Sometimes we want vicious friends: People have nuanced preferences...

Intuition and research alike suggest that people prefer friends to be kind and trustworthy and disfavor viciousness and indifference. Here, we reconsider these preferences in light of the fact that dyadic friendships are embedded in wider social networks. Per an embedded dyad framework, because our friends recurrently interact with other people, and these friend-other interactions can facilitate various positive and negative effects on us, people should possess distinct preferences not only for how our friends should behave toward us but also for how our friends should behave toward other people (common classes of interactants, e.g., strangers, rivals). In six studies (N = 1183; two pre-registered) with complementary designs and cross- national samples (U.S. community, U.S. student, India community), we find: (a) When the targets of best friends’ behavior are not specified (as in past work), people’s friend preferences track how they want friends to behave toward them. Replicating patterns found in past work, (b) people generally want friends to be kinder and more trustworthy than not. But (c) people also want friends to be more prosocial toward them than toward others and (d) people sometimes prefer friends who are more vicious than prosocial (toward participants’ enemies). Findings counter predictions derived from canonical friend preference work and also from cooperative accounts of partner choice. More broadly, findings enrich our understanding of what it means to deem people, e.g. “kind”, as such evaluative personality concepts may by default be indexed to the self.