Friends Foresee Your Death Better Than You, Study

Friends read us best, especially our "potentially fatal habits". A recent study shows that friends can foresee when we would die and whether we would fall ill or not, as most of us would be blind to ourselves!

The study published in the journal Psychological Science, called 'Your Friends Know When You're Going to Die', probed 300 couples starting from their 20s upto their deaths. The study, conducted by researchers from Washington University in St Louis, started in the 1930s.

The questionnaire asked couples about themselves, and then posed the same questions to friends. Some of them included queries on their friends' lifespans.

They found that our friends could be better predictors of our own lifespans than we can, because they could get insights into our personalities as we cannot.

"First, friends may see something that you miss; they may have some insight that you do not. Second, because people have multiple friends, we are able to average the idiosyncrasies of any one friend to obtain a more reliable assessment of personality," said Dr. Joshua Jackson, one of the lead researchers, according to rt.com.

When a man is viewed as "reliable, conscientious, and imaginative" by friends, he ends up living longer. This is mainly because such positive personality traits would help people to stick to issues such as "eating well, regular exercise, and looking after themselves".

Men who are less disciplined tend to take more risks such as smoking, drinking and driving without a seatbelt.

Emotionally stable women who stave off "anger, depression, and anxiety, and are better suited to being an easygoing wife" also enjoy longer lifespans.

"Our study shows that people are able to observe and rate a person's personality accurately enough to predict early mortality decades down the road. It suggests that people are able to see important characteristics related to health, even when their friends were, in the most part, healthy and years from death," said Dr. Jackson. "It demonstrates that information from friends and other observers can play a critical role in understanding a person's health issues," he added.

The healthier people are those who are "outgoing, hardworking, organized, and relaxed". Such people do not suffer from serious health conditions like strokes, heart conditions, or arthritis, according to theguardian.com.