ECSN Research Seminar - "The price of social facades? Examining the emotional toll of faking and hiding friendships"

People attempt to make others believe they are friends with someone, even when they are not (faking friendships), and attempt to make others believe they are not friends with someone, even when they are (hiding friendships). This paper investigates the emotional consequences of faking and hiding friendships, where individuals either misrepresent non-existent friendships as real, or disguise actual friendships as non-existent. Despite prior work emphasizing how these behaviors can be socially advantageous, our findings suggest they carry significant emotional costs. Across multiple studies, we demonstrate that engaging in such behaviors leads to feelings of shame, guilt, and a sense of dirtiness. Analyses of cognitive social structure data across six samples reveals that faked and hidden friendships naturally occur throughout social networks. In analyses of open-ended textual data, a two-workweek experience-sampling study, and a preregistered experiment, efforts to misrepresent friendships -- whether by faking or hiding them -- largely led to higher levels of shame, guilt, and dirtiness. Notably, the motive behind these behaviors moderated the intensity of these emotions, with self-serving reasons exacerbating feelings of shame, guilt, and dirtiness compared to prosocial intentions. While being perceived as having a desirable circle of friends may be advantageous, people pay a price for attempting to present their friendships as something other than what they believe them to be.

This is coauthored work with Blaine's PhD student Jingze Wang (1st author).