This article asks about the types of friendships people prefer across cultures, focusing on closeness and endurance. The authors hypothesize that people generally favor close and enduring friendships, especially when seeking support and social input, while those with self-serving or mate-seeking goals may prefer casual and convenient ones. Using data from 6,224 participants across 12 countries, they find that most people prefer close and enduring friendships, and that preferences largely align with actual friendships. Results also show small but significant effects of Dark Triad traits—particularly Machiavellianism—on friendship preferences. The conclusion is that friendship preferences are broadly consistent across cultures but shaped by individual goals and personality.

Lullabies are often touted as universal to all human cultures, regardless of time and place. In order to test this axiom, this article examines all 186 societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and codes them for the presence or absence of lullabies. The result ultimately hinges on the meaning of the word “lullaby”: when lullabies were defined as a strict and culturally conserved repertoire of songs sung to soothe infants, they were found to be neither a statistical nor even a “near” universal. However, when lullabies were defined as any type of singing used to soothe children, they were a near universal, with 96.8% of societies in the sample coded as having lullabies.