Did we just become best friends

If only friendship were as easy as Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly found it to be in the 2008 comedy "Step Brothers," where their agreement on three random favorite things - velociraptors, "Good Housekeeping" magazine and John Stamos - transformed them into instant besties.

Unfortunately for most of us, including the scientists who study it, friendship can be very complex.

"In this field, a big difficulty is that we don't even have the language to fully talk about every aspect of friendship yet," said Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of psychology. "For example, what do you even call the stages of making friends? We don't really talk about 'friend attraction,' 'friend flirting' or 'friend dating.'"

As principal investigator of the UCLA Social Minds Lab and director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, Krems studies the challenges and opportunities inherent in finding, deepening, keeping and even losing friendships. Her goal is to better understand every aspect of how friendship works to help as many people as possible reap its benefits.

In 2027, she's also planning for UCLA to host the world's first-ever conference on adult friendship.

"I want to get more people talking about friendship and research, and I'm lucky to have found so many folks here at UCLA and beyond who are truly interested in this topic," she said. "I'm excited for people to think and care more about friendship - and maybe help us do more work on it."

► VIDEO: Jamie Krems on the importance of federal funding for research.

Below, Krems answers our questions about friendship and her research.

Why is friendship important?

There are so many benefits to friendship that really, as researchers, we're only starting to realize in the last decade. Here are a few interesting facts:

• A major meta-analysis suggested having friends is as good for your health as quitting smoking. Or a different way to put it: not having friends is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day - it has the same negative health impacts.
• Data shows having certain friends can increase economic mobility and be an engine of change and good in people's lives.
• Romantic partners aside, when Swedish men have friendships, they're less likely to have heart attacks.
• There's some work that suggests that when women feel really supported, they recover more quickly from breast cancer surgery.
• In non-human animal work, we have an even clearer picture of friendship's relationship to fitness. For example, in several non-human primates, like capuchins and baboons, females who have a few close friends are more likely to have offspring, and those offspring are more likely to survive.

We don't quite know what the mechanism is, but it is so clear that friendship benefits us on every level.

What directions were you exploring before you found science?

I grew up in Philadelphia, and I studied classics and classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Bryn Mawr. I worked at the Penn Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology and played poker to make money. (My dad played blackjack for a living before I was born; he's a really cool dude.) My favorite poker player is (actress) Jennifer Tilly. She was also on the most recent "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" - she always has snacks, and she thanks her ex-husband, who gave her all his money from "The Simpsons." She's a bit of an idol of mine.

After I read some books by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins about how the mind works, I decided to get my master's at the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked in an evolutionary psychology lab. And around that time, I lost two of my best female friends. They ended up having this two-hour direct messaging conversation exclusively about how much they hated me. It took me a very long time to realize there's a lot of jealousy and competition in friendships, because when we talk about friendships - which is rarely - we only talk about their positives, but there's an underbelly too. People compete for friends: I want my friend to like me better than they like you.

What are some highlights of your work?

I collaborate with Dan Conroy-Beam's lab at UC Santa Barbara, which does computational work on human mating preferences - how do we amalgamate all of our mate preferences and actually choose someone? Basically, you have a distance in space between, "A person would like their partner to be (actor) Charlie Hunnam" and "This is that person's actual partner, who is significantly not Charlie Hunnam." (Sorry, I've been watching "Sons of Anarchy" again; it's a great friendship show.)

Dan's new algorithms, including a resource allocation model, help us figure out how couples become couples or, in our case, could potentially show how best friends become best friends. With Dan's lab and his grad student Ashley Coventry, we hope to test if we could prospectively and successfully pair people to become new best friends.

Think of what we could potentially use this to do. We could take people in their very first year of college, pair them up and make them friends, which ideally will not only make them happier, healthier, longer-lived, but they'll probably have higher GPAs and be more likely to stay in school, to graduate and to graduate on time.

If the short-term goal of my career is to have more people talking about, researching and valuing friendship more - at least as much as we do for mating relationships - the longer-term goal would be to understand friendship so well that we could create a robot to do it. If we can do that, we can help people "solve" friendship!

Who's the most memorable friend in pop culture?

A lot of women have told me that they want a friendship like Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) has with Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) on "Grey's Anatomy." I think Cristina Yang is the ultimate friendship crush; she has this great quote about what it means to be a best friend: "She's my person. If I murdered someone, she's the person I'd call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor."

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