Recommendation Letters: Do you know who your friends are?
Did you ever have a sneaking suspicion that someone you consider a friend doesn’t consider you a friend?
A recent study examining the reciprocity and directionality of friendships was published this past March. The premise of the study is that friendships are usually assumed to be reciprocal. If I think you are my friend then generally, you think of me as your friend. It was a small study of 84 undergraduate students that demonstrated a profound inability of people to perceive if their friendships go both ways. If I consider you a friend that does not necessarily mean you consider me a friend. In the study they discovered that although 94% of the time students expected the friendship to be reciprocal, it was only reciprocal 50% of the time.
What does this have to do with medical school admissions you may ask? Everything. Letters of recommendation can make or break an application. They are one of the only places in the application where the admission committee gets to find out what other people think of you.
This study emphasizes what I already suspected - we have difficulty perceiving what others think of us. You might be surprised to know that occasionally admissions committees receive negative letters of recommendation or just plain bland letters of recommendation - which are the equivalent of a negative letter. It is obvious that the applicant really did not know what the letter writer thought of them or they would not have asked them for a letter. Interestingly the researchers noted that there was a higher chance a friendship would not be reciprocated the larger the difference in hierarchical social status.
This reinforces the advice that when you are asking a professor, mentor or advisor for a letter of recommendation it is important to always ask, “Do you think you can write me a strong letter of recommendation in support of my candidacy for medical school?”. Always give the letter writer a way out since you don’t really know what they are thinking unless they tell you.
Almaatouq A, Radaelli L, Pentland A, Shmueli E (2016) Are You Your Friends’ Friend? Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Behavioral Change. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0151588. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151588
