Reply to Völker et al.: On the evidence of increased close friendships in societies

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2026 Open access

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Authors: Stefan Thurner, Markus Hofer, Jan Korbel
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2535183123
Cited by: 1
References: 4

Abstract

Commentators on ref.1 argue that a rapid and strong social connectivity increase is not supported by data (2).Their critique focuses on data presented in Fig. 1E (1).To find out if close friendship ties, strong enough to aect the opinions of friends, increase over time, we compiled available surveys that meet carefully chosen selection criteria, specified in SI Appendix (1).The commentators present datasets that do not match these criteria to conclude that our results are unsupported.We discuss this problematic reasoning along with their arguments.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation Social Power and Status Dynamics Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Volume
123
Issue
7
Pages
e2535183123–e2535183123
Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN