A lot of you are saying something along the lines of "I'm really lucky because my friends are awesome" or "I surround myself only with awesome people". I think this is a very interesting phaenomenon.
Well, everybody thinks their friends are great, right? I don't think I've ever known anybody who thought their friends were all pratts without whose company they'd be better off. If they did, these "friends" wouldn't be around too much longer, or, they'd be called "acquaintances".
So here's what evolutionary psychologists think is happening in your brain. You make friends, right? Well, when we were hunter-gatherers, it was necessary to make friends because survival in the tribes made it necessary to rely on our neighbours, because we were interdependent, and to distrust others, because they were competing for resources. Because this sort of arrangement promoted survival, evolution saw fit to imprint it in our brains.
Jump to the present, and it's just another artifact of evolution that we've outgrown, and the results are that you evaluate your friends differently from how you evaluate strangers.
Ever notice how when one of your friends stands up you for a meeting, but you'll give him/her the benefit of the doubt, but if you hear about somebody you don't know doing the same thing, you immediately think that person is a wanker? That's why.
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