Friendship and the Development of Self-Schemas
Two studies were conducted to examine a model proposed to explain similarity in the self-schemas of friends. According to this model, in the ongoing conversation of friendship, each person becomes aware of the dimensions used by the friend for describing people. Over time each incorporates some of the friend's dimensions for organizing information about others and ultimately for describing the self. In the first study the self-conceptions of friends and nonfriends were compared. As predicted, friends, as compared to nonfriends, had more similar self-schemas, and more readily adopted each other's self-schema dimensions for describing a target. In the second study two unacquainted partners discussed their impressions of a target person. Subsequently, the pairs shared more similar self-schemas and incorporated dimensions from each other's self-schemas for self-description and for description of the target person. Thus, the results of both studies are consistent with the model proposed. Directions for future research are discussed.