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Edmund_Kemper
Disregard my larping efforts. I can’t change it.
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Yes orbiters exist study shows:
STUDY 1 finds that in opposite gender friendships, men are more likely than women to be attracted to the friend of the opposite gender and men are more likely to overestimate how romantically interested their opposite gender friend is in them. Read more below
STUDY 2
STUDY 1 finds that in opposite gender friendships, men are more likely than women to be attracted to the friend of the opposite gender and men are more likely to overestimate how romantically interested their opposite gender friend is in them. Read more below
Men report more sexual interest in their female friends than their female friends do in them, and men are also more likely than women to overestimate how romantically interested their friends are in them. In most cases, sexual attraction within a friendship is seen as more of a burden than a benefit, the study finds.
"I think men and women do want to be friends, they do want to engage in platonic friendships," said study researcher April Bleske-Rechek, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. "But the data I've been collecting suggests that attractions can get in the way."
Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues were interested in how heterosexual, opposite-sex friends dealt with issues of sexual attraction that might come up in their friendships. First, they recruited 88 pairs of opposite-sex college-age friends to fill out questionnaires about their friendship. The researchers had pairs of friends come in so they could be sure that each member of the pair agreed that they were in a friendship, preventing one-sided relationships from muddying the waters.
The participants separately answered questions about their friendship, including their levels of attraction to one another. To discourage pressure to share the answers later, the researchers instructed the friends to keep their answers confidential, even after the study.
The results revealed that men are more attracted to their female friends than their female friends are to them. Such overestimating of women's interest is not unusual for men, Bleske-Rechek said.
"Men over-infer women's sexual interest in a variety of contexts, and I definitely see that extending into the domain of cross-sex friendships as well," Bleske-Rechek said.
Attraction to friends
Men who were romantically involved were no less likely than single guys to say they found their female friend attractive or to say they'd like to go on a date with her. Women who were romantically involved were also equally as likely as single gals to be attracted to their male friends, but they drew the line at dating, with fewer women in relationships saying they'd date their guy friend.
The researchers next wanted to expand their findings outside the college student realm, so they sent questionnaires 107 young adults ages 18 to 23 and 322 adults between the ages of 27 and 55. In these questionnaires, participants were asked about their cross-sex friendships and were given the opportunity to list their own reasons why those friendships were both beneficial and burdensome.
Although older adults reported fewer opposite-sex friends than the younger group did, everyone was very positive about these friendships, ranking them as overwhelmingly beneficial. But when people listed attraction on the "costs and benefits" list, it almost always fell under a "cost." Almost half of the young adults in the study spontaneously mentioned attraction as a problem in their friendships, the researchers reported April 25 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
There was a slight sex difference to this finding, such that men were less likely to call sexual attraction to a friend a cost than women were, although they were still unlikely to see it as a positive.
"When it does come up as a benefit, it's more likely to be a guy saying it," Bleske-Rechek said.
The finding shouldn't be interpreted to mean that men and women can't be friends, Bleske-Rechek said, just that we may have to overcome our evolutionary history to do so.
"It's very likely that the modern environment has changed so quickly that we've got these novel opportunities to engage in a variety of types of relationship with the opposite sex that we probably didn't, historically," she said. "It's going to take us a while to adjust."
STUDY 2
Findings from this study support American research suggesting that women are more intimate and emotional in their same-sex friend- ships than men, and tend to place a higher value on these friendships than men do. In accordance withfindings of the American sample, New Zealand women emphasized talking, emotional sharing, and discussing personal problems with their same-sexfriends, and men showed an emphasis on sharing activities and doing things with their men friends. Differences between the American and New Zealand samples were shown for men in the number of friends and the intimacy levels of these friendships. New Zealand men preferred numerous but less intimate same-sex friends, while women (as in the United States) showed a preference for a few, close, intimate same-sex friends. Men, in contrast to women, derived emotional support and therapeutic value more from their opposite-sex relationships than their same-sex friendships. Finally, more men than women stated they would not cancel an engagement with an opposite-sex friend in order to go out with a same- sex friend.
When asked whether they would cancel an engagement with their same-sex friend to go out with a member of the opposite sex, a greater percentage of men (5507o)than women (3607o)stated that they would cancel an engagement with a same-sex friend to go out with a member of the opposite sex [x2(1) = 6.1, p < 0.05]. Table II shows differences between New Zealand men and women regarding these variables.