Check Your Friendship Culture

Tell me the behavior reinforcement dynamic between you and whom you consort with and I will tell you who you are

In a great American novel, there was a bold kid named Huckleberry Finn who faked his death and left his home of Missouri. Set in the 1830s, He finds himself on a journey up the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave trying to escape to freedom.

Towards the end of their odyssey, someone arrests Jim. Huck creates a solid and easy plan to get him out. But then, by chance, his old homie Tom Sawyer shows up. Huck had always admired Tom for his demeanor, his style. But instead of going with Huck’s simple plan to finally set Jim free once and for all, Tom cooks up a crazy, foolish way to do it. Which fails.

Luckily, someone shows up in the clutch and explains that Jim had actually been freed during their entire adventure north. Tom says he too knew this, but still wanted to break him out “in style.”

A weird interpretation of this that recently came to my mind: how many young guys exist in social circles where the way you get respect within the group is by being an idiot.

There is a useful idea from psychology that all behaviors are either rewarded or punished. People you associate with positively or negatively reinforce your actions, leading to an increase or decrease in those behaviors over time.

You can immediately improve your life by thinking hard about this idea.

If someone gives respect when you do things that are bad for you, and loses respect when you do things that are good for you, why would you still hang out with them? This is beyond clear. And yet I wonder how often people stay close with someone who influences their behavior for the worse just so they can, you know, be in the club screaming no new friends; so Tom will approve that Huck does things with style.

That said, I’m sick of the posts I’ll see on social media about friendship. The whole “you need to cut off your old friends, they are holding you back, blah blah blah.” This can be accurate! Sometimes you need to let someone float out of your life down the Mississippi. However, I’d also bet that often, the person posting that idea is just being a piece of trash. It depends on a million different things, of course.

For me at-least, most of my old friends are infinite treasures. Treasures of love, special understanding and impossibly funny experiences. With many of them, there were elements of bad behavior reinforcement dynamic in the past. Whoever sent the “I’m down a zillion” text at 3 AM after doing something ridiculous got respect, as bizarre as that sounds. But the culture of friendships can always change.¹ And with many of them it has changed in positive ways.

This happens by Huck and Tom agreeing that the plan is bad. Jim’s freedom is at stake, everyone’s future is at stake.

Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer

1. “A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behavior.”

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity