Men and women can't be just friends | Hacker News Reader

Men and women can't be just friends

scientificamerican.com

35 pointssperm38 comments

   researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab.

Ok, so this research has nothing to do with men or women - just horny near-adults.

I stopped reading at that point as well.

In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex.

There was a follow-up study, but it doesn't say how much, if any, of the original research was tried again.

This is what passes as science in 'scientific american'?! There's not a single absolute number reported aside from the laughingly small sample size of 400 adults in a world of 7,000,000,000.

How are you judging that that's a small sample size?

Given the claim in the title they talk about "men and women". So the sample size is small because:

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

If your bar is that high then you can say that about literally any study. What do you expect, a study involving a million people?!

The sample size is irrelevant, what people expect is to confirm what they already believe.

The paper is linked. Feel free to take a look[1].

1: http://bleske-rechek.com/April%20Website%20Files/Bleske-Rech...

A random sample of 400 is enough to give a good estimate, regardless of the size of the population.

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.)

I agree on the bigger question. I thought I was communicating the lack of random samples, but I appreciate you pointing out why just referencing the sample size is not good enough in a sense. Anyways, they practically required lack of randomness. Their sign-up took place at the same school and "requested that participants be traditional college students of heterosexual orientation". Then they obtained the older generation participants by getting the first group to hand over addresses of their older relatives, neighbors and employers. I don't think it could get much less random.

read on...

>> 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.

Yeah, but what was the age range they tested? If they're comparing 22 year-olds to 18 year-olds, they're still only covering a small range.

Accordingly, we aimed to compare the extent to which emerging adults (late adolescence to mid-twenties) and young and middle-aged adults (late twenties to about 50) experience attraction to their cross-sex friends

From the linked paper. That's for the follow-up study.

Also, 176 is not terribly many. You'd have to make extra sure you get a sample that represents people at large.

FYI, this is from 2012, The paper is under the link "New research"[1].

1: http://bleske-rechek.com/April%20Website%20Files/Bleske-Rech...

First off, this is too vague of a generalization based on their sample size. It makes for a nice casual read but I can't take it too seriously. Though, I must note, my anecdotal experience also makes me think this is more of a norm.

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.

Ya, I don't buy this. I know this is just my experience, but I've had plenty of "just friends" who were members of the opposite sex, and nothing bad ever happened.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her.

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.

Wow, that's sad.

"sad" is being naive about the relationship between men and women

Naive, as in having an adolescent conception of the relationship between men and women; that's sad.

Indeed.

That is so odd to me. Why would you pursue (platonic) relationships with men if there's no attraction? Are you only attracted to women? (I'm assumig you're male.)

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.

I am only sexually attracted to woman of course.

But at the same time I think men are generally more fun to be around. Woman are in some way 'less funny' on average.

Let say a particular woman is not sexually attractive to you but get along very well with you, would you still not interested to be friend with her?

Invalid premise. If not sexually attracted, they would not get along that well

We could get along just fine, professionally. I can get along just fine with many female colleagues at work. I am just not interested in keeping contact outside of the professional environment and neither in becoming friends, unless I am sexually attracted to a woman.

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 :)

I would recommend you do bother. Having a social life very enjoyable, even if we sometimes think it's not needed. Besides, you're not the only guy your wife is taking to, stop kidding yourself

I would say yours is invalid. I'm an asexual male and do seek friendship with both genders, more because of the need for seeking social interaction. And I do believe I do get along well with people even without second intentions.

I'm an Apache attack helicopter

>"I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her."

if that is the case, it doesn't sound like you are actually pursuing friendships

of course. because, generally speaking, men and women have very few shared interests or behaviors (and that's not sarcasm in case it wasn't clear)

Me either, although as mentioned elsewhere in the comments the ratios (male:female) were mentioned but not the magnitudes. Also they only applied to pairs of friends who were willing to attend a study like this together.

Personally, I have plenty female friends with whom I know there is no attraction.

Apparently the writer of the article can not comprehend the difference between attraction and action.

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.

Am I crazy or is their surprisingly little quantitative data? Are we talking a 5% effect or 80%?

Ah, the undergraduates. The most studied group in America!

About 1/2 of my friends are female. Over the years, I've had a few of my expressions of interest rejected. However, I've had quite a few female friends "give up because I didn't get the message they were interested". I've been abused, called stupid, asked if I was gay, etc by female friends who were interested in me. I once had to ask a mutual (female) friend what happened because I couldn't get a word out of one woman. "You can't be THAT dumb, can you?".

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.

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