Men and Women Can't Be "Just Friends" (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Men and Women Can't Be "Just Friends" (2012)

scientificamerican.com

1 pointyamrzou11 comments

You can. Undergrads are still Learning how to communicate with each other. And Learning takes time, and happens through making mistakes and correcting "thoughts". The article is all about the "thoughts" of men and "thoughts" of women at a particular point in time. It doesn't show what happens to those "thoughts" after a mistake has been made. The "thoughts" evolve with time. Its not a static system, but a dynamic system with feedback loops.

Makes sense to me. I have had a number of women friends. The ones who were truly good friends (as opposed to social acquaintances)? If I like them that much, then I could also see the potential of a romantic relationship with them.

That said, I find it odd that the study found guys overestimated the woman's interest. That seems like wishful thinking. I always found it pretty clear whether or not the potential interest was returned. If it wasn't, it wasn't, and there's no sense messing up a nice friendship.

Taking a few steps back, to look at the big picture: It is pretty well established that - given the opportunity - men tend to be more promiscuous than women. Turned around: women tend to be more selective than men, and if they are not, it can lead to (or is tied to existing) mental health problems. For example, one NIH study shows "a strong association between number of sex partners and later substance disorder, especially for women".

> That seems like wishful thinking

I think it is more of an ego thing.

You might be making the classic correlation-causation mistake, in that promiscuity causes mental health issues and substance abuse; it may very well be that both the sex and the drugs are symptoms of underlying psychological or psychiatric issues, and I can believe that in a society that judges them harder for it, women might be impacted worse.

The study was conducted on a small sample of people at a single public university in the US. Now, repeat the study with a random sample of people from a less conservative and sexually repressive culture, such as Sweden, Finland, etc., and the results will look very different.

You don’t know the results will be different without running a study, right?

I can guarantee they will look different because I've spent the majority of my life in a culture where male-female friendships are extremely common.

In fact, if the study was conducted among 50-year-olds in the United States, the results would most likely be significantly different.

It is a bit of hubris to think you know this. How do you know that your experience is normative in that culture? Without studying the topic in depth you can’t know that you have not lived in a bubble so to speak.

I went to a private university in the US, and (due to the severely lopsided gender ratio) I remember being told, my freshman year, "of course we all wind up sleeping with the freshmen; everyone else you've either already slept with or never will".

IMX being just friends was very easy when both parties fell into each other's "never will" set.

Remember there’s a replication crisis going on in psychology. This is a prime example of a poor study: small sample size of students of one University self-reporting in a lab.

Take the results with twelve grains of salt.

https://archive.is/iLxJc

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