Reply to Völker et al.: On the evidence of increased close friendships in societies

Commentators on ref. 1 argue that a rapid and strong social connectivity increase is not supported by data (2).Their critique focuses on data presented in Fig. 1E (1).To find out if close friendship ties, strong enough to aect the opinions of friends, increase over time, we compiled available surveys that meet carefully chosen selection criteria, specified in SI Appendix (1).The commentators present datasets that do not match these criteria to conclude that our results are unsupported.We discuss this problematic reasoning along with their arguments.