What Are Friends for in Russia Versus Canada?; the notions of trust and help in adversity emerged as defining features of friendship in Russia but were less clearly present in Canada

What Are Friends for in Russia Versus Canada?: An Approach for Documenting Cross-Cultural Differences. Marina M. Doucerain, Andrew G. Ryder, Catherine E. Amiot. Cross-Cultural Research, June 16, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/10693971211024599

Abstract: Most research on friendship has been grounded in Western cultural worlds, a bias that needs to be addressed. To that end, we propose a methodological roadmap to translate linguistic/anthropological work into quantitative psychological cross-cultural investigations of friendship, and showcase its implementation in Russia and Canada. Adopting an intersubjective perspective on culture, we assessed cultural models of friendship in three inter-related ways: by (1) deriving people’s mental maps of close interpersonal relationships; (2) examining the factor structure of friendship; and (3) predicting cultural group membership from a given person’s friendship model. Two studies of Russians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 195; Study 2b, n = 232) and Canadians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 164; Study 2b, n = 199) implemented this approach. The notions of trust and help in adversity emerged as defining features of friendship in Russia but were less clearly present in Canada. Different friendship models seem to be prevalent in these two cultural worlds. The roadmap described in the current research documents these varying intersubjective representations, showcasing an approach that is portable across contexts (rather than limited to a specific cross-cultural contrast) and relies on well-established methods (i.e., easily accessible in many research contexts).

Keywords: friendship, Russia, Canada, cultural models, intersubjective culture, methods

Discussion

The present studies showcased a three-pronged approach to quantitatively document cross-cultural differences in models of friendship in Canadian versus Russian cultural contexts. Our hypotheses were largely supported. Participants’ mental map of the interpersonal space around friend was different from that around droog (H1), the factorial structure of friendship characteristics differed across cultural settings (H2), and we could predict group membership from participants’ ratings of friendship characteristics (H3). We also found evidence of cultural consensus in people’s responses across studies and across cultural contexts. Further, the three aspects of our methodological approach relied on very different analytic strategies, yet yielded convergent results.

Our results documented some similarities between the two cultural contexts. Both friend and droog were located close to relationship terms with connotations of fun and good times (Study 1), and items referring to stimulating companionship clearly loaded on a single factor in both countries (Study 2a). This is consistent with existing research on the classical Aristotelian model of friendship, where enjoyment is an important feature of friendship (Bukowski et al., 1987; Hall, 2012). However, across studies, the notions of trust and help in adversity emerged as defining features of friendship in the Russian context, whereas they were less clearly present in the Canadian context. Relationship terms with connotations of “brother-in-arms” were located very close to droog (Study 1), and higher ratings of trust and not fearing negative consequences from a friend’s actions were related to a greater likelihood of being Russian (Study 2b). Trust is also seen as a friendship characteristic in the Western literature (Hall, 2012; Hartup & Stevens, 1997; Wright, 2006), but in addition to being particularly salient for Russian participants, trust may also be represented differently in the Russian context. Indeed, trust and esteem for one’s friend formed a single factor among Russians, whereas trust items were associated with instrumental help (or tended to not load very highly on their respective factor) among Canadians (Study 2a). This is consistent with Russia’s 20th century historical events. In a totalitarian regime where self-disclosure could have life threatening consequences, trust, and help in adversity may well have emerged as paramount features of friendship.

The results also indicated that friendship is seen as a closer and more intimate relationship in the Russian group than in the Canadian group. Droog and luchshiy-droog were located very close together, whereas friend and best-friend were in different clusters (Study 1), and seeing friendship as entailing very frequent interactions was related to a greater likelihood of being Russian (Study 2b). As mentioned earlier, Western research on friendship regularly distinguishes between “casual” and “close” friendships. In Western/North-American cultural worlds, a generic friendship may be mentally represented as a not a very deep relationship, and qualifiers such as “close” are necessary to account for a broader range of social ties. It was also noteworthy that endorsing more strongly the idea that having friends is a reflection of one’s social skills (Study 2b) was related to a greater likelihood of being Canadian. This is consistent with the Western interpersonal literature, whereby friendships index one’s interpersonal abilities (Jerrome, 1984) and personal characteristics (Walther et al., 2008). This notion is also encoded in the English language, where “‘making friends’ appears to be seen as an art and a skill” (Wierzbicka, 1997, p. 45).

Overall, our results echo Wierzbicka’s (1997) linguistic analyses and the qualitative findings that friendship is a very involved and demanding relationship in the Russian cultural context (Doucerain et al., 2018). Collectively, these results also support the notion that different intersubjective representations of friendship, or friendship models, are prevalent in these two cultural worlds. Although these results encourage confidence in our methodological approach, several limitations should be noted. First, we used gender-neutral names to elicit representations of as generic a friendship as possible, but this decision may have introduced noise into the results. Gender differences in friendship patterns are well documented (Aukett et al., 1988), and whether participants had a male or female generic friendship in mind when completing the study might have influenced their answers. Second, both Russian and Canadian samples were fairly young (in their thirties on average), and it is possible that older participants would have characterized friendship differently. This is particularly problematic for the Russian sample, given the profound social changes that Russia experienced over the last decades. In a related vein, North American products are increasingly prevalent in Russia, like in many other parts of the world. These globalization forces (Cowen, 2009) may influence people’s friendship representations—particularly among younger people, just like they contribute to reshaping a number of psychological constructs and processes (Kirmayer, 2006; Watters, 2011). Finally, so far, we have tacitly assumed a complete overlap between nation-state and cultural group, which is problematic. Cultural/cross-cultural psychologists routinely rely on such correspondences, but they are over-simplifications that can unfortunately reify and essentialize cultural differences (Morris et al., 2015). Our goal here was to propose and document an approach to characterize cultural models of friendship—and our results suggest that our approach was adequate—but future research should take these limitations into consideration.

We showcased our three-pronged methodological approach by contrasting Russian versus Canadian friendship models, but future research could employ a similar approach in other cultural contexts. For example, some preliminary qualitative work suggests that Japanese friendship models may also differ from North American ones (Cargile, 1998). It would be interesting to examine where friend’s translation equivalent tomodachi (友達) stands in relation to other relationship terms such as mikata, nakama, shinyuu, or tsukiai, and how the factor structure of a generic tomodachi’s characteristics compares to the factor structures derived here.

However, rather than being an end in itself, documenting cross-cultural differences in friendship models should serve as a base for subsequent “unpackaging” studies: namely, studies clarifying what mechanisms account for the observed cultural differences (Dere et al., 2012; Matsumoto et al., 2008). In other words, what sociocultural characteristics, historical circumstances, prevalent practices or core concerns of Russian versus Canadian worlds can explain the differences in friendship models we observed here? For example, the high premium placed on trust in the Russian model may stem from decades of Soviet rule where self-disclosure entailed significant risk to one’s safety, and future research should test such a hypothesis.

More broadly, focusing on the mechanisms underlying cross-cultural differences in friendship patterns may stimulate work on how culture shapes ways of relating to each other. Cultural/Cross-cultural psychologists have usually focused on individual-level constructs, such as values (Schwartz, 2012), self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), or emotional experience (Matsumoto et al., 2008), but much less on relational constructs (Morris et al., 2000). The present work took a step toward addressing this paucity of research by proposing a methodological road map for studying cross-cultural differences in friendship models and by documenting these differences across Canadian and Russian cultural contexts. Many quantitative investigations of cross-cultural differences build on initial qualitative, anthropological, or linguistic evidence. We hope to have demonstrated here one approach to negotiating this transition step in a systematic way.