Gemma Spake

You now have the minimum number you need for alliances.

In conflict situations, there is always going to be an odd one out.

Or when people are disagreeing, there's always going to be somebody who's left out.

You can't split three evenly.

Simple maths.

Either the group splits three ways or more often two pair off.

And this is when the fact that there are three of you and there is a quote unquote spare or an extra bonus member at any given time.

That is when this becomes a deeper unraveling for dynamics like this.

There is a 2021 paper literally called Friendship Jealousy.

Tools for Maintaining Friendships in the Face of Third Party Threats that was published in, I think it was the journal of, must have been the journal of social psychology.

And what this paper shows so well is how when there is a third person, when you can see the threat of you being replaced, you act differently.

Across 11 studies, researchers found that often friendship jealousy is uniquely triggered, not just by...

The idea that your friend might not like you anymore or could be taken away, but by third party threats.

So not just the idea of losing your friend, but losing them to someone else is more painful.

And it makes us especially sensitive to cues of being replaced by the third person in the friendship.

Because we can see this person.

We can literally...

We know that this person is a nice person.

We know that these people have a good bond.

It's very easy for us to imagine them existing and going on without us.