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It’s often said that we’re all the average of the five people we spend the most time with. We humans have brains literally designed to reflect and adopt each other’s vibes, and if those vibes are off? Well, you can probably guess the impact it can have on your life, or you might have even experienced it. So, what should inform how we choose our friends? Psychology has some answers.

The way you should feel about your closest friends, according to psychology.

Part of the way we humans have survived as long as we have is through community and collaboration. I can’t fight off a tiger by myself, but if you and I join forces, you can create a diversion while I throw a spear, right? And key to forming those collaborative and communal bonds is a process psychologists, anthropologists, and others call mirroring.

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Basically, we take on and reflect back each other’s attitudes, feelings, beliefs, even physiological characteristics and speech patterns, in order to form more cohesive bonds. Scientists have found that both happiness and obesity are essentially contagious among social groups, for instance, in a process sometimes referred to as “the chameleon effect.”

You can probably already see where this is going: This mirroring can either be beneficial to us, or really, REALLY harmful. Or somewhere in between, of course.

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Scientists say admiration of your closest friends is key to beneficial social mirroring.

“We don’t just hang out with people, we become people,” podcaster and TikToker Taryn Arnold eloquently put it in a video on the subject. This is because, aside from the aforementioned evolutionary tendency to “chameleon” into each other, we also consider our closest people part of our sense of self.

This propensity and neurological bond is so strong, in fact, that studies have actually found it impacts our ability to distinguish our own faces from those of the people closest to us. Which sounds patently insane, but a 2018 study found this to be true.

Scientists gave subjects a test in which they were shown pictures of themselves and close relations, and then pictures of themselves and celebrities like Reese Witherspoon. They had to press a button as fast as possible to indicate whether the picture was their own face or a celebrity’s. Their response time with the photos of their close friends was much slower than with the celebrities.

Which underlines the point Arnold made in her video: If you don’t admire your friends, you might be setting yourself up to meld with people and dynamics that don’t really serve you. As she put it, “If you don’t look around at your friends and go, I admire you so much, I don’t just like you, I want to be more like you, You should.”

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This ‘chameleon effect’ also begins before we’re adults, during adolescence.

It turns out your parents were right about worrying you were “running with the wrong crowd” or spending too much time with that weird girl from school. Scientists have found that we not only mirror each other in these key ways, but it’s part of how we actually build our adult personalities during adolescence.

During adolescence, we are figuring out and adopting what we think it means to be an adult, and an adult version of ourselves. Studies have found that we look to our peers for context on how to define this.

Polina Tankilvitch | Pexels

They’ve also found this to be part of how we differentiate ourselves from each other, and why, even when we have similar backgrounds, we tend to emerge as unique people. It’s almost as if we collect a set of descriptors of our friends, and then pick and choose which attributes we want to take on board our own adult identities.

It’s a good reminder that we’re not just “known by the company we keep,” but we kind of end up BEING the company we keep. That can be helpful in not only deciding which relationships in our lives may have run their course, but also the ones that help us be better. As Arnold eloquently put it, we should all take a moment to “thank them for what they’re teaching you without even knowing it.”

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.