Wishing our friends would take it seriously: What predicts concern about friends’ behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the ways in which social interactions happened. This is particularly true for valued social relationships such as friendships. Friendships provide many physical and mental health benefits, including buffering against loneliness during the pandemic, so contact and interactions with friends may have become more important during the pandemic. Additionally, an additional benefit of friendships is that they may have provided individuals with the ability to reduce their uncertainty and lower their risks during the pandemic. But, if individuals or their friends are not being careful about their risky behavior during this time, this could lead to conflict within these valued relationships. In this study, we investigated how COVID-19, demographics, and preferences for risk management influenced participants’ perceptions of their friendship during the pandemic. We found that participants who were more concerned about contracting COVID-19 and more likely to use risk retention reported having more conflict with their friends during the pandemic. These results suggest that there may be individual differences in risk tolerance of contracting COVID-19 and these differences fundamentally influence social relationships, loneliness, or social connectedness during the pandemic.