Men and women can't be just friends(scientificamerican.com) |
Men and women can't be just friends(scientificamerican.com) |
researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab.
>> Males were significantly more likely than females to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, and this discrepancy increased as men aged—males on the younger end of the spectrum were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, whereas those on the older end of the spectrum were ten times more likely to do the same.
There was a follow-up study, but it doesn't say how much, if any, of the original research was tried again.
1: http://bleske-rechek.com/April%20Website%20Files/Bleske-Rech...
This also agrees with observed primate behaviors. Males have an incentive to identify potential mates while female have incentive to pick one out of the many available. (Male can impregnate many females in a year, female can only bear one child at a time.)
Friendship and romance also have overlapping characteristics. Example: "bromance" where it's not sexual but outsiders might see characters typically associated with romance.
It's too big of a topic and I would probably write an essay.
I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.
Or are you talking about sexual attraction? Do you view women as only sexual? I am simply trying to figure out what men provide that women can or do not.
Personally (as a man) I can't make heads or tails out of how to interact with other men outside of work; I am precisely the opposite of you.
if that is the case, it doesn't sound like you are actually pursuing friendships
Personally, I have plenty female friends with whom I know there is no attraction.
I can find someone attractive without trying to have sex with them. Men and women can be "just friends", and this is not incompatible with "men are more likely to find friends sexually attractive."
Whether this is due to biology, sociology, culture, or space aliens is anyone's guess.
I call bs on this one. I've had too many instances of being explicitly hit on (about 1 in 3 of good female friends at a guess) to believe the "women aren't attracted to male friends".
However, I have plenty of female friends who I just like because they are amazing people.
From the linked paper. That's for the follow-up study.
But at the same time I think men are generally more fun to be around. Woman are in some way 'less funny' on average.
But now I have a wife and a baby, so I will not bother with other female relationships anyway. I like to keep things simple in life :)
This is a non-intuitive result from statistics. The standard deviation - the average expected error - does not actually depend on the population size. It could be 7 billion or 7 hundred. The standard deviation only depends on the sample size, and is O(1/sqrt(n)).
In this case, with n=400, we have O(0.05). If we are testing a random variable with two values, then the true deviation is less than 0.5, so the expected error is 0.025 - we expect no more than 2.5% of mistake. That's very good!
(The bigger question is whether the sample is random or not.)
1) zero variance in location
2) very little variance in age (all undergraduate) (variances of the ages: 1.33 to 7.19, so 70% of their samples all were in two age ranges, one 3 year wide, one 14 year wide)
3) cultural variation : essentially zero (?) they didn't even bother to check AFAICT
1: http://bleske-rechek.com/April%20Website%20Files/Bleske-Rech...