What giving back means between friends
Do exchanges between friends follow a rule of return? Since the late 1970s, social psychology has distinguished two ways of keeping accounts in a relationship.
An old question
Marcel Mauss, in his Essai sur le don, described the gift as caught in a threefold obligation: to give, to receive, to reciprocate. The work dealt with distant societies, but it established the idea that an exchange with no expected return is rarer than it seems, including among people who are close.
The sociology of friendship inherited a tension from it: the friendly bond presents itself as disinterested, yet observation finds regular exchanges of favours, invitations and gifts, whose reciprocity seems to matter even when it is never put into words.
Two distinct norms
In 1979 Margaret Clark and Judson Mills proposed distinguishing exchange relationships, in which a benefit received creates a debt to be settled, from so-called communal relationships, in which each person responds to the other's needs without keeping a precise account. Friendship is placed in the second category.
The distinction does not describe two kinds of people but two norms, which the same person applies depending on the relationship. A colleague met the day before and a long-standing friend do not give rise to the same expectations in response to the same favour.
What the experiments show
Clark and Mills's first experiments varied the expectation of a future relationship with a partner. When this expectation was strong, immediate repayment of a favour reduced the partner's appeal; when it was weak, it increased it. Paying back too quickly signalled an exchange relationship.
Other work in the same vein found that, in communal relationships, people keep less track of each person's contributions to a joint task and more track of the other's needs. These results come mainly from laboratory situations, between students who did not know each other.
Bookkeeping by another name
The absence of accounts does not mean the absence of balance. Equity theory, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, holds that relationships perceived as lastingly unbalanced are less satisfying, and several surveys on friendship find this association, to varying degrees.
The two approaches can be reconciled by distinguishing time horizons: the account would be suspended in the short term and reactivated over time. A single favour not returned carries no weight; a long series ends up being noticed. This reading remains an interpretation, not an established result.
What makes measurement difficult
Exchanges between friends are heterogeneous: a piece of advice, a place to stay, a listening ear, an invitation. Reducing them to a common unit in order to judge the balance requires a conversion that respondents carry out themselves, implicitly, and that surveys cannot reconstruct.
Added to this is a bias described in relation to shared tasks: each person tends to overestimate their own share in a joint activity. Two friends may therefore judge the same history of exchanges very differently, without either being more mistaken than the other.
Key points
Since 1979, Clark and Mills have distinguished exchange relationships from communal relationships.
Between close friends, a return that comes too quickly can signal an exchange relationship rather than a friendship.
The absence of immediate accounting does not rule out attention to balance over time.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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