In the News (Tel Aviv University ): “Most of us think that friendship is a two-way street — but that’s true only half the time, according to research from Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Their new joint study says only half of your buddies would consider you their own friend. People have a very poor perception of friendship ties, and this limits their ability to influence their “friends,” according to the research, published in PLoS One on March 22, 2016. …

“‘It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,’ says Dr. Erez Shmueli, who conducted the study with Dr. Laura Radaelli, both of TAU’s Department of Industrial Engineering, in collaboration with Prof. Alex Pentland and Abdullah Almatouq of MIT. ‘And our difficulty determining the reciprocity of friendship significantly limits our ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. We learned that we can’t rely on our instincts or intuition. There must be an objective way to measure these relationships and quantify their impact.’

“The researchers conducted extensive social experiments and analyzed the data from other studies to determine the percentage of reciprocal friendships and their impact on human behavior. The team also examined six friendship surveys from some 600 students in Israel, Europe and the United States to assess friendship levels and expectations of reciprocity.

“They then developed an algorithm that examines several objective features of a perceived friendship (that is, the number of common friends or the total number of friends) and is able to distinguish between the two different kinds of friendship: unidirectional or reciprocal.

‘” Dr. Shmueli says. ‘If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case — only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.’

“Why is this important? According to Dr. Shmueli, influence is the name of the game.

“’Reciprocal relationships are important because of social influence,’ says Dr. Shmueli, who utilized the ‘FunFit’ social experiment in the course of the research. ‘In this experiment that analyzes different incentives for exercising, we found that friendship pressure far outweighed money in terms of motivation. We found, not surprisingly, that those pressured by reciprocal friends exercised more and enjoyed greater progress than those with unilateral friendship ties.’”

My Comment: Indeed, we only see ourselves reflected in our environment. Therefore, we need to fix this some how.. On the one hand, we see an incorrect and absolutely false world. On the other hand, we don’t want to correct the incorrect mutual relationships between us, even though it is possible to correct them.

Question: At what point would there be correct assessment of reciprocal friendship?

Answer: This would be when all of us begin to work for closeness between us, without any connection to what is happening between us. This would be when our goal becomes connection between us in the center of the circle in order to attain the next level of development, to rise to the next level of nature, of creation, of formation. Then, we would no longer have any problems.

Question: This is very difficult for people.

Answer: No, we can do this as a “guided tour” on a spiritual roller coaster, and this will be a joy. This is wild spiritual fun. I recommend this to you!

Question: Even the researchers concluded that friendship is a stronger motivation than money. So, the most useful method for attaining results in every area is to perform work together with friends.

Answer: This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks about. It is up to us to work together for the sake of unity. Then, we would have everything, including money, undoubtedly! This is because the upper force that manages everything in our world, including the regulation of all of our commercial problems, only comes down to a place where unity exists.

Question: Does this mean that everything I have will be enough for me?

Answer: Even more than that.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 5/11/16

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