Sex differences in friendship preferences

Friendships can help us solve a number of challenges, increasing our welfare and fitness. Across evolutionary time, some of the many challenges that friendships helped to solve may have differed between men and women. By considering the specific and potentially distinct recurrent problems men's and women's friendships helped them solve, we can derive predictions about the qualities that would have made men's and women's same-sex friends ideal partners. This logic leads to several predictions about the specific friend preferences that may be differentially prized by men and women. Across three studies (N = 745) with U.S. participants—assessing ideal hypothetical friends, actual friends, and using a paradigm adapted from behavioral economics—we find that men, compared to women, more highly value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, and afford access to potential mates. In contrast, women, compared to men, more highly value friends who provide emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information. Findings suggest that the specific friendship qualities men and women preferred differed by sex in ways consistent with a functional account of friendship.     

Journeys of patronage: moral economies of transactional sex,kinship, and female migration from Mozambique to Europe

The article explores how young Mozambican women's migratory trajectories towards Europe are shaped by sexual relationships with older white men and obligations towards female kin. Triads of exchange between young women known as curtidoras (women enjoying life) and their partners and kin in Maputo are understood through theories of patronage and exchange moralities. Searching for respect, adventure, and consumption in the sexual economy, young women at the same time struggle to ensure their families' well‐being by redistributing the money they extract from white men. Sexual‐monetary transactions, love, and desire must be understood as part of broader moralities of exchange in which migration to Europe and sending of remittances is also a kinship project. The forms of patronage available in Maputo's sexual economy become stepping stones as well as obstacles to migration northwards.     

Disabling violence: intellectual disability and the limits of ethical engagement

Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in the same relationship when caregivers pursue reciprocal friendships with those they support. What happens to this ethical project when those with intellectual disabilities are violent to their caregivers? Trying to pursue intimate engagement in this context has the unexpected result of creating distrustful and tense relationships, which raises questions not only about why this ethical project goes so wrong, but also about what it would mean for it to go right: that is, what a richer and fully positive reciprocity between limited and complex human beings would actually look like in practice.     

Attractiveness and Rivalry in Women’s Friendships with Women

Past research suggests that young women perceive their same-sex friends as both facilitating the pursuit of desirable mates and competing for access to desirable mates. We propose that similar levels of physical attractiveness between young adult female friends might be one explanation for the opposing forces in their friendships. Forty-six female friendship pairs completed questionnaires about themselves, their friend, and their friendship; in addition, each woman’s picture was rated by a set of nine naive judges. Friends were similar in both self-rated and other-rated level of attractiveness. Within-pair analyses revealed that women agreed on which friend was more attractive, and the less attractive members of each friendship pair (by pair consensus as well as outside judges’ ratings) perceived more mating rivalry in their friendship than did the more attractive members of each friendship pair. We offer directions for research on women’s friendships over the lifespan.     

Down deep in the holler: chasing seeds and stories in southern Appalachia

This essay, which is the third in the series “Recollections, Reflections, and Revelations: Ethnobiologists and their First Time in the Field”, is a personal reflection by the researcher on his experience and involvement in kinship and friendship networks while conducting agrobiodiversity research in southern Appalachia, USA. Vignettes are given from moving moments spent with Native spiritual leaders, backcountry mountain people, and local co-collaborators in the research process. The author demonstrates how lasting field friendships have helped lead to groundbreaking ethnoecological research.     

Generation,ethnic and religious diversity in friendship choice: exploring interethnic close ties in Britain

Abstract

Interethnic friendships can reflect intergroup relations and immigrants' integration into host societies. Using pooled 2007–09 Citizenship Surveys, this study investigates interethnic friendship patterns and determinants of friendship choice in Britain. The paper focuses on generational, ethnic and religious diversity in forming interethnic close ties. The most common friendship pattern is having co-ethnic close friends. This ethnic boundary in interethnic ties, however, weakens across generations whereby those born in or migrated to Britain at young ages have a higher chance of having close friends from other ethnic groups. We find that interethnic friendships are formed in a ‘pan-ethnic’ pattern by which those with similar ethnic/racial and religious background such as Muslim Indians and Pakistanis, or mixed white and black Caribbean and black Caribbean, are more likely to nominate one another as close friends.     

Surfies versus Westies: Kinship,Mateship and Sexuality in the Cronulla Riot

In the predominantly affluent and Anglo Sutherland Shire in southern suburban Sydney, neighbourhood and extended kinship ties continue to exert powerful forces shaping local identities. During the riot of 11 December 2005 these identities were brought into relief by being pitted against the Lebanese immigrant youth who have been spatially and morally separated from Anglo‐Australians. I argue that the strong homosociality exhibited in several different contexts by young Anglo‐Australian men (the barbecue area, a sports team's ‘gang bang’, the violent defence of a neighbourhood controlled beach) and young Lebanese Australian men (paternal cousin and fraternal solidarities, an infamous series of gang rapes, their response to the White riot at Cronulla) are forms of separation that produce particular kinds of male sexual, class and ethnic subjects. I propose that a study of the role of kinship and cohort relationships in Anglo‐Australian and Lebanese‐Australian male groups should include the nature of incestophobia as an essential component of the precipitating fantasies leading to the riot and the subsequent retaliation.     

Friendship,bitching, and the making of ethical selves: what it means to be a good friend among girls in a London school

This article explores the relationship between friendship, personhood, and ethics among girls in a London school. While a Western ideal of friendship is posited as a personal, private, and spontaneous relationship between autonomous individuals, I argue that girls’ friendships are a complex entanglement and interaction between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Girls’ ideals of friendship, and practices of making friends, suggest forensic pre‐constituted selves acting with volition in order to become closer to other selves. However, bitching, exclusion, and breaking friendships foreground mimetic dimensions as girls shape each other and themselves according to gendered ethical criteria. Examining these analytical strands offers insight into how individuality is produced through sociality in everyday life.     

Twins and friendship.

A growing body of literature asserts the importance of friendships for a child's emotional wellbeing, behavioural adjustment and developmental attainment. However, few studies have examined friendships in the twin situation. This paper examines the literature on friendships among children who are twins and asks two questions: (1) What are the implications of the twin situation for friendship formation? (2) How can the twin situation inform theoretical knowledge concerning friendship formation in the general population? The discussion examines the implications of the twin situation for the size and nature of twin children's friendship pool and questions whether children who are twins are more likely to be adaptive or maladaptive in their social behaviour. The paper argues for the need to study the process and mechanisms in friendship formation among twin children because the findings might inform not only studies of friendship but also behavioural genetic research.     

Individual contributions to babysitting in a cooperative mongoose, Suricata suricatta

Evolutionary explanations of cooperative breeding based on kin selection have predicted that the individual contributions made by different helpers to rearing young should be correlated with their degree of kinship to the litter or brood they are raising. In the cooperative mongoose or meerkat, Suricata suricatta, helpers babysit pups at the natal burrow for the first month of pup life and frequent babysitters suffer substantial weight losses over the period of babysitting. Large differences in contributions exist between helpers, which are correlated with their age, sex and weight but not with their kinship to the young they are raising. Provision of food to some group members raises the contributions of individuals to babysitting. We discuss the implications of these results for evolutionary explanations of cooperative behaviour.     

Obesity and social marginalization: When do organized activities promote or hinder peer relationships?

Overweight youth are often socially marginalized and have fewer friends than their nonoverweight peers. Participation in organized activities may be one way to promote friendships for overweight youth. In this study, we used a large nationally representative sample to test whether two aspects of participation promoted friendships, namely the number of activities and the social acceptance of activity co-participants. In contradiction to our hypotheses, participating in activities with high socially accepted peers was associated with significantly fewer friendships over time for overweight adolescents. Conversely, there were small differences between overweight and nonoverweight adolescents’ friendships when they participated in activities with low socially accepted co-participants. Our findings provide new insight that activities may not be universally beneficial for overweight adolescents’ peer relationships. We discuss the various peer mechanisms that explain why certain types of activities predict these friendship patterns for overweight youth.     

The Pet Factor - Companion Animals as a Conduit for Getting to Know People,Friendship Formation and Social Support

Background

While companion animals have been previously identified as a direct source of companionship and support to their owners, their role as a catalyst for friendship formation or social support networks among humans has received little attention. This study investigated the indirect role of pets as facilitators for three dimensions of social relatedness; getting to know people, friendship formation and social support networks.

Methods

A telephone survey of randomly selected residents in four cities, one in Australia (Perth; n = 704) and three in the U.S. (San Diego, n = 690; Portland, n = 634; Nashville, n = 664) was conducted. All participants were asked about getting to know people within their neighborhood. Pet owners were asked additional questions about the type/s of pet/s they owned, whether they had formed friendships as a result of their pet, and if they had received any of four different types of social support from the people they met through their pet.

Results

Pet owners were significantly more likely to get to know people in their neighborhood than non-pet owners (OR 1.61; 95%CI: 1.30, 1.99). When analyzed by site, this relationship was significant for Perth, San Diego and Nashville. Among pet owners, dog owners in the three U.S. cities (but not Perth) were significantly more likely than owners of other types of pets to regard people whom they met through their pet as a friend (OR 2.59; 95%CI: 1.94, 3.46). Around 40% of pet owners reported receiving one or more types of social support (i.e. emotional, informational, appraisal, instrumental) via people they met through their pet.

Conclusion

This research suggests companion animals can be a catalyst for several dimensions of human social relationships in neighborhood settings, ranging from incidental social interaction and getting to know people, through to formation of new friendships. For many pet owners, their pets also facilitated relationships from which they derived tangible forms of social support, both of a practical and emotionally supportive nature. Given growing evidence for social isolation as a risk factor for mental health, and, conversely, friendships and social support as protective factors for individual and community well-being, pets may be an important factor in developing healthy neighborhoods.     

It's the attention that counts: interpersonal attention fosters intimacy and social exchange

Human friendship poses an evolutionary puzzle, since people behave more generously toward their friends than the tit-for-tat strategy stipulates. A possible explanation is that people selectively behave in a generous manner toward their true friends, but not toward fair-weather friends. Social psychological studies have suggested that people use a partner's attentiveness toward them as a cue to distinguish these two types of friends. Accordingly, it was hypothesized that people would increase their intimacy with a partner who was attentive to them. This hypothesis was tested by disentangling the frequent confounding between a partner's attention and the benefits provided by the attentive partner in two scenario experiments (studies 1a and 1b) and three laboratory experiments (studies 2a to 2c). In study 1, a partner's attentiveness was manipulated independently of the benefit provided by the partner. In study 2, the partner's attention was experimentally dissociated from any potential benefit. These studies consistently showed that the participants increased their intimacy with a partner when they received attention from the partner. This result implies that models of the evolution of friendship must incorporate information exchange regarding the valuation of the relationship, as well as the exchange of fitness-related costs and benefits.     

Sex (similarities and) differences in friendship jealousy

Friendships provide material benefits, bolster health, and may help solve adaptive challenges. However, a recurrent obstacle to sustaining those friendships—and thus enjoying many friendship-mediated fitness benefits—is interference from other people. Friendship jealousy may be well-designed for helping both men and women meet the recurrent, adaptive challenge of retaining friends in the face of such third-party interference. Although we thus expect several sex similarities in the general cognitive architecture of friendship jealousy (e.g., it is attuned to friend value), there are also sex differences in friendship structures and historical functions, which might influence the inputs of friendship jealousy (e.g., the value of any one friendship). If so, we should also expect some sex differences in friendship jealousy. Findings from a reanalysis of previously-published data and a new experiment, including both U.S. student and adult community participants (N = 993), provide initial support for three predicted sex differences: women (versus men) report greater friendship jealousy at the prospective loss of best friends to others, men (versus women) report greater friendship jealousy at the prospective loss of acquaintances to others, and men's (but not women's) friendship jealousy is enhanced in the context of intergroup contests.     

Contact Patterns in a High School: A Comparison between Data Collected Using Wearable Sensors,Contact Diaries and Friendship Surveys

Given their importance in shaping social networks and determining how information or transmissible diseases propagate in a population, interactions between individuals are the subject of many data collection efforts. To this aim, different methods are commonly used, ranging from diaries and surveys to decentralised infrastructures based on wearable sensors. These methods have each advantages and limitations but are rarely compared in a given setting. Moreover, as surveys targeting friendship relations might suffer less from memory biases than contact diaries, it is interesting to explore how actual contact patterns occurring in day-to-day life compare with friendship relations and with online social links. Here we make progresses in these directions by leveraging data collected in a French high school and concerning (i) face-to-face contacts measured by two concurrent methods, namely wearable sensors and contact diaries, (ii) self-reported friendship surveys, and (iii) online social links. We compare the resulting data sets and find that most short contacts are not reported in diaries while long contacts have a large reporting probability, and that the durations of contacts tend to be overestimated in the diaries. Moreover, measured contacts corresponding to reported friendship can have durations of any length but all long contacts do correspond to a reported friendship. On the contrary, online links that are not also reported in the friendship survey correspond to short face-to-face contacts, highlighting the difference of nature between reported friendships and online links. Diaries and surveys suffer moreover from a low sampling rate, as many students did not fill them, showing that the sensor-based platform had a higher acceptability. We also show that, despite the biases of diaries and surveys, the overall structure of the contact network, as quantified by the mixing patterns between classes, is correctly captured by both networks of self-reported contacts and of friendships, and we investigate the correlations between the number of neighbors of individuals in the three networks. Overall, diaries and surveys tend to yield a correct picture of the global structural organization of the contact network, albeit with much less links, and give access to a sort of backbone of the contact network corresponding to the strongest links, i.e., the contacts of longest cumulative durations.     

Mating patterns,mate choice,and birth season heterosexual relationships in free-ranging rhesus macaques

Birth season adult heterosexual nonkin relationships of 50 free-ranging female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) in two social groups at Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico were examined using focal follow (289 hr) and ad lib data. Eighty-eight percent of subjects had at least one relationship characterized by particularly high frequencies of spatial proximity, grooming, or both. These were designated “friendships.” Males intervened in aggressive interactions more frequently on behalf of Friends than non-Friends. Female aggressive support of males was extremely rare. Higher-ranking males experienced more friendships than lower-ranking males. High-ranking females had higher-ranking Friends than low-ranking females. Older females had higher-ranking Friends than younger females. Females groomed high-ranking Friends more than they were groomed by them, whereas they groomed low-ranking Friends less than they were groomed by them. In one social group, high-ranking females were more likely than low-ranking females to groom their Friends more than they were groomed by them. Males were more responsible than females for spatial proximity maintenance in 9 of 14 Friend dyads for which sufficient data were available. Neither male nor female dominance rank affected responsibility for proximity maintenance in Friend dyads. Eight of 24 females had friendships with males with whom they had completed copulations during their conception peri-ovulatory period of the preceding mating season. Two of 19 females completed peri-ovulatory copulations with Friends during the following mating season. Friendship was not correlated with either of two demonstrated female mate choice indicators: (1) proximity maintenance during estrus; or (2) cooperation with male “hip-grasp” courtship attempts. Males directed “muzzle-up” courtship signals at lower rates toward Friends than toward non-Friends. These and other investigators' results indicate that (1) protection from aggression is the primary benefit to female rhesus macaques of birth season heterosexual relationships; (2) the most effective protectors are in greatest demand as Friends; and (3) friendship has no effect or an inhibitory effect on mate choice in this species. Benefits to males of friendships were not apparent from this study but may include coalitional support against lower-ranking males.     

Mirroring Nature? Men's and Women's Models of Conception in Telefolmin

Telefol men are reluctant to talk about conception, which they claim is ‘bad talk’. Despite this, they espouse a theory of conception, and this theory accords well with the general form of Telefol kinship. Telefol women are cognizant of the men's model, but have a further one of their own which differs from that of the men in regard to the respective contributions of the sexes and the domains in which these contributions are relevant. These domains may be glossed as kinship and cult, and this paper argues that it is the relation between these domains, as well as between women and men, that is the bone of contention.     

The Function of Ceremonial Sexual Intercourse Among the Northern Plains Indians

Abstract

Sexual intimacy as a means of transferring spiritual power appears to have been a Mandan-Hidatsa ceremonial trait borrowed by three Algonkian Plains tribes as part of the graded men’s societies complex. The Algonkian tribes modified the rite, which in the village tribes emphasized the role of father’s clan. The Arapaho emphasized the cosmic symbolism of the rite, the Atsina made it a test of self-discipline, and the Blackfoot stressed the dangerous power commanded by those who performed it. These modifications parallel the differences in kinship structure between village and nomadic Plains tribes discussed by Eggan.     

First tests of Euclidean preference integration in friendship: Euclidean friend value and power of choice on the friend market

Close friendships are associated with greater happiness and improved health; historically, they would likely have provided beneficial fitness outcomes. Yet each friendship requires one's finite time and resources to develop and maintain. Because people can maintain only so many close relationships, including friendships, at any one time, choosing which prospective friends to pursue and invest in is likely to have been a recurrent adaptive problem. Moreover, not all friends are created equal; some might be kind but unintelligent, some intelligent but disloyal, and so on. How might people integrate their friend preferences to make friend choices? Work using a Euclidean model of mate preferences has had significant success in elucidating this integration challenge in the domain of mating. Here, we apply this model to the domain of friendship, specifically exploring same-sex best and close friendships. We test and find some support for several critical predictions derived from a Euclidean integration hypothesis: People with higher Euclidean friend value (a) have best friends who better fulfill their best friend preferences, (b) have higher friend-value ideal best friends, and (c) have higher friend-value actual best friends. We also (d) replicate existing similar findings with regard to mating and (e) additionally provide a first test of whether people's Euclidean friend value (versus mate value) is a better predictor of their friend outcomes, and vice versa, finding some, albeit mixed, support for the dissocialbility of these constructs.     

Aid and affect in the friendships of young Chinese men

Two of the most enduring concepts in the study of friendship are those of pure affect and instrumentalism. These have long been set in contrast to one another, and a number of typologies of different varieties of friendship have been built around the affect-instrumentalism distinction. In this article, however, a careful look at the close friendships of young Chinese men demonstrates that not only do these two aspects sometimes coexist in the same relationship, but that they may actually be deeply interdependent on one another. Such relationships urge us to re-examine our understandings of affect and instrumentalism, what constitutes them, and what they truly mean for the study of close, intimate relationships.  

Résumé

Dans l'étude de l'amitié, deux des concepts les plus durables sont ceux d'affectivité pure et d'instrumentalisme. Longtemps opposés l'un à l'autre, ils ont donné lieu à de nombreuses typologies des variétés d'amitié, élaborées autour de la distinction entre affect et instrumentalisme. Le présent article accorde cependant son attention aux amitiés proches entre jeunes Chinois, pour démontrer que ces deux aspects peuvent parfois coexister dans une même relation et peuvent même être profondément interdépendants. Ce type de relations nous incite à réexaminer notre compréhension de l'affect et de l'instrumentalisme, de ce qui les constitue et de leur signification véritable dans l'étude des relations proches et intimes.