The When Harry Met Sally research effect
is alive and well in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationship.
A new study, Benefit
of burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship (PDF),
presents a study’s findings on heterosexual men and women’s experiences with
cross-sex “platonic” friendships.
But doesn’t it seem like sociological researchers
are always asking this question? They
are, and this time their answer is yes, platonic friendships are possible
if you’re a woman. But since a platonic male-female friendship requires both a
man and a woman, it seems their real answer is no.
The main study highlighted in the Scientific
American’s coverage of the research is one performed, not
surprisingly, on a college campus. Researchers brought in 88 pairs of
opposite-sex friends, separated them, then asked each participant questions
about their physical and romantic attraction to their friend and their
perception of how attracted their friend was to them. They used a 9 point
rating scale: 1 (not at all attracted), 5 (moderately attracted), and 9
(extremely attracted).
The full-text article, not some annoying abstract
or hyped-up press release, is available
online, which meant I actually looked at the numbers. The results of the
study aren’t especially surprising, but they are sort of funny. Men were more
likely to express sexual or physical attraction for their friend. Women tended
to view their male friends as, well, friends.
If you actually read the data, the differences
are statistically significant, but not insanely different. Men’s self-reported
attraction to their friend was a mean 4.94, while the mean for women was 3.97. Additionally, men tended believe that their female friends were more attracted
to them (mean 4.54) than they were. Whereas women tended to believe that their
male friends weren’t as physically attracted to them as they actually,
statistically, were (mean 4.25). Both sexes apparently projected their own
feelings of attraction onto their friend: women weren’t as attracted to their
male friends and thus they thought their male friends probably weren’t into
them either.
Though importantly, the men were more likely to
think their friend wanted to date them (a separate category from physical/sexual
attraction) than to actually want to date their lady friend themselves. When
the opposite-sex friend was already involved in a romantic relationship, women
were less likely to be sexually attracted to that friend and much less likely
to want to date them. However, when the woman was already partnered, men were
more likely to be sexually attracted to them and to want to date them, as
compared to the uncoupled women. Men, y’all conniving. More revelations after the cut....
