Just good friends? Attraction to opposite-sex friends is common but burdensome

"Every platonic friend I got is some woman I was trying to ****, I made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the friend zone. 'Oh no, I'm in the friend zone!'" Chris Rock.

They were virtually unheard of for most of human history, but today, in many cultures, friendships between men and women are common place. Still, that niggling doubt never seems to go away - is the relationship really entirely platonic?

A new study by April Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues has investigated cross-sex friendships between heterosexual men and women through the prism of evolutionary theory. From a survey of 88 pairs of college students in cross-sex friendships (averaging two years' duration), the researchers found that: men felt more attraction to their female friend than vice versa; that men overestimated how much their friend was attracted to them; and that men's desire to date their female friend was unaffected by whether they (the men) were in a romantic relationship with someone else, whereas females tended to report less desire to date their male friend, if they (the women) were already in a romantic relationship. Male attraction for a female friend was undimmed by the fact their friend had a partner. By contrast women tended to report less attraction for male friends who had partners.

The participants gave their answers after being reassured they'd be kept anonymous, and after agreeing publicly with their friend not to discuss the study afterwards (I bet they stuck to that!).

The pattern of results makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective on mating strategies, the researchers said, whereby men have more to gain from short-term sexual encounters, whereas women, who invest more in their offspring (in terms of gestation and child-birth), are more selective.

What about the way people deal with their sexual desires for opposite-sex friends? For a second study, over a hundred heterosexual young men and women (average age 19), and an older sample of 142 men and women (average age 37), answered questions about their cross-sex friendships, including listing the costs and benefits. Among the younger sample, 38 per cent were in a (non-marital) romantic relationship; around 90 per cent of the older sample were married.

Again, the researchers said the findings made sense in terms of evolutionary theory. The older sample, most of whom were immersed in a serious long-term relationship, reported less attraction to their opposite-sex friends than the younger sample did. However, this wasn't case for the older single people - they reported just as much attraction to their opposite-sex friends as the younger participants.

Overall, attraction to an opposite-sex friend was more often seen as a burden rather than a benefit of the friendship. Averaged across both samples, attraction was listed as a cost or complication by 32 per cent of participants - five times more often than it was listed as a benefit or enhancement. For young women, and men and women in the older sample, more attraction to their closest friend was associated with feeling less satisfied with their romantic partner.

Zooming in on gender differences, men more often than women, listed attraction to their female friends as a benefit of the friendship, and they were less likely than women to list it as a cost.

"Our findings offer preliminary support for the proposal that men's and women's experiences in cross-sex friendship reflect their evolved mating strategies," Bleske-Rechek and her team concluded. "Attraction between cross-sex friends is common, and it is perceived more often as a burden than as a benefit." Looking ahead, the researchers said it would be interesting to investigate attraction between homosexual same-sex friends, and whether it's seen by them as a burden or benefit of the friendship.

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Bleske-Rechek A.,, Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L., Matteson, L., Stocco, C., Schumacher, B., and Ritchie, L. (2012). Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443611

Further reading, from the New York Times: "A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?"

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Threaten a man's masculinity and he becomes a short-sighted risk taker

With Britain embroiled in yet another banking scandal, commentators are once again pointing their fingers at the macho culture of the City. "Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks," Ian Leslie wrote, "and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam."

Now a study has cast new light on the role that masculinity may have played in past and present financial crises. Jonathan Weaver and his colleagues at the University of South Florida report that threatening a man's sense of manhood makes him myopic and more prone to take risks, particularly in a public situation. The findings suggest that being surrounded by their sweaty, swaggering alpha-male peers may have provided just the kind of threatening environment to encourage bankers to become short-sighted risk-takers.  

For an initial study, the masculinity of 19 heterosexual male university students was threatened by having them product test a pink bottle of "Sweet Pea" fruit-scented hand lotion; 19 others acted as a comparison group and tested a power drill. Ostensibly as part of a separate study, all the men were then filmed playing a gambling game. They started with $5 and had five chances to bet between $0 and $1 on whether a die roll would turn up odds or evens, with the potential to win or lose the amount they gambled. Over the course of the first four bets, the men who'd had their masculinity challenged tended to bet larger amounts; they also bet the maximum possible amount more often.

A second study was similar but this time the masculinity of half of 73 more men was threatened by having them recall 10 examples of times they'd behaved like a "real man". Chuck Norris aside, because it's difficult for most men to think of 10 examples off the cuff, this challenge has an undermining effect on their sense of masculinity. By contrast, thinking of 2 examples (as the remainder of the participants did) is easy for most men, and has the opposite, manhood enhancing effect. Next, all the men made a series of choices between smaller financial rewards now or larger rewards later. Half of the men in both groups thought they'd have to justify their choices publicly. The take-home finding here was that men who'd had their masculinity challenged, and thought their decisions would be public, tended to make more short-term choices, forfeiting about three times the amount of money available, as compared with men in the other conditions. Presumably acting impetuously in front of a crowd helped the men feel more manly.  

Weaver and his colleagues acknowledged that the way they threatened the manhood of their participants was not a close simulation of the way that masculinity is threatened in a macho banking environment. However, they said that both their interventions had "the psychological consequence of reminding men that manhood is a precarious social status."

"Whether manhood threats were directly implicated in the recent financial crises that continue to plague the US [and UK] economy, the current findings are at least consistent with such an interpretation," they said. "Certainly, they are suggestive enough to warrant further investigation into this critically important question."

A weakness of the studies was the lack of a genuine control group, in which masculinity was neither threatened nor strengthened. As mentioned by the researchers, it would also be useful for further investigations to observe the effect of gender threats on women's risk-taking behaviour.

This new paper builds on several related findings that are pertinent to the role of a macho culture in the recent banking crises; for example: it's been shown that men, but not women, take higher-risk financial bets when surrounded by same-sex peers of similar status; men make more myopic decisions in competitive all-male situations; and male stock traders in London made higher gains on days that their testosterone levels were higher (probably because they took more risks).

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Jonathan R. Weaver, Joseph A. Vandello, & Jennifer K. Bosson (2012). Intrepid, Imprudent, or Impetuous?: The Effects of Gender Threats on Men's Financial Decisions. Psychology of Men &; Masculinity DOI: 10.1037/a0027087

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

At what age do babies enter the uncanny valley?

In the 1970s, the roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed a curious phenomenon. As robots became more human-like, their appeal increased but only up to a point. When their human likeness became too realistic (but still not perfect), their appeal plunged. Mori nicknamed this abrupt aversion "the uncanny valley", in reference to the shape of the graph mapping human-likeness and appeal. Are we born with this aversion to the almost-real or does it emerge later?

To find out, David Lewkowicz and Asif Ghazanfar presented nearly a hundred infants (aged between 6 to 12 months) with pairs of faces, to see which they would look at for longer. In the first study, the babies were shown a human face alongside a cartoon face (an "avatar") with enlarged goggle-eyes. The researchers said adults would find the avatar uncanny and would avoid looking at. The key finding here was that six-month-olds spent more time looking at the uncanny avatar, whereas the twelve-month-olds, like adults, spent more time looking at the human face. Based on this dramatic contrast in preference, Lewkowicz and Ghazanfar said the uncanny valley effect emerges gradually between six and twelve months of age.

What was it about the faces that provoked this change in preference in the older babies? In two further studies, the researchers presented the babies with either a goggle-eyed uncanny avatar alongside a more realistic avatar face with normal-sized eyes, or with a human face alongside the realistic avatar. In the first case, all the babies, from 6 to 12 months, spent more time looking at the realistic avatar. In the second case, the babies of all ages spent equal amounts of time looking at the two faces.

These results suggest that none of the babies could distinguish between the realistic avatar and a real human face, and that the older babies in the first study, and all the babies in the second study, must therefore have been using the enlarged eyes to distinguish the goggle-eyed avatar from a human face or realistic avatar face, respectively.

Lewkowicz and Ghazanfar said that the aversion to the goggle-eyed uncanny avatar likely emerged in the older babies as a consequence of their growing expertise with processing human faces, and their association of human faces with positive consequences. However, the older babies' expertise was obviously far from complete because they were unable to tell a realistic avatar from a human face. By 12 months, they can spot uncanny features, it seems, but not a synthetic face. "This limitation, particularly at the end of the first year of life, is interesting," the researchers said, "because infants of this age have already become sufficiently specialised for human faces that they no longer discriminate the faces of other species and of other races [a process known as perceptual narrowing]".

This study builds on recent research showing evidence of the uncanny valley effect in monkeys. From an evolutionary perspective, the researchers said their results were consistent with the idea that the uncanny valley effect emerges as a result of early developmental experience and was "a useful behavioural adaptation because it enables observers to quickly detect anomalies (e.g. disease) and/or aesthetic value (i.e. beauty) of a face."

Critics of this research may feel that it is rather a leap to assume that the uncanny feeling experienced by adults is felt by babies in any way, just because they look at a face more or less. Moreover, the classic uncanny valley effect is about almost-real robots and faces. This study arguably complicates the issue somewhat by introducing specific abnormal features onto synthetic faces, therefore making them look unreal. Whilst it's been shown that abnormal features, such as enlarged eyes, are perceived as uncanny by adults, this could be a different effect from the discomfort caused by not-quite-perfect hyper-realistic entities.

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Lewkowicz, D., and Ghazanfar, A. (2012). The development of the uncanny valley in infants Developmental Psychobiology, 54 (2), 124-132 DOI: 10.1002/dev.20583

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.