident, I became close friends with the two friends who shared the cost, and cut off contact with the others. Now, I go to Guangzhou every year to meet with them, have a drink and chat, and share the details of my life in the past year.
This experience made me realize that true friends are more important than quantity, and we should never invite too many people to dinner.
First, inviting too many people to dinner can cause checkout issues. Have you ever heard of the "bystander effect"?
This phenomenon is also known as the diffusion of responsibilities effect.
Simply put, when a certain task is assigned to a person, he usually takes the initiative to complete it.
But if this responsibility is shared among multiple people, the sense of responsibility will be diluted accordingly, the collective reaction time will be prolonged, and the action will be fraught with uncertainty.
Therefore, when a large number of people are dining together, most people may just be bystanders, indifferent to the act of checking out, and only a few people will stand up and share this responsibility, and these people are the ones who can really be called friends.
In addition, large-scale gatherings often make people you don't know very well, and there may be hostility hidden among these people that you don't know about, and you may inadvertently offend someone.
Finally, large gatherings often make communication superficial and lacking depth, thus losing the original meaning of the meal. All of these reasons suggest that the number of people in the meeting should be moderate in order to maintain the quality and depth of the meeting.
In interpersonal interactions, gatherings are a way to maintain friendships.
But psychologists point out that the quality of social interaction is more important than quantity.
Therefore, when organizing a potluck, you should choose a small-scale format, which can provide more space for participants to interact and allow people to communicate in a relaxed environment and avoid getting tired from large-scale social activities.
In fact, inviting guests is also a technique to invite friends who are truly worthy of deep friendship.
First of all, there are two types of people who are not suitable for invitation, and they are not suitable for deep friendship.
First and foremost are those who have defective moral character.
In psychology, moral character is usually related to an individual's personality traits, covering the psychological traits and behavior patterns that an individual exhibits in a social environment.
People with good moral character always make people feel comfortable in their interactions and do not cause discomfort to them.
On the other hand, those who are constantly sowing discord always want to stir things up, and they tend to upset the harmony of others by spreading rumors.
With such people, it is easy to be influenced by their negativity.
Not only are they prone to conflict with people, but they can also cause unnecessary disputes.
Therefore, it is important to avoid inviting people of bad character to meetings.
The second category is those who only know how to ask for feedback but do not know how to give back.
Just like me, it was only after an unpleasant party that I realized that I had considered these people friends.
I've always treated them like brothers, and yet they see me as something to be used for.
Looking back, they have always taken advantage of my kindness in this way, and I was always the first to pay the bill.
This phenomenon is known in psychology as the broken window theory.
Once someone's bottom line of behavior is broken, his other bottom lines will gradually be violated, and in such an environment, the people around him will become more and more presumptuous.
These people are accustomed to receiving from others and do not know how to give in return.
Relationships with friends should develop naturally and not be forced.
We all know that eating together isn't just about physical needs, it's also a way to socialize and help to strengthen the emotional connection between people.
For those friends who live in a different world from us, we need to learn to let go at the right time, and we should not force ourselves to keep them. I remember having a very good friend in junior high school and we were inseparable ever since.
But after high school we parted ways and could only be contacted occasionally via text message. As time went on, we became less and less connected and ended up almost becoming strangers.
When I entered college, I tried to repair our relationship by asking him out for dinner.
But when we got together, I realized that we no longer had the common language we used to have, that he had worked and had a family, and that I was still studying in school, and that the trajectory of our lives was very different, and the meeting was very awkward.
This experience made me realize that some friends are destined to go their separate ways, and forcibly maintaining them will only make both parties uncomfortable.
The End -
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Keywords: interpersonal communication, psychology
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