What Makes People Stick Together During Good Times and Bad?

It is often said that it’s easy to stick together when all is going well, but when times get tough, it can be a different situation altogether. How about if you’ve gone through a difficult period when people in your family became ill or when you suffered a financial setback? Who was there for you during these unhappy times?

Best friends, close family, and relationship partners are all supposed to be around for you no matter what (“for better or worse”), but this doesn’t always happen.

Perhaps you had a person you thought was your oldest and most significant friend, but who suddenly dropped out of sight when things turned bad. No phone call, text, or messaging of any sort, leaving you on your own to deal with your own suffering.

On the other side of the coin was a person you only recently got to know through mutual friends who provided not only a shoulder to cry on but also actual, practical help. Once things settle down, who would you want to maintain a relationship with?

Empathy and Social Closeness

According to University Hospital Würzburg’s Anne Saulin and colleagues (2024), “social closeness and connectedness,” key to well-being and mental health, “depend on a shared understanding of the current situation and the others’ internal states.”

The more people learn about each other, the closer they feel. Empathy, in this process, “is the glue that holds relationships and societies together.” What can promote empathy, furthermore, is viewing another person being in pain or suffering.

Thinking back on the person who showed so much support and care for you (vs. the person who did not), it is clear that they felt empathic toward your unfortunate situation.

Not only were they genuinely interested in what you were going through, but they also seemed to know without your having to explain just how rough it all was. This is, indeed, the person you’ll want to continue a relationship with even when your life gets back in order and their help is no longer “needed.”

The German research team cites prior research demonstrating the neural circuits that exist for affective empathy (feeling what someone feels) and its cognitive counterpart (knowing someone’s thoughts and intentions).

Brain scans reveal that the regions underlying these forms of empathy both become activated with increasing social closeness to another person. They also show changes when observing someone else’s pain. Could these two types of activation somehow be related? If so, an empathic response to another person’s pain could continue to foster social closeness even when that other person’s pain subsides.

Testing Empathy’s Role in Persistent Sense of Closeness

If this reasoning is indeed sound, the question then becomes one of showing its support experimentally. To do so, the authors used a reinforcement learning paradigm in which participants saw a confederate receive what they thought was a slightly painful stimulus.

In the empathy-learning trials, participants believed that the confederates were receiving the stimulus on 80 percent of the trials, and in the extinction phase (when empathy should decline) the painful stimulus was purportedly given 20 percent of the time. While this was happening, they were undergoing brain scans and also being asked to rate how close they felt to the other person.

For these trials, no pain was administered. Evidence for empathy’s effect on social closeness was taken from the data showing whether social closeness continued to remain high in the extinction phase.

Using complex machine-learning statistical tools to analyze brain scans, the Hamburg research team established the predicted links between empathy and persistent social closeness along with support for the neural underpinnings of this connection.

A second variant of the experiment tested the role of social reciprocity, another process related to empathy. For these trials, participants were the ones who received an actual small but painful stimulus unless the confederate offered to save them (which would have supposedly cost them money).

The number of pain versus non-pain trials was predetermined, however, and randomly assigned. Here, the question was whether reciprocity would also help to stimulate feelings of closeness.

The reciprocity study showed that social closeness persisted in the extinction trials far less so than in the empathy trials. In other words, benefiting from someone else’s help had less of an influence on lasting social closeness than did the stimulation of feelings of empathy.

As the authors concluded, not only is empathy the glue that holds relationships together, but it also “can lead to stable personal and societal relationships.”

Building Your Own Social Connectedness

Now that you can see what watching someone else in pain can do to promote social closeness, you can have a better understanding of what made your helpful and supportive friend’s response so much more impactful.

Although technically the reciprocity condition in the Saulin et al. study would suggest that being helped has less effect than helping, in an actual relationship, it is likely that receiving empathy can start a deepening of social connections that could continue when the good times finally come.

By the same token, if showing empathy helps foster social connection, when you are the person who helps a friend during tough times, it will be your understanding that can begin to build a more sustainable relationship.

As a selfless act, showing empathy should have no “purpose.” Even so, being willing to listen to someone else’s heartache may become the basis for the kind of closeness that will deepen over time.

To sum up, borrowing from the observation that the German author team concluded with, as a “societal glue,” empathy would seem to be a pretty effective tool.