Facebook study reveals users 'trophy friends' - Telegraph
When you're only given the binary decision of "yes or no" to define "friend," it's going to force you to tip towards saying "yes" After all, most of the time someone has to be your friend in order to communicate with them on these social networking sites. If you have the slightest inclincation to communicate with someone who seems interesting, on the surface, are you going to wait and see or give it a shot?
Friends, buddies, favorites - these are all examples of valuation. Valuation falls into the realm of the Feeling function. At the base of the Feeling function is the value judgment dichotomy of "good" and "bad" - you can either have a personal good/bad judgment (which would be Fi - Introverted Feeling) or a societal one (which would be Extraverted Feeling, or Fe)
So when one comes to an person, place, thing, event, idea or quality, when we use our Feeling function, we evaluate it terms of good or bad. So let's simplify the process - instead of adding or not adding someone, just give them a green light or a red light, a plus or a minus. We can even expand it a little and use a likert scale of 1-5 on both sides of good and bad.
Eventually it can also be expanded to a full 100 point spread. Either way, we need to get away from the Thinking dichotomy of "yes/no" and start thinking in terms of the Feeling dichotomy of "good/bad" - after all, socializing is the realm of the Feeling function, not the Thinking function.
