友谊的黑暗面：“我们需要一个共同的敌人”

As a rule, friendship is considered an unalloyed good, one of life’s happy-happies, like flowers and fresh fruit. “Report: It Would Probably Be Nice Having Friends,” read a recent headline in The Onion. Ha ha! Of course it’s “kind of fun” and “pretty cool” to “have a few select people in your life to do stuff with on a regular basis.”

友谊一般被认为是绝对的好事，像花朵和新鲜水果一样，是生命中一种单纯的快乐。最近，洋葱网(The Onion)的一个新闻标题是《报告：拥有朋友可能是件不错的事》(Report: It Would Probably Be Nice Having Friends)。哈哈!要是“生活中能有几个经常一起做些什么的人”当然“有点意思”，也“挺酷的”。

Most people can name at least half a dozen people they view as reasonably good friends. The only society where people don’t have any friends, according to Daniel Hruschka, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University, is found in the science fiction of C.J. Cherryh’s “Foreigner” series.

大多数人都能说出至少五六个算得上好朋友的人。按照亚利桑那州立大学(Arizona State University)进化人类学家丹尼尔·赫鲁诗卡(Daniel Hruschka)的说法，唯一一个没有朋友的社会，只在C·J·切丽(C.J. Cherryh)的科幻小说《外来者》(Foreigner)系列中出现过。

Yet researchers who explore the deep nature of friendship admit the bond can have its thorns, bruise spots and pesticide traces.

但考察友谊深层性质的研究人员认为，这种感情可能带刺，有伤痕，有杀虫剂残留。

Take the new evidence that people choose friends who resemble themselves, right down to the moment-to-moment pattern of blood flow in the brain. The tendency toward homophily, toward flocking together with birds of your inner and outer feather, gives rise to a harmonious sense of belonging and shared purpose, to easy laughter and volumes of subtext mutually, wordlessly, joyfully understood.

要说新的证据，可以是人们会选择与自己相像的朋友，也可以是大脑中时刻出现的血液流动模式。这种“同质相吸”、物以类聚的趋势，都加强了和谐的归属感和共同的使命感，彼此间能轻松欢笑，更能在无言之中读懂对方的潜台词，在快乐之中达到理解。

But homophily, researchers said, is also the basis of tribalism, xenophobia and racism, the urge to “otherize” those who differ from you and your beloved friends in one or more ways.

但研究人员表示，这样的同质性也是同族意识、仇外情绪、种族主义的基础，当你面对那些或多或少与你和你亲爱的朋友们不一样的人时，这让你产生“排他”欲望。

The impulse can yield absurd results. One recent study from the University of Michigan had subjects stand outside on a cold winter day and read a brief story about a hiker who was described as either a “left-wing, pro-gay-rights Democrat” or a “right-wing, anti-gay-rights Republican.”

这样的冲动会带来荒谬的结果。在密歇根大学(University of Michigan)前不久的一个研究中，实验对象被安排在寒冷的冬季里站在室外并阅读一个关于徒步旅行者的小故事，这位旅行者或被描述为“支持同性恋权利的左翼民主党人”，或被描述为“反对同性恋权利的右翼共和党人”。

When asked whether the hypothetical hiker might feel chilly as well, participants were far more likely to say yes if the protagonist’s political affiliation agreed with their own. But a political adversary — does that person even have skin, let alone a working set of thermal sensors?

当被问及这位假想的旅行者是否也感觉寒冷时，如果主人公的政治派别与自己相一致，被试者则更有可能回答“是”。但是如果政治派别对立——别说他们还能不能感受得到温度，这人有皮肤吗?

“Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?” Nicholas Christakis of Yale University said. “I have struggled with this, and read and studied a tremendous amount, and I have mostly dispiriting news. It’s awful. Xenophobia and in-group bias go hand-in-hand.”

“为什么爱自己这类，就一定要恨其他那类呢?”耶鲁大学(Yale University)的古乐朋(Nicholas Christakis)说。“我对此有过挣扎，进行了大量的阅读和学习，但大多都是令人沮丧的消息。这太糟糕了。仇外情绪和群体内偏见是不分家的。”

Game theory models predict it, real-life examples confirm it. “In order to band together, we need a common enemy,” Dr. Christakis said.

对此，博弈论模型有所预测，生活中的现实案例也可以证实。“要团结起来，我们就需要有共同的敌人，”古乐朋说。

Fortunately, he added, no model insists that the out-group must be exterminated or otherwise eliminated from the scene. “It’s possible to treat the out-group with mild dislike or even grudging respect,” he said. “Cultivating in-group distinctiveness does not require that the other must be killed.”

不过他还说，幸好还没有哪个模型主张圈外人士必须被消灭或驱离。“以轻度的不喜欢或勉强的尊敬来对待群体之外的人是有可能的，”他说。“建立群体内的独特性不一定要把其他人消灭掉。”

Nevertheless, even the ordinary business of making friends is an exclusionary act, a judgment call, and therefore threaded with the potential for pain.

然而，就连普通的交友也是一种排外行为，是一种主观判断，因此也带有受伤的可能。

“A friendship is always a little bit of a conspiracy,” said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton. “We two are here, they are over there, and we’re going to do our thing whether they want us to or not.”

“一段友谊总会带有一丝共谋的意味，”普林斯顿大学哲学教授亚历山大·内哈马斯(Alexander Nehamas)说。“我们俩在这边，别的人在那边，不论他们愿不愿意，我们都会做我们自己的事情。”

And if they try to join us, we can say, no, sorry, that seat is taken. We’re saving it for a friend.

如果他们想要加入，我们可以说，不行，抱歉，这位置有人了。这是我们给朋友留的。

Who may not return the favor. Abdullah Almaatouq of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues recently showed that people are poor judges of who their friends are.

但这位“朋友”不一定会礼尚往来。麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)的阿卜杜拉·阿玛图克(Abdullah Almaatouq)和同事最近证明，人们对于谁是自己的朋友判断力欠佳。

When the researchers asked 84 college students to identify which of their classmates qualified as friends, the researchers found that in half the cases, those labeled friends failed to reciprocate the designation.

研究人员要求84名大学生在同学中指出自己认为称得上朋友的人，他们发现，被称为朋友的那方有半数的人都没有相应地指认回去。

Other studies have shown similar discordances or worse, with one survey revealing that 66 percent of supposed friendships were cases of unrequited like.

类似的或者更糟的不协调性在其他研究中也有所表现，一项研究显示66%的假想友谊都是“单相思”。

Friendships are also surprisingly fragile. Based on a detailed survey of 540 participants, researchers at Oxford University determined that people had a falling out with a member of their social circle about once every 7.2 months, or nearly two times annually, and that a year later 40 percent of those ruptures remained unhealed.

友谊还惊人地脆弱。根据对540名参与者进行详细调查，牛津大学(Oxford University)的研究人员测定，人们每隔7.2个月，或以将近一年两次的频率，会与自己社交圈内的一人闹僵，而其中40%的关系破裂在一年后都依然没有修复。

The overall rates of friendship conflict did not differ between men and women, but women were more likely to clash with close friends, to express feelings of anguish over the breakup, and to be more demanding of evidence of remorse before reconciling.

友情发生冲突的整体比率在男性和女性之间没有差别，但女性更可能与亲密好友发生冲突，在关系破裂后更可能表现痛苦，并且在和好之前会需要有更多悔恨的表现。

Sure, love may mean never having to say you’re sorry. But friendship is a stricter taskmaster, and sorry may not be enough.

当然了，爱可以意味着永远都不需要说抱歉。但友谊是个更加严格的“工头”，一句抱歉可能不够。