Actually, it all started by coincidence: Leiden PhD student Max van Duijn visited a congress and introduced himself to his future colleagues from Oxford and Helsinki who were doing research into social relations. “At some point I said that I knew of a great case, my old student fraternity.” That got the ball rolling and before he knew it, Augustinus’s first-year members had become the subjects of an international study. The research team is headed by Anna Rotkirch from the University of Helsinki. Van Duijn acts as the middle man.
We build a major part of our social networks between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, he explains. “The friends you bury." In the Netherlands, that has been institutionalised in a unique way in our socially-structured student fraternities and that’s incredibly interesting for the Finnish and English researchers.” “In Finland, we have student fraternities but they don’t have the same structure”, agrees Rotkirch. “We are studying Augustinus because it uses cordialen [smaller clubs] in its strategy and that overlaps the way bonds of friendship should be forged according to the literature.”
“Decisive factors for the creation of social connections include the amount of time you see each other, shared physical effort, singing, coordinated actions (stamping, little dances), competition, cooking and eating meals together. By pure coincidence, those are precisely the activities first-years at a student fraternity do. In fact: if you were to design an institute to stimulate friendship on the basis of scientific understanding, that institute might resemble Dutch-style student fraternities”, continues Van Duijn
The first-years were followed for twelve months without the outside world knowing. “First of all, we asked about their interests and we did a few tests, then the participants filled in an online questionnaire about their friendships and social relationships in the cordial. In the end, around 250 students out of the four hundred first-years were involved in the study.”
Rotkirch adds: “We wanted to find out how groups were formed, how friendships are created. Surprisingly little research has been done into friendships among adults. Personally, I’m interested in differences between the sexes: the cordials are either men-only or women-only. What are the differences? Are there any leaders, and if there are, how do they become prominent? Are there differences in the way they deal with conflict? What is the relationship between the group’s traits and those of the individual members?”
They did not conduct an ethnographic study at Augustinus. “The scientists really wanted to, but Augustinus wasn’t happy with the idea. They didn’t want researchers sitting next to them taking notes while they had a quiet drink. But the researchers dropped by one evening.”
While visiting Augustinus, Rotkirch was struck by the all-female cordials in particular. “They sing and drink as much as the lads, and have their own dress code. In sociology, the cliché has it that women don’t form groups like that.” Van Duijn: “Students arrived wearing face paint for a party; students sang and danced. Of course, the place had everybody fuelled with endorphins.”
The background of The Fraternity Friendship Study, as the study into Augustinus is called, is a number of debates and theories about friendship, says Van Duijn. “Friends are born or friends are made", for example. Some scientists think that friendship occurs naturally when two people click while others think that friendship is formed when you do things together. At student fraternities, the emphasis is mainly on sharing time together: a frequently asked question is: ‘You will be there tonight, won’t you?’”
Another well-known theory about friends was posited by Robin Dunbar, who is also connected to the study. Dunbar, the director of the Social & Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford University, is one of the most respected researchers in the field of social behaviour. According to Dunbar’s theory, the number of friendships a person can maintain is limited. Van Duijn explains: “Most people have a support clique of just five people – their most intimate relationships, including family members. The second group, of which those five are part, consists of about fifteen people. They are good friends with whom you spend a lot of time.
“In total, we can maintain an active connection with around 150 people, while we know about 1,500 people. If you have 450 friends on Facebook, you usually only have regular contact with 150 of them. In this context, a cordial is very interesting because you make new contacts quite easily in an institutionalised way in the second circle of friends, the one that consists of 15 people.
“Perhaps they aren’t your most intimate friends straightaway, but they prove to be high-quality friendships. And that, in turn, has proved good for your health. They say that the impact of a stable social network is just as great or greater than whether you smoke or not.”
Rotkirch hopes to be able to continue the study at Augustinus for another three years at least. “Forty years would be perfect. A study like that has been done only once, at Harvard, where it emerged that friends and loved ones are better predictors of your life expectation and well-being than education or wealth.”
Van Duijn: “In the future, we could cluster the data on properties, such as social economic background or personality traits. In addition, it would be interesting to study members of other fraternities. Do students forge better relationships if they are subjected to a tougher hazing? Does the element of humiliation add anything to the social relationships or does it do more harm to the individual?”
So far, the study has revealed that student fraternities boost the creation of high-quality friendships. “That doesn’t mean to say that people who don’t join clubs won’t make any friends, but the activities at fraternities and perhaps at the more student-like clubs where people sing, mess around and compete for points among themselves might help”, adds Van Duijn.
Rotkirch, too, is already calling the study unique: “We know more about how monkeys make friends than about the way humans do.”