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Category: Project

Description: Humans form and maintain friendships across long distances who can provide access to non-local resources and support against large shocks that affect the entire local community. However, long-distance friends may be less likely to reciprocate help than close-distance friends because monitoring for defection is more difficult at greater distances, and thus help between long-distance friends may be more explicitly contingent than between close-distance friends. We interviewed 918 fishery users from 21 coastal villages in Tanzania about whether they had received help in the form of a gift or loan from a friend living in their village and a friend living in a neighboring village. As there are local expectations that loans will be repaid but gifts will not, we predicted that close-distance friends would be more likely to help with gifts, whereas long-distance friends would be more likely to help with loans. Contrary to our predictions, gifts and loans between close- and long-distance friends were similar in kind and amount, though close-distance friends provided more help frequently, possibly because they meet more frequently and belong to the same religious congregation. These results indicate that long-distance friends are an important, and likely robust, strategy for managing risk in high-variance environments.