Through the course of human evolution, nature has bestowed upon the human species several traits that distinguish it from the more primitive others. Among these is a large and extremely complex brain. The human brain is capable of so much more than other species on this planet. Yet, our close relatives in the mammal kingdom (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, etc.) all exhibit traits that remarkably resemble those found in humans. The need for companionship is a key factor in survival of all primates. Motherly attention is required to provide for a young one. However, after the need for maternal care has dwindled with age both humans and primates still pursue a connection with other members of their species.
How this need for a connection came about is a result of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years of evolutionary workings. Through time and environmental influence, evolutionary logic and the drive for survival in primates developed as a particularly intricate web of connections, that we (humans) as the latest in evolutionary design call friendships.
Friendships serve us in many ways, almost too many to name. Though not necessarily needed for survival, friendships still exist in many of the same contexts that they did thousands of years ago. However, modern social impacts have changed our perspective on friendships. As Robert Wright points out, "[Humans] live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population" (191).
Friendships are an integral part of the human experience. A personís friends provide much of the comfort, companionship, and support that is needed to survive in our world. Friends act in many of the same ways as families do. It would be near impossible to survive as a human without some form of human contact beyond the void of familial relations.
The purpose of this experiment is to examine the numerous facets of friendships and perhaps find a basis for their formations. In particular we wish to examine the modern thought s about friendships and their importance to humankind. The discrepancy between genders is a primary factor in our research, being that the world has become very dichotomized between males and females.
We intend for our research to confirm some of the research that has been conducted prior to our experiment. Does reciprocal altruism play as big a part in friendships today, as it did thousands of years ago? How has the evolution of Human society changed the context of friendships? In terms of modern impact friendships play a much different role than they did for our ancestors, but the psychological underpinnings are very much the same, a need for companionship. Furthermore, we contend that various modern influences have altered the meaning of friendships.
Friendships extend the possibility of genetic heritage and longevity through several processes that are key to human survival. Only a handful of studies and theories abound regarding the evolutionary origin of friendships. Perhaps foremost among the theories regarding friendships is that of reciprocal altruism. The idea of reciprocal altruism first took loose form when George Williams published Adaptation and Natural Selection. He wrote, "Ö an individual who maximizes his friendships and minimizes his antagonisms will have an evolutionary advantage, and selection should favor those characters that promote the optimization of personal relationships" (Quoted in Wright, 190).
Robert Trivers, in 1971, published a paper entitled "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism." This essay formalized the idea of reciprocal altruism and brought it into the limelight in terms of evolutionary explanations of friendships. Plainly stated reciprocal altruism is basically a "you scratch my back, and Iíll scratch yours" approach to genetic proliferation.
Non-Zero Sumness is another aspect of friendship covered by Wright. Essentially, it is in favor of reciprocal altruism. In non-zero sumness two parties can, "through cooperation, or reciprocation, both players can be better off (Wright 194). Though Wright uses the example of meat shared between two monkeys, he brings the theory into a modern light using information or gossip as the primary resource of trade in human society.
We asked ourselves why exactly it is that human beings form friendships and what causes them to keep these friendships and were pleased to find so many sources. Lott and Lottís Classical Conditioning Approach basic theory is that person A will probably like person B more if they experience reward in the presence of person B. To test this theory they split a class of children into groups of three. Some groups were rewarded while playing the game, while others were not. Later when the children were asked which two children in the class they would like to go on vacation with the rewarded children picked their teammates more often than the children that werenít rewarded.
Bryne and Cloreís Reinforcement-Affect Model has the same basic premise as Lott and Lottís. Bryne and Clore emphasize reinforcement and the positive affects that accompany it, from their perspective "reinforcement can be conceptualized as an unconditioned stimulus leading to an unconditioned response, positive feelings." (Derlega/Winstead, 11) Thus, we like people who are present when we receive rewards, as well as when they are the source of the positive feelings. They also found that we enjoy people who dislike the people that punish us.
Rusbultís Investment Model asserts that when the reward associated with the relationship increases, the costs decrease, and the personís expectations decline the personís satisfaction with the relationship increases. Rusbult also found that we are less likely to leave a friendship if we have invested a lot in the friendship or if there are poor alternatives to the present friendship.
Another believer in reinforcement theory is Hatfield. Hatfieldís Equity Theory states that we as humans try to maximize our outcome in a friendship. In this theory it is believed that society plays a role that determines that rewards are equal among all of the participants. He found that if we are not getting more out of a friendship than what we are putting in we become stressed and will try to restore equality by doing one of three things. The first of these things is that we will change our input or adjust our outcomes. We will also attempt to convince ourselves that there is equality, even if there isnít, using psychological mechanisms. Finally, we will leave the friendship.
These are just a handful of many theories that deal with the broad characteristics of friendships. Through our research we attempted to discover information about the way in which the sexes differ when it comes to friendships. The differences that appear in childhood show a large contrast between males and females.
It has been researched that human children begin to establish friendships around the age of two. At this time they are not partial to either sex when looking for a playmate. However, around the ages of three and four children begin to exhibit preferences towards same-sex friends. Once the gender line has been established in children, the way in which boys and girls choose to form friendships are very different. The most social boys will have "extensive" friendships, meaning that boys generally interact within large groups of other boys that share similar interest, skills, and hobbies. The most social girls will have more "intensive" friendships, having close friendships with only one other girl, they may occasionally allow one or two other girls to join in their circle but it is not all that likely.
In Friendship and Social Interaction Derlega and Winstead found that boys will play in structured, competitive, complex games. Within these games boys will have teams that follow the rules and play fair, so that no partiality is demonstrated despite the feelings one has for one's opponent. They also discovered that girls choose to play games that are less competitive that involve taking turns where there is not a significant difference in the roles that they play (rope jumper, rope turner). Also, girls are more likely to bend the rules so that their friends will not feel inferior if they do not do so well, so that there is an equal outcome and no obvious winner so that everyone's feelings will be spared.
But what does it all mean? People do not have friends simply for the fact of having them. A friendship benefits another person in some way whether it be psychologically, physically, or some other aspect of the human existence. Upon observing certain species of animal, it is apparent that the animals realize the benefit of supporting one another in times of need, whether or not the supporter will receive compensation for his/her contributions. It is said that "evolutionary logic" guides certain members of a species to form friendships and thus thrive in a population; whereas members of a species that do not form friendships will find survival difficult in time of need. There is no set of genes that proliferate a friendship, however, the process of learning to form friendships is one important aspect of genetic proliferation.
The design of our experiment relies heavily upon the survey we have made. The survey consists of 14 questions regarding various aspects of friendship as well as general information about the participant (age, gender, etc.). The primary focus of the survey is the difference in responses depending on gender. The participants were asked to conduct themselves in a serious fashion when taking the survey, however, as expected some surveys contained lewd and inappropriate responses. These responses are elaborated on later in this paper. A few of the surveys, however, were stricken from the experiment as a result of the sophomoric responses. Despite these rare occurrences the majority of the collected surveys contain what we hope to be accurate information.
The design of the survey is intended to obtain information regarding some the most basic aspects of friendships. The first set of questions is intended to confirm some of the general ideas espoused by previous researchers regarding friendships. The questions themselves are generalities and not necessarily specific in their focus. The survey moves to a more detailed and definitive section beginning with question twelve. The second section is an attempt to obtain more qualitative data regarding the personal beliefs of the survey participants. The two sections can be used to compare the general responses versus the personal responses to determine the degree that peopleís values are used in making friends.
In distributing the surveys we chose to give out five or six surveys at various locations all over campus. We passed surveys out at the Shriver center, King library, Western campus, the sidewalk uptown, and the slant walk. We feel that we got a random group of participants. The only major problem we encountered in design was the narrow age group specification and the relatively small number of surveys. Since the themes of the data did not have much of a variance neither did the research. As one author put it "most research on same-sex friendships has been done with the preferred social research animal, the college undergraduate." This means that almost all of the information that we have to base our project on is only about one group of people. These people are predominantly white, middle-class young adults with at least some form of a higher education. This population of people represents a very small portion of the general population and thus skews the basis for our analysis greatly. The silver lining in this cloud is that most of the people that we will be reporting our project to are college undergraduates, so we will be able to present to the target audience.
1. What is your age?
2. What is your gender? M F
3. Do you have a best friend? Y N
4. If so, what gender are they? M F
5. Do you have more male or female friends? M F SAME
6. Which gender makes a better friend? M F NO PREF.
7. Which of the following types of friendships do you feel work out the
best? M/M F/F M/F NO PREF.
8. Is sexual tension a major part of male/female relationships?
Y N SOMETIMES
9. Which gender do you feel is easiest to open up to?
M F NO PREF.
10. Do you look for the same qualities in friends regardless of gender?
Y N
11. Can a friendship exist between a male and female without any sexual
tension? Y N
11b. How about among the same sex (assuming heterosexuality)?
Y N
12. Rank the following characteristics of friends in order of importance and by point value.
1=not important
2=not very important
3=somewhat important
4=important
5=very important
-Similiar Interests
-Personality
-Trustworthiness
Income Level
-Gender
-Popularit
-Reciprocal Altruis
-Who Their Friends Are
-Dedication
-Accessibility
-Other
13. Name a few of the benefits you see in having friends (either gender)?
14. What do you feel are some of the rituals in a cross-gender friendship (other than sexual)?
Our results were not what we had expected. For the majority of the questions that we asked, there was not a big difference between the ways that males and females view friendships, we will try to answer why this is later on. Much of the data was consistent with the information that we had found in doing our research, but the results were not as differentiated as we had thought they would be.
We expected that a large majority of the female participants would have a best friend, while the males would have none. We felt this way because of the "intensive" relationships that females have at an early age and the stigmatization that can be placed on males at a young age for having friendships that could be viewed as too close, since often males choose not to have close friendships. We came to this conclusion because "several authors writing about male same-sex friendships have argued that one factor inhibiting males from forming close relationships with other males is homophobia." (Derlega/Winstead, 89) Despite our prospects our data found that both 75% of males and females have best friends. The results we got from question 4 were as we expected that most peopleís best friend be of the same gender. We predicted this because in a survey we found "Öseveral people stated that they related better to same-sex friends." (Werking, 78) This also explains the figures found for question 5, that people have more friends that are of their own gender.
Although our participants choose their friends by gender in a way that is consistent with most of the research that has been done, their attitudes are not as predictable. A majority of people gave no preference to which gender makes a better friend. However, each sex felt that their sex would make a better friend than the opposite sex. In our opinion the reason that the answers for question six are not consistent with those from questions four and five is because of two reasons. The first reason being that people wonít limit their distant friends based on gender, but they are more specific with who they have for close friends, and they want them to be of the same gender. The second reason is that in this politically correct world that we live in today we sometimes feel guilty being gender biased, in any form. Therefore, we will lie on a survey so that we can trick ourselves into believing that we do not characterize people based on their gender.
This can also explain the data in question seven. The majority of both genders had no preference as to which type of friendship was best, male/male, female/male, or female/female. The second choice of each gender was that the male/female friendship was the best. Again, we associate this with the desire people have to not be gender biased. Weíd like to think that men and women are able to be close friends nowadays, they need each other, and not always in a romantic way. People want to believe that theyíre not the same as when they were children, having the need to only be friends with people of the same gender, and thinking the other gender is icky.
Since weíre not children anymore, we have more stresses in our lives and need someone to open up to. When we asked people which gender they felt was easier to open up to we expected that almost everyone would answer female, because of the belief that women are better listeners than men. Although the bulk of people in either sex did answer female the answers were more distributed than we had expected. One thing that should be noted is that whereas females found it best to open up to other females 50% of the time males preferred to open up to females 75% of the time. These numbers can be contributed to the fact that females are expected to open up to their friends and be emotional, without any stigmatization from anyone. However, males cannot have such ëlapses in masculinityí as to allow themselves to express concern and emotion in front of other males. Man can open up in front of females without any type of judgment from them, in fact they can sometimes be praised for not letting their machoness get in the way of getting in touch with their emotions.
Since people did feel that one gender was better at a task than the other gender we felt that people might look for different qualities in friends based on gender. Most people from both sexes responded that they look for the same qualities in friends regardless of gender. Again, we can contribute this response to peopleís desire to not be gender biased. However, it could also be that because of the changing role of women in todayís society that we no longer feel the need to fulfill the typical gender roles.
The typical gender roles that Wright expressed early in the book lead us to believe that most males would feel that a relationship could not exist between a man and a woman without sexual tension, whereas females would feel that sexual tension does not always need to be present. Another reason we feel this way is because some men admit that sexual attraction is the reason that they became involved in some of their cross-sex friendships. (Werking, 89) To our surprise females felt that sexual tension was present 13% more than males. This could be contributed to womenís changing role and the fact that women are more in touch with their sexual feelings and no longer feel ashamed to express their sexual desires.
Since women are able to recognize their sexual urges they are also able to acknowledge that they can sometimes have sexual desires for their female friends. Due to the homophobia that is associated with males it was expected that they would deny that there is any sexual tension between friends of the same gender. Both genders for the most part felt that people of the same gender could have a friendship without sexual tension. Nonetheless, there was a slight difference, the males expressed that sexual tension played a role 4% more often than the females. Weíre not quite sure why this occurred. One reason could be that just because females feel they can express desires towards males, they might not be comfortable expressing desires towards females. Or, perhaps they were envisioning male/male relationships as well, thinking about the homophobia that is associated with males, therefore thinking that there was no way that there would be any sexual tension between them. The males could also have been imagining female/female friendships, and having lesbian fantasies that most people assume that men have. Perhaps males arenít as homophobic as we assume they are and arenít ashamed to admit that other males are attractive. The final reasons that we can think of is that the difference is so small that it is not significant enough to take into account or the wording of the question is somewhat awkward so people could have answered differently than the way they felt.
Question twelve perhaps is the most encompassing of the survey. It asks participants to rank ten traits on a one to five scale. Using the Spearman Correlation test we compiled a graph of the results. Where we thought we would find great discrepancies in our results the opposite proved true. Male and female responses were remarkably similar. We all are just human, with many of the same desires and the means to attain them. P-value indicates that that null hypothesis be rejected. High scoring traits such as personality, trustworthiness, reciprocal altruism (despite confusion among some participants due to definition), dedication, and accessibility. At the lower end of the Spearman rank the traits listed are income, gender, and popularity. This seems to be an ironic occurrence since each of these traits is highly pursued by individuals in our society. However, in the context of friends, they are subverted.
The final two questions (13 and 14) were open-ended responses. The first asks for personal aspects of friendships and the second question deals with the rituals of friendships. The responses were varied when it comes to detail; however, the data can be generalized. Initially we were going to omit this as well as the next question due to some of the lewd, illegible, and vague answers. Upon further scrutiny, however, we noticed various trends in the responses. Up until this point in the research we have found that male and females responded remarkably similar.
For both questions thirteen and fourteen we noticed a discrepancy. The males typically responded in a more physically oriented manner, whereas the females leaned towards the more intellectually or emotionally charged sentiments regarding friendships. The amount of sexual influence in many of the malesí responses is indicative of perhaps a natural inclination to regard male/female friendships as sexual in nature. This would make sense given the evolutionary origins of the human brain; however, much more restraint must be used regarding sexual intentions in modern society. Wright states that, "trading gossip is one of the main things friends do, and it may one of the main reasons friendships exist" (195). This statement appears to hold some merit.
The majority of responses to question thirteen were focused on the talking aspects of friendships. Information it seems is extremely important in maintaining friends. Another interesting aspect of the responses to these questions is the focus on self that many people exhibited. In most cases, the participantís response was regarding something they could gain from friendships, though many acknowledged the reciprocal nature of friendships. Hatfield contends that humans will try to maximize the outcome of a friendship (quoted in Derlega and Winstead, 14). Therefore it can be postulated that when advertising oneself as a potential friend, he or she would be inclined to play up their benefits as a potential friend. Maximization of number and quality of friends provides for more potential for support in times of need. The Spearman rank graph of question 12 falls under this scrutiny. This perhaps ties in with Wrightís assessment of genes as mercenaries, or our wiliest plotters for survival (204). Friendship, through the guise of compassion and support, has steered us toward genetic proliferation.
Since the human race left the forests for civilization, advancements in technology, and ultimately mastery of the natural world the human need for friendship has undoubtedly changed in many contexts. The evolutionary effects on the human mind have been established as a valid scientific endeavor, however, the evolutionary logic in friendship has changed, as humankind has become materialist in nature. Society, in the pursuit of gain, has changed disrupted the balance of reciprocal altruism and the non-zero sumness in nature. Inequalities in gain and loss among individuals create a drastic difference in quality of life. Though "quality of life" would be a near obsolete term by which to describe a hunter-gatherer society. The forest would supply all of its inhabitants nearly equally. However, in the twentieth century acquisition has overshadowed sharing among others. The effects can be seen throughout the world through racism, classicism, and economics. The inequalities abound. Unfortunately, we couldnít conduct much of a study into this arena. Our surveys did not cover a diverse enough population. But such is a curse of undergraduate research.
Friendships encompass a whole realm of humanity that defines much about who we are as people. Our interactions with each other guide us and aid us in times of need. That we connect with another living organism in such an intense fashion. Before we think about social constructs such as gender, we are all human beings. We have been shaped by eons of evolutionary design as well as the modern society in which we live. The underlying motives expressed by evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have found their way into the human psyche and still guide us in our daily interactions; having a great influence on us as people.
Block, Joel. Friendship. MacMillan. New York. 1980.
Derlega, Winstead. Friendship and Social Interaction. Srpinger-Verleg, New York; 1986.
Mullen. Jealousy. Guilford Press, New York; 1989.
Malone. Straight Women, Gay Men. Dial Press, New York, 1980.
Rader. Breaking Boundaries. Paulist Press, New York; 1983.
Rubin, Lillian. Just Friends. Harper &Row. New York, 1985.
Werking. We're Just Good Friends. Guilford Press, New York, 1997.
Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal. Vintage Books, New York, 1994.
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