Seminar Series

Close friendships are essential for well-being and are often built on shared interests, identities, or experiences. But interacting with new and diverse social partners also offers benefits, like novelty, a sense of belonging, and future friendship. A healthy social network therefore balances social exploitation (investing in familiar relationships) and social exploration (interacting with strangers and embracing differences). In this talk, I first present survey and experience sampling data that suggests preferences for spending time with friends versus acquaintances predict distinct patterns in well-being and social network structure. Despite its benefits, social exploration comes with challenges: it can be harder to connect and or find common ground with dissimilar others. Drawing on sociocentric network data, I show that successful exploration hinges not just on who we meet, but how we perceive them: perceived similarity, more than actual similarity, predicts outcomes like belonging and even shared laughter. These findings suggest that the explore-exploit tradeoff in social life is not just about who we spend time with, but how we bridge the unfamiliar into the familiar.