People in Finland are more likely to receive intensive childcare assistance from siblings than from friends, but they are also more likely to receive practical day-to-day help from friends, according to a study published in 2016. evolution and human behavior.
Why do people help each other? Does it matter whether the person in need is a family member or a friend? Inclusive fitness theory predicts that people should be especially likely to help genetic relatives. By doing so, we can indirectly support the survival and reproduction of shared genes. Previous research often supports this idea, showing that people tend to direct more altruistic feelings toward biologically close relatives than toward distant relatives, stepparents, or unrelated individuals. At the same time, some studies have found that friends can receive as much or more help than relatives, depending on the type of help studied.
Antti O. Tanskanen and colleagues examined this question, focusing on the actual help people report receiving from their biological siblings and friends. This distinction is important. That’s because siblings share on average about half of their genes, while friends typically share no genetic relatedness. The authors were particularly interested in whether the type and cost of support mattered.
Child care assistance may be particularly meaningful from an evolutionary perspective because it can directly support the reproductive success of kin, whereas practical and financial assistance may be shaped by daily needs, availability, and social intimacy. Therefore, the researchers expected that childcare assistance would be more common from siblings than from friends. Although they expected that practical and financial help might be more evenly distributed, they still receive slightly more help from siblings.
This study used population-based survey data from the Finnish Intergenerational Transmission project, which collects information on social support between kin and non-kin, as well as sociodemographic information. The survey was collected by Statistics Finland in autumn 2018 and initially targeted 1,945 young and middle-aged Finnish adults. Participants could complete the survey online or using a paper-and-pencil survey, and nearly 80% completed the survey online. At the time of data collection, participants ranged in age from 19 to 56 years.
For the current study, the researchers included only participants who had at least one living full sibling and one living friend and had complete data on the study variables. This resulted in a final sample of 1,254 adults.
Participants reported whether they had received three types of assistance in the past 12 months: practical assistance, financial assistance, and childcare assistance. Each form of help was coded as received or not using a scale of 0 = no, 1 = yes. For siblings, participants can report support received from up to four older full siblings. If there was more than one sibling, the researchers selected the sibling from which the participant received the most of a particular type of help.
Regarding friends, participants answered parallel questions about the friend who received the most help. Practical assistance and financial support were sought for all eligible participants, while childcare assistance was sought only for participants with at least one child under 13 years of age.
The final analysis included 1,226 observations from 613 individuals regarding childcare support and 2,508 observations from 1,254 individuals regarding practical and financial support. The researchers also considered the participants’ gender, age, education, financial status, partnership status, number of children, number of siblings, and number of close friends.
The results show that the source of aid is highly dependent on the type of aid. Participants were more likely to receive childcare assistance from siblings than from friends, with predicted probabilities of 36.7% for friends and 45.5% for siblings. This supported the authors’ prediction that childcare, as a demanding form of support related to physical fitness, would be more likely to be obtained from close relatives.
Financial support was also slightly more likely to come from siblings than from friends, with predicted probabilities of 4.5% versus 3.4%, but this difference was not statistically significant. The authors noted that overall financial support was rare in this Finnish sample.
In actual support, the pattern was different. Participants were more likely to receive practical help from friends than from siblings, with predicted probabilities of 45.1% for siblings and 58.3% for friends. This finding suggests that low-cost or more routine forms of support are often provided by friends, perhaps because they live nearby or daily assistance may be more readily available.
When examining gender differences, the researchers found no significant gender differences in sibling versus friend patterns of childcare or financial support. However, both men and women were more likely than men to receive help with childcare from friends and siblings.
Practical help also differed by gender, with both women and men more likely to receive practical help from friends than siblings, but men in particular were more likely to receive practical help from friends. The authors suggested that this may reflect broader differences in how male and female friendships are often organized, with men’s friendships potentially being more centered around working together.
An important limitation is that the authors had no control over the characteristics of the specific siblings and friends included in the analysis. In particular, we were unable to account for geographic distance, even though proximity can have a significant impact on whether someone is available to provide practical assistance. Previous research has shown that friends typically live closer to each other than siblings.
Overall, the findings suggest that while siblings may be a particularly important source of more expensive family-related support, friends may play a greater role in day-to-day practical support.
The study, “Altruism among siblings and friends in a modern affluent population,” was authored by Antti O. Tanskanen, Mirkka Danielsbacka, and Robin IM Dunbar.
