differenceblog, posts by tag: friendship - LiveJournal

Different people have different needs from their social networks, and many researchers have attempted to find gender-based patterns in these needs. Joyce Benenson (1990) found that boys had larger social networks than girls in 4th and 5th grades. Yeung et al (2007) found that women, but not men, who adhered less to traditional relationship roles, were happier with fewer close friends.

Cross and Madson (1997) suggest that men's need for independence (versus women's interdependence) leads them to have less social interaction. Responding to this article, Baumeister and Sommer (1997) suggest that the drive for independence leads men to associate in a larger, but no less important, social sphere.

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Last time we looked at social networks ("Social networks and depression", 4/17/07), I remarked that I'd noticed the closest bonds between men during my childhood. This caused me to think about my friends in this context. I see nearly equal division between men and women in the "organizers" -- the people who make get-togethers happen. One thing I don't see addressed in any of the articles cited today is the isolation that can accompany child-rearing. I tried to find what percentages of men and women worked outside the home. I haven't found an answer, but the search itself is enlightening. The phrase "work outside the home" refers specifically to women in the first 10 hits on Google.

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Keltner et al (1998) hypothesized that women would have more negative emotions associated with teasing than men, whether they were the aggressor or the target. While they tested this hypothesis only within heterosexual, college-aged romantic relationships, they did find support for this hypothesis, and also found that women were more upset by being teased by their partner than by teasing him. Keltner et al's 2001 meta-analysis suggests that the claim that friendly teasing is more prevalent among males is not supported.

Wirth and Schultheiss (2006) found that high-testosterone (for their sex group) people of both genders learned patterns more easily when associated with an "angry" face, leading to the conclusion that a fleeting "angry" expression is rewarding to these individuals. "Perhaps teasers are reinforced by that fleeting annoyed look on someone else’s face and therefore will continue to heckle that person to get that look again and again. As long as it does not stay there for long, it’s not perceived as a threat, but as a reward.” Schultheiss said in a University of Michigan press release.

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The difference in teasing -- and in accepting teasing without getting upset -- is one of the gender stereotypes that gets brought to my attention most often, and my experience has certainly played out that way. However, I feel that using romantically involved couples was a major weakness in Keltner's 1998 study. People react very differently to teasing from their partner than from a friend of any gender. However, I do think this is one of the areas in which individual differences far outweigh any gender patterns.

According to Kendler et al (2005), women usually report having more supportive social networks than men, but have higher rates of depression. In a study of over 1,000 pairs of male-female twins, Kendler et al found that women reported having a more supportive social network than did their twin brothers. Male and female twins did not show a significant difference in the amount of support received from their parents. Kendler et al found that social support was a better predictor of depression in women than in men.

Shih et al (2006) suggest that these differences begin with greater reactivity and exposure to social episodic stress as adolescent girls. Brugha et al (2005) found that small social networks (< 3) were especially detrimental to men. Piccinelli and Wilkinson's 2000 review points out that studies on social support and depression are inconsistent, with some showing advantages for women and some for men.

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I feel incredibly lucky to have the social support that I do. I spent most of my life very socially isolated, first by being in a rural community as part of an unpopular family, and later by being in a romantic relationship where outside friendships were discouraged. While women are supposed to be more affiliative than men, in my life, the most supportive friendships I've seen have been between men, in my father and his friends.

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men. Levesque et al also found that masculine women tended to sexualize opposite-sex interactions more than feminine women, but there were no differences between "masculine" and "feminine" men (rated using the BSRI).

Levesque et al did not provide the ages or recruitment methods of their participants, nor was I able to find this information about Abbey and Melby's experiments, although later studies by Abbey (e.g. 1987, 1995) use college student samples. Also, no studies seem to have been done to assess the level of sexual intent inferred by gay men and lesbians in same or opposite sex pairings.

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In my experience, men assume no one is hitting on them, and women assume everyone is hitting on them. Obviously, this is an oversimplification. I've known and dated guys who were supremely arrogant and women who were painfully self-conscious. However, I still found that the arrogance in men tended to translate to thinking they would get a positive response to flirtation, and the self-deprecating women assumed that the flirtation was non-serious, or sexual only. It's a self-fulfilling observation in my case. I tend to assume that no one is flirting with me because they see me as male, and wonder if they're seeing me as something else if they make their intentions known.

"Everyone knows" that men are either bad at intimacy (e.g. AZ Republic 2005), or define intimacy so much differently than women that it's not even the same concept (Elmore 2004). Salas and Ketzenberger (2004) found significant gender differences on average self-reported intimacy in same-sex relationships, but not in romantic relationships. Fehr (2004) found that men and women agree on the prototypical patterns that indicate intimacy (such as emotional support and self-disclosure) but women seem to place more importance on these factors than men do. Roy et al (2000) found equal levels of trust in men's and women's same-sex friendships, but found that women rated the importance of spending transitional periods together higher (both positive and negative events). Very few studies look at opposite-sex friendships, but Reeder (2003) gender role (masculinity or femininity) affects friend-gender-preference, but that this has no effect on friendship closeness.

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My partner notes that we have ended up with a largely male circle of friends lately. He has traditionally had more female friends than male friends. Strangely, I feel like I have more female friends than ever, but note that we don't actually spend much time in person together - we "hang out" online. In person, the guys show up more. I have theorized that this is because the two main social event types we hold are "game nights" and sports viewing, but I have yet to explain why women don't more consistently attend game nights.