Cognitive inconsistencies and non-symmetric friendship

Non-reciprocated relationships, such as all workers knowing the president of the company but only a few of the workers being known by the president, and non-symmetric relationships, such as workers thinking that they know the president and thinking that the president does not know them, are endemic to most social situations. While such inconsistencies may be expected in relationships such as giving advice and lending money, they are rarely expected to occur in seemingly symmetric relationships such as friendship. Nevertheless, they do. We suggest that research in this area has been hampered by the confused language used for describing 'symmetries' and 'non-symmetries'. We present a framework for thinking about these relations that clearly distinguishes cognitive inconsistencies and non-symmetric and non-reciprocated, relations. Then, we employ this framework and constructural theory to suggest that owing to cognitive inconsistencies, any interaction-based relationship, including friendship, can potentially be non-symmetric. We examine a series of hypotheses concerning interaction and interaction-based behaviors that derive from this theory using friendship relations. We find that we are able to predict both who is friends with whom, non-symmetry in friendship, and non-reciprocities in the expectation for and recall of friendship.