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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.

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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.

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.

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