The Art of Manliness - The Fascinating Differences Between Male and Female Friendships

00:00:00.000 We're at McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.360 Friendships are a central part of the lives of both men and women.

00:00:14.360 But from personal observation, you probably noticed the dynamics of male and female friendships

00:00:18.220 aren't always the same.

00:00:19.660 You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what's

00:00:23.580 behind them.

00:00:24.380 While there's still a lot of facets of friendship that haven't yet been researched, Dr. Jamie

00:00:27.920 Krims, who runs UCLA's Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what

00:00:32.160 we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently.

00:00:36.200 Today on the show, she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences

00:00:39.280 in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they

00:00:43.660 look for in friends.

00:00:45.020 We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends flaws than women do, why 0.69

00:00:49.140 men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship

00:00:53.220 jealousy.

00:00:54.340 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Krims.

00:00:57.920 All right, Jamie Krims, welcome to the show.

00:01:14.080 Thank you for having me.

00:01:15.140 So you are a social psychologist who researches friendship, but you do it through an evolutionary

00:01:20.640 lens.

00:01:21.580 How did you end up doing what you do?

00:01:23.080 Well, I studied classical archaeology and translated Latin.

00:01:28.720 It was like solving a puzzle.

00:01:30.260 I thought that was cool.

00:01:31.460 Booked bands, played poker, living in Philly.

00:01:34.120 And then I let myself get bored and found books by Steven Pinker.

00:01:39.620 And I thought, oh my God, I'm not alone.

00:01:41.840 Other people think about the world and the mind like this.

00:01:44.660 And I came to evolutionary psychology, worked in Rob Kurzban's lab at Penn, Robin Dunbar's

00:01:52.800 lab at Oxford, and Newberg and Kenrick's at ASU.

00:01:56.900 And I thought, this is the way to make the world make sense.

00:02:01.180 As for what I study, it's in part because two of my best friends had a 26-page, two-hour

00:02:11.640 G-chat just about how much they hated me. 0.98

00:02:14.660 And I found it because one of them was a moron and did it on my computer. 0.98

00:02:18.400 So I wanted to understand friendship dynamics for quite some time. 0.99

00:02:23.440 Yeah, friendship dynamics amongst women, particularly. 0.99

00:02:25.880 A lot of your studies are on what friendship dynamics look like with women. 0.93

00:02:28.420 But you also, in the process, look at how it differs from men.

00:02:32.140 That whole thing about finding the G-chat, about how your friends hated you.

00:02:37.540 If you have a sister, you probably encountered this as well.

00:02:40.200 I remember growing up, my sister, something like that happened.

00:02:43.400 She found out that this girl that she thought was her friend was just dogging her.

00:02:48.280 And it was terrible.

00:02:49.700 It was devastating.

00:02:50.280 It was not nice.

00:02:51.820 Yeah, I cried so hard.

00:02:54.340 My friend that I was on the phone with, I was crying to her. 0.99

00:02:56.860 She couldn't understand a damn word I was saying. 0.98

00:02:59.800 Now I completely understand. 0.99

00:03:01.520 Oh, you know, like their parents never loved them.

00:03:03.760 They were jealous.

00:03:04.600 That's fine.

00:03:05.360 They're still unhappy today.

00:03:06.720 I sometimes go on Facebook and check.

00:03:09.000 And so, yeah, thanks to them, I get to work at UCLA.

00:03:12.340 There you go.

00:03:13.300 Okay, so I want to talk about your research on how men and women socialize and form and manage friendships.

00:03:19.780 So let's start with this question.

00:03:20.660 And from an evolutionary perspective, why do men form friendships?

00:03:27.220 So I don't think that we can really pull apart why men and women do these.

00:03:34.160 It is to two totally separate things.

00:03:36.680 Okay.

00:03:36.760 So the function of friendship seems to be about social insurance, and that's for both men and women.

00:03:47.140 So John Tooby and Lita Cosmides have a really great idea that friendships solve the problem

00:03:54.520 of accessing resources and other support when people are most in need.

00:03:59.640 So if I asked you, Brett, you're a bank, you have some money to invest in, one person.

00:04:07.060 Would you rather invest that money in sort of a Ryan Gosling in the beginning of the notebook 1.00

00:04:13.340 or a slick, suited, rich Ryan Gosling in crazy, stupid love? 0.99

00:04:19.640 The rich guy, the slick, that's what I'd probably invest in. 1.00

00:04:22.420 Absolutely.

00:04:23.140 And that's what banks do.

00:04:24.500 And so the paradox is that people in need often don't get what they need, right?

00:04:29.100 Banks invest in the rich folks, and people invest in those likely to repay it or reciprocate.

00:04:37.880 But we need help when we're in need, and friendships might be the way that we solve this problem.

00:04:44.940 These relationships where another person has a stake in my continued welfare means that

00:04:50.680 when I am in need, they'll invest in me, and so I survive helping them when they eventually

00:04:57.240 face their own times of hardship.

00:04:59.100 Because I have a stake in their continued welfare.

00:05:01.840 Yeah, 2B calls this the banker's paradox.

00:05:04.500 So it's when you're most in need of help, people are least inclined to want to invest

00:05:09.060 in you because people want a relationship that's more benefit than cost.

00:05:13.820 But if you already proved yourself to be a valuable friend, then people, they'll stick with you

00:05:17.660 because they see value in continuing the relationship.

00:05:20.340 So it's worth incurring that cost.

00:05:23.640 All right, so friendship builds our credit for hard times.

00:05:26.580 Why isn't family enough support?

00:05:28.640 Like, why not just rely on grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins?

00:05:32.720 That's a great question.

00:05:34.240 Some people do think that friends act like family.

00:05:37.260 A related explanation, the alliance hypothesis of friendship, suggests that it's more about

00:05:44.020 having support and conflict.

00:05:45.780 So on this view, friendship is in part the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to

00:05:50.960 assemble support for future agonistic conflicts and fights.

00:05:54.220 And so in a conflict between two of my friends, I should preferentially support the friend who's

00:06:00.180 more likely to support me in the future, helping that person win their conflict and survive to

00:06:05.780 support me another day.

00:06:07.260 Whereas our siblings might be around to do that, our parents and our grandparents will eventually

00:06:13.860 die and likely die before we do. 0.91

00:06:16.340 So we might need to generate more kin, generate more other folks who have a stake in our welfare,

00:06:23.440 who are going to maybe be at the same life stage as us and live longer than our elderly kin.

00:06:30.900 Okay.

00:06:31.600 So friends are insurance.

00:06:33.560 It's just social insurance for us.

00:06:35.840 That is the general idea.

00:06:37.900 There's some idea that women's friends act as sort of kin replacement, given a long history 1.00

00:06:43.940 of patrilocality.

00:06:45.700 So men stayed in the same place. 0.63

00:06:48.140 Women left their community and married someone else and went to that community. 0.99

00:06:53.440 And so being without family, women really needed to replace those kin. 1.00

00:06:59.920 And that might be why their friendships are so close.

00:07:03.180 By contrast, men may have been sort of co-fighters in intergroup warfare and group defense.

00:07:09.320 And so they benefit more from the numbers.

00:07:12.240 And that's really where it differs.

00:07:13.820 But even then, friends can act and probably do act as social insurance.

00:07:20.720 Among hunter-foragers in South America, for example, illness, injury, it's inevitable.

00:07:27.760 And it would have been in our evolutionary history.

00:07:30.420 And so you can imagine that looking at these folks, when they do get ill and injured, they

00:07:36.060 might often die.

00:07:37.000 They're less likely to die if they have good friends.

00:07:40.420 Okay.

00:07:41.180 So generally, what social psychology has found is that women's relationships or friendships, 0.50

00:07:47.740 they're more intense in their didactic.

00:07:50.440 Usually, it's just like one-on-one.

00:07:52.400 Men's friendship networks tend to be they're larger and they're looser.

00:07:57.840 They're not as close.

00:07:59.720 So yeah, kind of flesh that out.

00:08:00.840 Why the difference between how those friendships manifest themselves?

00:08:03.780 Yeah, so you'll hear me say this a lot, but we don't have a good answer to this.

00:08:09.440 We don't have an agreed upon, this is why.

00:08:12.320 It could have to do with the function of what men's friends do versus what women's friends

00:08:17.920 do.

00:08:19.100 So men's friends are co-fighters.

00:08:22.140 They help one another in intergroup warfare and group defense.

00:08:27.000 They can help one another gain status.

00:08:29.400 Women's friends tend to be more along the lines of alloparents. 1.00

00:08:35.600 They might help raise one another's children.

00:08:38.960 So part of it could have to do with function.

00:08:41.300 Part of it could just have to do with function and the time constraints of group structure.

00:08:47.120 So because women spend so much time or maybe have to spend so much time creating any one 1.00

00:08:54.820 friend and investing in those really close and, like you said, dyadic, intense relationships,

00:09:01.120 they don't necessarily have time to spend on a lot of other friends.

00:09:06.540 So it could be that the way that women's friendships work, being close and dyadic like that, force the 1.00

00:09:13.740 fact that they can only have so many friends, whereas men are allowed to put more eggs in 0.66

00:09:18.780 more different baskets.

00:09:20.280 Okay.

00:09:20.780 So just to recap there, men have that looser, larger, they want a lot of friends who are

00:09:24.520 just kind of buddies, chums.

00:09:25.920 There's nothing.

00:09:26.280 It's the intensity of the relationship is not going to be as much as women who prefer the

00:09:31.580 close-dyadic relationship because women are looking for an alloparent. 0.86

00:09:34.920 And I think it makes sense if you argue, okay, well, the reason why men form these clubs or

00:09:39.220 gangs or coalitions, if it's to fight and war, if one buddy dies or gets eaten by a saber-toothed

00:09:45.560 tiger, it's like, well, I can just replace them with another guy who can do the job.

00:09:49.000 If a female friend, like an alloparent, you're trying to replace your kin, if that person goes 1.00

00:09:54.020 away, that's a problem because you can't, it's hard to replace.

00:09:57.560 Not only is that person hard to replace because you must have built up a lot of trust to put,

00:10:03.020 you know, this tiny packet of your genes that we call our offspring in their hands.

00:10:08.640 They can also be dangerous to replace if you lose them, not through death.

00:10:13.960 So because women's friendships are so intense and emotionally open and so on, 0.99

00:10:19.900 we talk a lot of shit. 0.99

00:10:21.780 Much more than men do, we talk about people we don't like, what we don't like, 1.00

00:10:27.080 how much we don't like them.

00:10:28.520 And that information can be ammo for the friend that we told.

00:10:32.920 And that could be very dangerous if the friendship ends as well.

00:10:36.120 Okay.

00:10:36.180 So it's kind of like you're afraid that they're going to blackmail you.

00:10:38.380 Like you, you got information on them and they got information on you and you want to

00:10:41.820 keep the relationship together because you don't want them talking about you if it goes south.

00:10:47.380 Yeah.

00:10:47.920 And that honestly, that's kind of a difficult situation to be in because for women, 1.00

00:10:52.420 this kind of self-disclosure is almost required to ratchet up the closeness of the relationship.

00:10:58.520 And then if the relationship dies, that same self-disclosure can come back to bite them.

00:11:04.440 It's interesting.

00:11:05.200 So on average, I mean, that's a big cost.

00:11:08.520 That's like a reputation cost.

00:11:10.540 For women, is there a greater benefit than cost in female friendships? 1.00

00:11:15.780 Like, is it worth it to have female friends? 1.00

00:11:18.640 So, I mean, you had Joyce Benenson on.

00:11:21.700 She'd marshal the evidence and say, nah, I don't think so.

00:11:24.540 She'd say that female friendships are probably on average costlier than beneficial and costlier 1.00

00:11:30.620 than beneficial than in comparison to males.

00:11:33.580 I don't know if I agree with that.

00:11:35.580 I think that there can be a lot of benefits from female-female friendships, protection against 1.00

00:11:41.460 predators, protection against male coercion, advice and guidance, especially in friendships

00:11:47.340 where two women are not necessarily at the same life stage.

00:11:51.260 And we don't really study those friendships very much.

00:11:54.840 So I do think that there are benefits, but I could just be blinded by the fact that my

00:12:00.480 own best friendship is a lifeline.

00:12:02.900 Let's talk about some of the other differences between men's and women's friendships.

00:12:07.800 What about the length of friendships?

00:12:09.700 Are there any differences between men and women in how long their friendships last?

00:12:15.140 So the data right now suggests that women's friendships or really girls' friendships are

00:12:21.060 shorter-lived.

00:12:22.180 So girl-girl versus boy-boy.

00:12:24.820 We don't know what this looks like across the lifespan.

00:12:29.020 It could be that, you know, your adult wife's friendships are going to be just as long-lasting 0.97

00:12:34.400 as yours are.

00:12:36.160 But in girlhood, she would have experienced more best friends than you did.

00:12:40.340 We also don't know what this looks like across cultures.

00:12:44.140 And we also don't know the average time to unfriend, right?

00:12:50.080 We don't have sort of a survival analysis of male and female friendships or cross-sex friendships.

00:12:56.280 But what I can tell you is that if you ask a room of even awkward scientists, tell me about

00:13:02.380 a time that you lost a friend, all of the women's hands shoot up and they want to tell you about 0.98

00:13:08.040 this acrimonious split they had and this horrible person that they're no longer friends with.

00:13:13.060 And the men sort of act like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise.

00:13:17.040 Like, lose a friend?

00:13:18.540 Do you mean like, we don't talk anymore?

00:13:21.420 So there does seem to be a difference even in how people, at least in my generation and

00:13:27.700 those folks older than I am, have experienced friendship loss.

00:13:31.700 That tracks.

00:13:32.840 Because when I look at my own life, I can't think of any friends that I've lost because

00:13:35.900 of some kind of acrimonious dispute.

00:13:38.420 You know, something happened.

00:13:39.480 They just kind of rusted out.

00:13:40.700 Like, you know, we moved or, you know, we just, our lives went in different directions

00:13:44.100 and just contact went away.

00:13:46.220 It was nothing, no hard feelings.

00:13:48.520 When I talk to women I know, they've all got stories of like, oh, this is this, I had this 0.92

00:13:53.620 roommate and she did this and we were best friends, but we're no longer best friends anymore.

00:13:58.280 And I'm like, that does not continue.

00:13:59.980 Yeah, hard feelings.

00:14:00.620 And we do move more than ever now.

00:14:03.560 That is something that might affect both men's and women's friendships and the ability to

00:14:07.920 stay friends.

00:14:09.260 And so that's interesting to hear that that's really what did some of your friendships in.

00:14:13.580 Yeah, I would say that's what did most of them in.

00:14:16.180 Either I moved or someone else moved.

00:14:18.320 What are the theories of why do, with the research we've done, I guess it's just been

00:14:22.140 done on girls, maybe young women.

00:14:23.960 And why do their relationship tend to be shorter lived than men's friendship?

00:14:29.480 Like, what are the theories?

00:14:31.460 So there's sort of these paradoxes in female friendship the way that I see it. 0.86

00:14:36.560 One paradox is that female-female friendships are at once like the paradigm of friendships. 0.92

00:14:43.240 Girls are so close and emotionally intense and open and affectionate with one another.

00:14:48.240 This is how all friendships should be.

00:14:49.980 Versus other folks say female-female friendships are actually an impossibility. 1.00

00:14:55.860 There's so much, they're rife with actual envy and jealousy and hatred that they can't

00:15:01.520 ever really be friends.

00:15:03.300 The second paradigm is that they are so emotionally intense and close and open.

00:15:08.580 But we also know from the data that they're fragile and shorter lived.

00:15:11.980 The third is that they seem to be strictly egalitarian.

00:15:15.800 There are these rules and friendships among women that, or at least girls, that you really 0.99

00:15:22.020 can't strive for higher status than me.

00:15:24.620 You can't compete against me.

00:15:27.180 So they're strictly egalitarian and non-competitive.

00:15:31.120 But in reality, there's a lot of competition going on there.

00:15:35.420 I mean, the term relational aggression, which some people often use as indirect aggression

00:15:40.320 or social aggression, was really coined to be able to characterize the kinds of aggression

00:15:46.380 that takes place characteristically in female-female relationships. 1.00

00:15:50.380 So it could be that they are unable to tolerate the sort of everyday issues in friendships, the

00:16:00.380 turbulence that men are more likely to look at and either not be bothered by or reconcile

00:16:06.920 from.

00:16:08.240 And in fact, there's some really cool evidence suggesting that male-male friendships are more

00:16:12.940 likely to experience issues and get back together than female-female friendships. 0.55

00:16:18.220 As to why that happens, again, the best idea that we have right now is that insofar as women's 0.97

00:16:28.140 friendships need great trust because of a long history of evolutionary functionality of

00:16:34.300 alloparenting, so we have to really trust this person to be able to take care of our

00:16:39.260 offspring and our future offspring, we don't brook any turbulence. 0.99

00:16:45.460 Whereas among men, you know, yeah, he might be a dick. 0.99

00:16:50.040 Yeah, he might have, you know, run over my bike. 0.97

00:16:53.180 But in the end, more is better than fewer because we might have to come up against this other

00:16:59.680 coalition.

00:17:00.220 Yeah, speaking to the tolerance that men have for their friends, for their just their foibles

00:17:05.160 and the intolerance that women have, I think Joyce Benenson did a study on roommates and 1.00

00:17:11.020 she found that men and men roommates, they just tolerate each other.

00:17:15.480 Yeah, the guy ate my Cheerios and I was pissed for a little bit, but then I just got over it.

00:17:22.320 Women, they've got a bigger problem with that. 1.00

00:17:24.880 Yeah, the emotional reactions there kind of suggest that women often see other women,

00:17:32.840 even their friends when things go awry, as the other woman's mere existence is costly. 1.00

00:17:40.140 And I think Joyce would trace this back to a sort of behavioral ecology idea in our primate

00:17:46.020 ancestors that every extra female added to the group could, you know, take my mate, could mean

00:17:51.980 that I'm carrying this infant and now I have to walk further for food, they're costly to me.

00:17:57.920 Whereas every extra guy added to the group doesn't cost other men in the same way and provides a

00:18:04.320 benefit in group defense.

00:18:06.560 Okay, so that's interesting.

00:18:08.340 So women, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong on this, women, even their best friends, women might still 0.92

00:18:13.840 see them as a potential competitor?

00:18:15.380 Absolutely, at least in the women that we've studied, right? 0.86

00:18:20.640 So that's typically college students and then in developmental psychology.

00:18:26.360 When we talk about men's and women's friendships, you know, we can compare men and women, we can

00:18:31.240 compare some women to other women and some men to other men, but all of this relies on having

00:18:36.580 data, right?

00:18:37.840 One of the problems in this area of research is that we have a lot of good data from girls 0.99

00:18:43.380 and boys because people are interested in studying friendships in girls and boys.

00:18:49.440 But as soon as girls and boys grow up, they hit puberty and they can have romantic relationships.

00:18:54.880 It's as if researchers flee for the romantic relationship hills and just want to study those

00:19:00.160 relationships.

00:19:01.360 So we don't have great data beyond some young adults and certainly not in, say, mothers or

00:19:09.040 in older adults.

00:19:10.080 We're starting to get them, but we don't have great data on male-male, female-female friendships 0.95

00:19:15.940 across the lifespan for me to actually tell you this is what's going on.

00:19:20.960 Interesting.

00:19:21.440 It would be interesting to get that data because I think you could theorize that maybe some of

00:19:26.780 the conflict among college-age women underlying that, even unconsciously, could be competition 1.00

00:19:33.060 for mates.

00:19:33.600 And then later in life, when each person is married, each secured their mate, maybe friendship

00:19:39.680 tension goes down.

00:19:41.500 So are there studies being done on that today, like looking at friendships, how they change

00:19:45.580 over the lifespan?

00:19:47.860 So, I mean, if you went to the big social psych conference of any talk about a relationship,

00:19:55.120 seven out of 10, they're going to be about romantic relationships.

00:19:58.440 Fewer than one out of 10, on average, is going to be about friendships.

00:20:01.700 This is starting to change.

00:20:04.380 At UCLA, we're starting to change this.

00:20:06.700 We've developed the UCLA Center for Friendship Research.

00:20:10.620 There are multiple faculty that want to understand friendship and solve the problems of friendship,

00:20:16.820 but it is not a well-studied phenomenon.

00:20:21.480 Not nearly as well-studied as you'd imagine it would be, certainly.

00:20:24.580 Do men and women today look for different things in potential friends, and what would evolutionary

00:20:31.640 psychology tell us about that?

00:20:34.500 Yeah.

00:20:34.840 So a lot like the research on mating or romantic relationships, we often talk about the things

00:20:40.940 that are different between the sexes.

00:20:43.820 I should emphasize the fact that the biggies, the things that everybody wants in friends, 1.00

00:20:49.920 they're the same.

00:20:50.600 Kindness, intelligence, and so on.

00:20:53.780 I'll also note that in my lab, we've actually figured out that that doesn't hold the way

00:20:59.280 that you might think it does.

00:21:00.640 So we want our friends to be really kind, right?

00:21:04.260 And we don't want our friends to be mean, right?

00:21:07.200 Right.

00:21:07.460 Except, not really.

00:21:08.640 We want our friends to be really kind to us, less kind to other people than they are to

00:21:14.120 us.

00:21:15.020 And sometimes we even want our friends to be more vicious than they are kind when they're

00:21:19.700 behaving toward people we don't like.

00:21:22.400 And that does hold for men and women.

00:21:25.380 But at the same time, yeah, men and women also face some sex-specific challenges.

00:21:30.660 And to the extent that their same-sex friends help them solve those challenges, then men 0.86

00:21:36.900 and women should look for different things. 1.00

00:21:39.260 So what we've found is that women tend to look for friends who provide emotional support,

00:21:45.800 intimacy, and useful social information.

00:21:48.700 They also tend to rate intrinsic traits, like being supportive, trustworthy, and respectful

00:21:54.920 more highly in friends than men do.

00:21:57.840 Whereas men tend to prioritize male friends' physical formidability, high status, and wealth.

00:22:04.700 Their sort of wingmanship or ability to afford access to potential mates as really important

00:22:10.940 compared to women. 1.00

00:22:12.220 And they also rate instrumental traits more highly than women do. 0.72

00:22:15.940 Traits like being able to provide material benefits.

00:22:19.200 Okay, so dudes prefer competent dudes.

00:22:21.540 Dudes with skills, with high status that can help them out.

00:22:24.760 So hunter-gatherers wanted male allies who were big and strong.

00:22:29.000 Men today still respect strength in each other.

00:22:31.180 But today, you know, guys want to be friends with a guy who can help them fix their car.

00:22:35.980 Or maybe they have a large professional network.

00:22:38.820 You know, maybe they can help you find a job, start a business, meet women, etc.

00:22:42.100 They do.

00:22:42.720 And there's some preliminary data that suggests that even the way that men and women use their

00:22:48.460 friends kind of reflects this.

00:22:50.820 So women will use their best friend as a study buddy, as a wing woman, as a you name the challenge, 1.00

00:22:58.840 they're going to take their best friend with them.

00:23:01.240 Men kind of use the right guy for the job.

00:23:03.760 They have one guy for studying, one guy for wingman, one guy for the basketball game.

00:23:10.180 That's interesting.

00:23:10.900 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:23:11.700 I've seen that too in my own life.

00:23:12.960 It's just like, it's completely anecdotal.

00:23:14.880 But I've got, I don't have a problem with having a friend.

00:23:17.380 This is my weightlifting friend.

00:23:19.980 And this is my church friend.

00:23:21.440 And this is my, I don't know, my book friend.

00:23:24.460 I have no problem.

00:23:25.400 And I think when I look at the women in my life, they want a friend who can do everything. 0.99

00:23:29.200 Yeah, so this relationship scientist, Eli Finkel, talks a lot about how in the modern U.S. in particular,

00:23:37.580 we put so much pressure on our romantic relationships to do everything for us and even take the place

00:23:43.980 of our friendships.

00:23:45.300 And it's kind of the way that the data suggests women are thinking about their friendships.

00:23:50.980 They want one best friend to be a Swiss army knife.

00:23:55.360 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:23:57.460 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:23:59.200 And now back to the show. 0.68

00:24:01.800 Okay, so men, large group of friends, looser.

00:24:05.220 They look for friends that are competent.

00:24:07.180 You can do things for them.

00:24:08.240 They help them out.

00:24:09.360 Women typically tend to have close didactic, intense, emotionally intense relationships. 0.98

00:24:14.140 I'm curious, is there any research on male best friends?

00:24:18.020 So like men tend to have like, you know, a large group of friends that they go to.

00:24:22.560 But, you know, men have best close didactic relationship with one of those friends every now and then.

00:24:27.640 Is there any research on that?

00:24:30.060 So we often include male best friendships in our studies, if only to look at the differences

00:24:36.560 between male, male and female, female friends.

00:24:39.080 And there's some developmental work on, you know, boys friendships.

00:24:43.980 But what I think you're asking is more about research into sort of the potentially distinct

00:24:48.940 qualitative nature of male and female best friendships.

00:24:53.340 And there, we really haven't paid attention to men as much as we have to women.

00:24:58.420 And in fact, that attention is sort of doubly small, so to speak, because we're not looking

00:25:05.060 at adults' friendships.

00:25:06.840 What I can tell you anecdotally is that, so again, more than ever, people are moving.

00:25:13.740 And when couples move later in life, which happens a lot in academia, there are a lot of women 1.00

00:25:20.280 who essentially try and find playdates for their husbands. 1.00

00:25:23.700 They would just like him to have some friends, you know, put him on a kickball team, sign

00:25:28.820 him up for a film thing, go make a friend.

00:25:32.320 And so I feel less bad about working and going to my friendships and tending to all my friends.

00:25:38.640 We don't know why it's harder for men to maybe make friends in later life, as it seems to be.

00:25:44.780 We have no idea because we haven't paid attention yet.

00:25:48.080 Just listening, why is it hard for men to make close friends?

00:25:51.600 I know a lot of men might join a club or like a CrossFit gym, and they'll have maybe some

00:25:56.360 superficial relationships.

00:25:58.600 And that can be fine.

00:25:59.860 Some guys might be fine with that.

00:26:01.160 But for the guys who want a closer friend, I think it's just harder for guys because

00:26:05.200 they might have less time than some women because they're working and then they've got 1.00

00:26:10.000 family responsibilities and then they're doing kid stuff.

00:26:12.860 We've had Jeffrey Hall on the podcast.

00:26:15.140 He's at the University of Kansas.

00:26:16.780 Yeah.

00:26:16.900 He's in Kansas.

00:26:17.940 He's a great dude.

00:26:18.800 Yeah.

00:26:19.060 He's done this research on how long it takes to make a friend.

00:26:22.160 Yeah.

00:26:22.560 And it just takes a long time.

00:26:24.700 I forgot the number, but it was just a really long time.

00:26:27.080 200 hours.

00:26:27.580 Yeah, 200 hours.

00:26:28.440 Ryan, you think about that when you're in high school and college, it was easy to acquire

00:26:32.480 that 200 hours because you're with these people at school every day and then you got to hang

00:26:36.480 out with them after school, doing your extracurricular activities, hanging out on Friday night.

00:26:40.240 To get 200 hours with somebody, that's really hard when you're a working adult.

00:26:45.440 I mean, it could be.

00:26:47.180 But let me say this, people, especially young folks, spend a ton of time on apps trying to

00:26:53.360 find people to have sex with or date, right?

00:26:56.620 We don't spend the same amount of time trying to find our friends.

00:27:01.220 Yeah, that's true.

00:27:02.480 That's a good point.

00:27:04.160 Okay.

00:27:04.620 So dudes can have best friends.

00:27:07.020 We just don't know a lot about it because there just hasn't been a lot of research on it.

00:27:10.260 If you are a podcast listener and looking for a PhD project, there it is.

00:27:16.140 Go for it.

00:27:16.920 Come here to UCLA.

00:27:18.500 We are the world leader in studying friendship.

00:27:21.860 Me, Matt Lieberman, Carolyn Parkinson, Naomi Eisenberger.

00:27:25.880 We want to understand what the heck is going on.

00:27:28.980 So yeah, come support our research, be our grad students, figure this stuff out with us.

00:27:34.000 So something else the research has shown about male and female friendship is that it tends

00:27:39.140 to be homosocial.

00:27:40.380 That is, men are friends with men typically, women are friends with women typically.

00:27:46.360 Have you done or have you come across any research on heterosocial friendships, so like when men

00:27:50.900 and women are friends with each other? 1.00

00:27:52.780 So we're doing some of that work in my lab.

00:27:55.720 There is not a lot of great work on this.

00:27:59.260 There is some work by Hannah Bradshaw that's really cool about guys-girls.

00:28:04.860 So what do people think of women who are primarily friends with men?

00:28:09.600 Women don't like them. 1.00

00:28:11.100 There is some cool work on the way that people pick their cross-sex friends.

00:28:17.220 So for men in particular, it might be the case that when they're looking for a friendship,

00:28:22.580 they're sort of looking for backup mates.

00:28:24.520 Um, so they want the same thing in their prospective girlfriends as they would in their

00:28:29.740 female friends.

00:28:31.160 So there is some work there, but this is another place where we don't do it.

00:28:37.180 I'll say part of the reason that we don't is honestly that in, in, in much of my work,

00:28:42.040 I specify same-sex friends because I don't want there to be a presumption of romance or

00:28:49.060 future romance.

00:28:50.640 Okay.

00:28:50.760 That makes sense.

00:28:51.460 So we got to find out if, is, is Harry right and Harry met Sally?

00:28:55.220 Can men and women be friends?

00:28:57.160 I mean, I think that's probably easier when men are already investing in their offspring.

00:29:04.240 And especially if they are friends with a woman who's investing in hers, there does seem to

00:29:09.780 be a sort of fundamental trade-off that people face in investing their energy in mating and

00:29:16.820 parenting.

00:29:17.440 And so the more that you are investing your energy and things like parenting, maybe, you

00:29:24.920 know, you are not going to be on the prowl or on the lookout and it could be easier to

00:29:29.920 be friends.

00:29:30.960 But yeah, that will remain a question that people ask forever.

00:29:35.640 I don't think we're even close to solving it.

00:29:38.700 I just think people will automatically say, absolutely not.

00:29:42.120 And absolutely, of course, what kind of sexist are you that you don't think women can be

00:29:45.580 friends with men?

00:29:46.340 Yeah.

00:29:46.740 Well, going back to this idea of why men and women would choose to be friends with each

00:29:50.700 other.

00:29:51.260 So men, they might be friends with a woman as a backup mate, right? 0.99

00:29:56.060 So, well, if I can't get this one gal, then maybe I can go for her. 1.00

00:29:59.220 But I think some other benefits of having a female friend, like a female friend could give

00:30:04.720 you like advice on how to approach a potential mate.

00:30:09.360 She could have an in with, you know, she's like the friend of the girl that you like.

00:30:13.340 And so you can figure out like, well, what should I do to get, I don't know, Jennifer to 0.62

00:30:17.520 like me, you know, that could be useful.

00:30:19.820 Absolutely.

00:30:20.220 I mean, they likely have knowledge that the other sex doesn't have, including the very 1.00

00:30:26.160 specific knowledge that you're talking about.

00:30:28.120 Does Jennifer like me?

00:30:29.900 Some other folks have talked about that women can potentially be the people that men talk

00:30:36.320 to about their emotional lives.

00:30:39.160 That's a possibility as well.

00:30:41.800 But folks like Amanda Rose would question whether or not men even want to engage in that kind

00:30:48.100 of emotional talk or benefit from it.

00:30:50.920 Just because we know women want to and seem to benefit from it doesn't mean that men want

00:30:57.160 to and or benefit from it.

00:30:59.060 So it's another place we need to be really careful about telling people what to do with

00:31:03.480 their friendships.

00:31:04.220 Not that you are, but a lot of people try to.

00:31:06.580 Yeah, that's an interesting point.

00:31:07.540 We've been alluding to this throughout the conversation.

00:31:09.620 Sometimes when we approach friendship, even academically, we view the female idea of friendship as the 1.00

00:31:14.720 ideal.

00:31:15.120 So it's like, well, you know, friends should disclose things and be really intimate with

00:31:20.200 one another emotionally.

00:31:21.840 So even men should be like that.

00:31:23.480 And it's like, well, maybe you guys don't want that.

00:31:25.760 Like what's going on there?

00:31:26.620 Why do we why do you think we put female friendship as the ideal of friendship? 1.00

00:31:30.880 I mean, that's a really great question.

00:31:33.900 I don't think we always have.

00:31:35.320 Certainly, I should say.

00:31:36.340 So, you know, Aristotle would talk about friendship and he just focused on men because he didn't really

00:31:41.540 think women could be friends and other researchers have put forward this idea that, 0.88

00:31:47.080 well, women can't really be friends with each other because there's always this underlying 1.00

00:31:51.000 competition or envy or hatred.

00:31:54.000 So now we more often see something different that women's friendships are privileged. 1.00

00:32:00.940 We see that in movies.

00:32:03.080 We see that in books.

00:32:05.240 And honestly, part of me wonders if that's not just because that's what sells.

00:32:11.080 Women are the ones who are buying books. 1.00

00:32:12.680 And so we write about female friendships, right?

00:32:15.080 When men's friendships are featured, you know, it's Sam and Frodo or Jean and Phineas.

00:32:22.640 This is a long-winded way of saying, yeah, I wish I had an idea.

00:32:27.640 I really don't know.

00:32:29.540 And it would be kind of lovely to explore the media landscape of male-male and female-female

00:32:35.920 friendships to show what are people even putting out there and consuming.

00:32:41.560 Maybe that'll help us figure out what it is that people are trying to say our friendship

00:32:47.120 should be.

00:32:47.900 I don't think that'll really answer the question of why do we tell people to be like women's 0.99

00:32:53.560 friendships?

00:32:54.740 Jean and Phineas.

00:32:55.360 That's from A Separate Peace, right?

00:32:57.060 It is.

00:32:57.540 Yeah.

00:32:57.880 That's my wife's favorite book.

00:32:59.760 Really?

00:33:00.060 She loves that book.

00:33:00.860 No way.

00:33:01.340 Yeah.

00:33:01.960 That's one of my favorite books as well.

00:33:04.500 Going back to male-female friendships.

00:33:06.960 So these are heterosocial friendships.

00:33:09.740 Okay.

00:33:09.920 So men might be friends with women because they're a potential backup mate. 0.93

00:33:14.320 Or a female friend might help him secure a mate. 0.92

00:33:17.900 Why would women want to be friends with men? 1.00

00:33:20.980 So there are a few reasons, and we even see this in some non-human primates.

00:33:26.620 So folks like Frans Duol have written about this.

00:33:30.560 One is for protection.

00:33:33.260 So if I'm worried about the coercion or physical attacks from other men, or I'm a woman, I'm

00:33:39.860 worried about that from men.

00:33:41.760 Having another woman might not necessarily be as effective in protecting me from that 1.00

00:33:47.480 male's physical aggression as another male in my corner.

00:33:51.820 So that's one reason is that we get some of those benefits.

00:33:56.040 But the same way that you said, well, you know, men might want to have women friends because

00:34:01.620 women have access to information that men don't, the flip side is true as well. 1.00

00:34:07.100 Men might have some information about even simply their friend group that the women won't 0.86

00:34:14.200 have in that larger social network.

00:34:16.920 One thing I've heard anecdotally, why some women like to be friends with dudes, is they're 1.00

00:34:22.780 like, well, they're just not the drama.

00:34:24.700 Is there any research about that?

00:34:27.520 So I would say that there is, but it's only tangential.

00:34:31.440 So Joyce Benenson's work on that, so a six-month female-female friendship is going to have more 1.00

00:34:39.420 issues and fights and, you know, sort of more turbulence than a six-month male-male friendship.

00:34:46.580 And part of this is related to the research on how women aggress.

00:34:52.120 So I can roll my eyes at you.

00:34:55.020 I can say, oh, it's so brave of you to wear that.

00:34:57.940 I can say, you know, when I said we're all going for ice cream, I didn't mean you, Brett.

00:35:04.500 There are these somewhat more subtle ways of aggressing than punching one another in the

00:35:10.060 face.

00:35:11.220 And women tend to aggress like this, aggress in ways that are more subtle and sometimes 1.00

00:35:17.240 covert.

00:35:18.300 So when a woman is talking to another woman, it's almost like there's a secret language 0.99

00:35:24.180 behind the words that we can decode.

00:35:27.120 In fact, I have some work on this with respect to disgust faces.

00:35:31.520 Women tend to make disgust faces at other women they don't want around. 1.00

00:35:35.840 Men don't tend to do this. 0.93

00:35:37.580 Women tend to notice or at least infer that other women's disgust faces directed maybe at 1.00

00:35:44.780 them, maybe not, means that that woman is going to try and avoid me. 1.00

00:35:49.800 And the more worried I am about having friends, the more I think that that woman's disgust 1.00

00:35:55.940 face potentially at me, it makes me sad and unhappy.

00:36:00.700 Well, I want to talk more about female aggression. 0.94

00:36:03.840 We talked about this idea that the female friendship is like the best. 1.00

00:36:06.980 It's the ideal.

00:36:07.580 It's close.

00:36:08.700 It's intimate.

00:36:09.400 You're being vulnerable.

00:36:10.140 And that somehow women are less aggressive. 1.00

00:36:14.440 But the research shows that women are just as aggressive as men.

00:36:18.320 They just do it differently.

00:36:19.500 Talk to us more about what does female aggression look like with each other? 1.00

00:36:24.700 Yeah.

00:36:24.940 So first, I should say that we've been sadly loose with our language and research about

00:36:30.560 this and given people the idea that women don't punch, they only gossip, which is not 0.64

00:36:36.920 entirely true.

00:36:38.160 And given people the idea that when men aggress, they punch, they don't gossip, which I think

00:36:43.500 we all know isn't true.

00:36:45.500 So what's really going on here is that women are way more likely to use tactics of aggression 1.00

00:36:50.600 that we'd call indirect aggression, social aggression, or relational aggression than they

00:36:56.680 are to use physical aggression.

00:36:58.940 Those tactics of aggression are really characterized by hurting other women where it hurts, which

00:37:05.460 is in their relationships.

00:37:07.580 So yes, there's the exclusion and the sort of asides that you say it just loud enough to

00:37:13.640 make the other woman overhear how much you hate her.

00:37:15.960 But really what indirect aggression is often aimed at doing is harming other women's relationships

00:37:23.440 or even potentially precluding other women's ability to form relationships. 1.00

00:37:28.100 Because we say what a horrible friend she is, how selfish she is, that she has an STD and 0.97

00:37:34.780 you shouldn't date her. 0.99

00:37:36.540 Okay.

00:37:36.720 So the indirect stuff.

00:37:37.660 So it's basically like, if you've seen Mean Girls, is it like that?

00:37:40.760 Is that, is Mean Girls?

00:37:42.060 It really is.

00:37:42.620 Okay.

00:37:43.000 Yeah.

00:37:43.320 And it, I think I haven't seen that movie in a long time, but there are a lot of instances

00:37:49.460 of aggression among women that many men might not even realize were acts of aggression.

00:37:56.620 And it's not to say that men don't do that as well.

00:37:59.140 They certainly do.

00:38:00.340 They certainly gossip.

00:38:01.660 They certainly derogate one another and try and harm one another's reputations.

00:38:06.640 Women seem to be attuned to avoiding the costs of engaging in competition and aggression. 1.00

00:38:13.320 Toward other women. 1.00

00:38:14.220 So they do it in ways that is more likely like implicature, deniable, kind of the same

00:38:20.140 thing when you're like, Hey, officer, is there a way we can take care of this ticket here?

00:38:24.580 So no one can point out that was a bribe.

00:38:27.320 That was aggression.

00:38:28.540 You're trying to hurt me. 0.99

00:38:30.120 Let's coordinate and hurt you. 1.00

00:38:32.840 Well, what's going on there?

00:38:33.860 Like what, what are the theories?

00:38:34.620 Why do men prefer the direct conflict and women prefer the indirect social conflict? 0.99

00:38:41.540 Yeah.

00:38:42.160 So I don't know that I'd say women, uh, men necessarily prefer direct conflict, but they'd 0.99

00:38:48.660 rather punch each other than gossip.

00:38:50.580 Some of our data suggests that if another person pisses a man off, the most likely thing

00:38:56.520 he is to do is nothing.

00:38:58.620 After that, then maybe he'll avoid the guy or exclude the guy.

00:39:03.060 Punching is pretty low on the list.

00:39:05.180 Granted that's in, you know, modern America.

00:39:08.880 So everybody's more likely to do nothing than avoid unlikely to punch.

00:39:14.920 Women really are much more likely to use indirect aggression than direct aggression though. 1.00

00:39:20.040 And the logic, and this is some work by Ann Campbell called Bjorkvist is that women are really 0.99

00:39:27.260 attuned to avoiding the costs of aggression.

00:39:30.100 So they don't want to engage or start physical aggression and they don't want to engage in

00:39:36.840 aggression that is overt and can end up in retaliation that would, you know, kind of physical

00:39:43.680 retaliation.

00:39:45.460 And in fact, Ann Campbell studied girl gangs and found that, yeah, when there's physical 1.00

00:39:51.020 aggression, it's among women. 1.00

00:39:52.980 It starts because somebody maligns somebody else's reputation.

00:39:56.620 So why don't women or why are women so attuned to avoiding the costs of physical aggression? 1.00

00:40:04.600 Again, this is Ann Campbell's work, but some of the ideas are that women are more expensive, 1.00

00:40:11.180 so to speak.

00:40:12.440 We have these large, expensive gametes.

00:40:15.700 We have a high possibility of having a child if we want to versus men's sort of small, cheap 1.00

00:40:22.480 gametes, their sperm, and it's harder for men to find a mate than it is for women to find 0.99

00:40:29.060 a mate.

00:40:30.240 So we really don't want to ruin our ability to pass on our genes.

00:40:34.420 That's one idea.

00:40:36.300 And that seems to be the idea that has taken hold the most is that women are trying to avoid 1.00

00:40:43.140 aggression because we're potentially more fragile, but much more than that, we're more expensive.

00:40:49.300 Does that change throughout the lifespan?

00:40:53.000 I guess there probably hasn't been research on that.

00:40:54.600 Does that change when you're 50, 60, 70 years old?

00:40:58.220 I mean, it should, right?

00:40:59.600 If it's about protecting your reproductive potential or if you're a mother, you... 0.84

00:41:05.900 So I should have said part of what Ann Campbell also says is that women avoid aggression that 1.00

00:41:11.740 could be physical or lead to physical aggression because as mothers, we're much more important 0.99

00:41:17.820 to the survival of our offspring than fathers are.

00:41:21.100 So if that is the case and it's really about protecting our future reproductive potential

00:41:26.300 or protecting our current young offspring, then we should see more physical aggression among

00:41:33.740 women later in life. 0.92

00:41:35.160 I don't think there's any evidence that we really, you know, ramp it up.

00:41:40.260 So something else must be going on that sort of boosts men's aggression.

00:41:46.500 Mechanistically, that might even be testosterone, right?

00:41:49.300 But we really don't have a good handle on why women aggress the way that they aggress. 0.99

00:41:56.160 I think we do now have a very good handle on the fact that women and men aggress differently.

00:42:01.740 Okay.

00:42:02.740 Whenever a new friend, like a new person comes into the friend group and that other person

00:42:08.280 could possibly become the new best friend of your best friend, that can cause a lot of

00:42:12.880 bad feelings.

00:42:14.100 Like, oh my gosh, this is a threat.

00:42:15.460 It can cause jealousy.

00:42:17.040 There's been a lot of research done on romantic jealousy.

00:42:19.960 You've done some research on friendship jealousy.

00:42:22.680 Tell us about that research there.

00:42:24.860 Yeah.

00:42:25.340 So friendships are really valuable.

00:42:28.420 They do a lot of important things for us.

00:42:30.940 Robin Dunbar would point out that having friends is the next best thing you could do

00:42:35.900 for your health next to quitting smoking.

00:42:38.380 And so we should be attuned to the concern that we're going to lose our friend to somebody else.

00:42:45.580 Yeah, our friends only have so much time in the day and we want them to spend that time

00:42:50.400 helping us than somebody else.

00:42:52.540 But it's particularly, we want that friend's support for us over other people, their other

00:42:59.060 friends, particularly for best friends.

00:43:01.120 And so what we find is really simple stuff that people feel jealous when their friends

00:43:09.340 might make new friendships, but not just when their friends sort of that friendship fizzles

00:43:14.940 out or the friend moves away.

00:43:16.540 People are more jealous when their closer friends might be usurped by other people versus their

00:43:22.500 less close friends and acquaintances.

00:43:24.140 And people are really attuned to cues that their best friends are replacing them with

00:43:31.080 a new friend.

00:43:32.640 So for example, we ask people, how jealous would you be if your best friend started a

00:43:38.560 new romantic relationship versus a new friendship?

00:43:41.820 And if people are only concerned with spending time with their best friend, then they should

00:43:47.640 be more concerned when they form a new romantic relationship because our new romantic partners

00:43:51.800 take up all of our time.

00:43:53.620 But if it's really about replacement and replacing the function that this person serves for you

00:43:59.260 and vice versa, they should be more jealous when their friends make new friends.

00:44:03.240 And that's in fact what we see.

00:44:04.720 People are more jealous when their friends form new friendships, particularly new same-sex

00:44:09.600 friendships.

00:44:11.120 No, you actually, there's a, in the study, you started off this paper with a quote from an

00:44:16.200 author named Andrea Laventhal and she says this, most girls won't admit this, but they'd rather

00:44:22.580 you hit on their significant other than their best friend.

00:44:26.040 Oh yeah.

00:44:26.620 So I think that's from a New York times article when I read that paper back in the day and

00:44:31.580 it was really hitting home the point that particularly for women, their best friendships might even

00:44:40.360 be longer lasting than many of their romantic relationships, which again, it, I hate using

00:44:46.700 the word problematize, but it problematizes or challenges this idea that female friendships 0.92

00:44:52.420 are exclusively short-lived, right?

00:44:55.100 There might just be a lot of them until we find the friend one, but that does seem to be

00:45:01.980 the case.

00:45:02.620 So when we do find sex differences, we find that females report greater jealousy at losing 0.96

00:45:09.000 their best friends and close friends than men do.

00:45:12.420 We also find, and this is a small effect, I don't know if it's real, but when men are 0.99

00:45:18.220 asked to think about their friends as being on part of a team and how they'd feel if their

00:45:23.360 friend sort of left their team for another team, they tend to be more jealous there.

00:45:28.680 That increases men's jealousy, not compared to men, compared to women.

00:45:33.560 Women are just more jealous at losing friends in general, not acquaintances, but friends. 1.00

00:45:39.000 You can amplify men's jealousy by saying, Hey, he's your teammate and friend, and he's

00:45:44.760 going to the other team.

00:45:46.420 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:45:47.420 So, okay.

00:45:47.900 The idea of men prefer large, loose kind of club networks.

00:45:52.960 Another guy coming in, being a friend, even a best friend, like that's, that'd be, Hey,

00:45:57.880 it's great.

00:45:58.260 We got another pal we can go fishing with.

00:46:00.420 But if that guy, if your best friend decided, I'm going to go, I don't know, join the other

00:46:05.820 team or something that's more, that's like, you've betrayed us.

00:46:09.660 What are you doing?

00:46:10.220 You betrayed the club.

00:46:12.060 Yeah, it's exactly that way.

00:46:14.100 And I should say thinking about jealousy or friendship, jealousy this way is totally

00:46:19.180 different than how most people have thought about it so far in developmental psych or other

00:46:24.280 more traditional areas of psychology or sociology.

00:46:27.440 Some work suggests that feeling jealousy at all is a symptom of internalizing Western

00:46:34.080 capitalistic ideals where you see people as things. 0.99

00:46:37.620 And that's moronic. 0.96

00:46:39.340 Other work seems to suggest that, yeah, okay, young people feel jealous when their friends 0.99

00:46:44.740 make new friends.

00:46:45.620 But if they're normally developing, they grow out of that because no one friend can fulfill

00:46:50.840 all our needs.

00:46:52.040 So if you do feel jealousy in adulthood, when your friends make other friends, you've developed

00:46:57.360 abnormally.

00:46:58.760 And still other work seems to suggest, you know, you just don't understand friendship

00:47:02.740 or there's something wrong with you.

00:47:05.020 Personal deficits.

00:47:06.020 You must have low self-esteem if you're jealous when your friends make new friends.

00:47:09.960 Our functional and evolutionary look at it is just this emotion is beneficial.

00:47:15.840 And on average, people that felt jealousy when their friends made new close friends

00:47:20.180 and acted accordingly in sort of positive ways to maintain their friendship probably did

00:47:26.660 better than people that didn't feel that jealousy at all.

00:47:30.060 Okay.

00:47:30.140 So if you started feeling friendship jealousy, you start doing the, hey, I'm going to invite

00:47:33.520 you.

00:47:33.660 Let's go out.

00:47:34.080 Let's go do something.

00:47:35.080 Like you try to be more proactive to nurture that friendship.

00:47:39.020 Yeah.

00:47:39.340 We created a list of sort of 44 items that we call friend guarding behavior.

00:47:45.700 So everything from punching the interloper to being really vigilant, maybe, you know,

00:47:52.260 you sort of stalk your existing friend on social media and see if they're hanging out

00:47:56.500 with this other person.

00:47:57.780 But in between, there are these behaviors that are probably more characteristic of adults,

00:48:03.680 like saying, hey, I'm really close to you.

00:48:06.420 Let's make sure we spend some time together and, you know, invest in this friendship.

00:48:10.700 That can be a way that people guard their friendships and their friends against defection.

00:48:16.040 But then this could go like, uh, malade, not malade, like maybe antisocial, not pro-social.

00:48:21.940 It's like, well, you start telling your best friend, I've heard this about her, you know,

00:48:25.940 gossiping and starting rumors and things like that.

00:48:27.480 It could go that way too.

00:48:28.300 So, I mean, in that sense, that kind of gossip or exclusion is antisocial or aggressive toward

00:48:38.060 the person that you're negatively gossiping about or excluding.

00:48:41.620 It might still be an effective form of friend guarding though.

00:48:45.240 Yeah.

00:48:45.660 Okay.

00:48:46.000 And to recap, women feel more friendship jealousy than men do on average.

00:48:51.860 They do.

00:48:52.800 The one exception, and again, this is a small effect, is that men tended to be comparatively

00:48:58.420 more jealous when their acquaintances made new acquaintances.

00:49:01.820 Wait, what's going on there?

00:49:03.920 So, I mean, it could just be, again, about the numbers, right?

00:49:07.340 So, men are using their networks to benefit them in ways that women aren't necessarily.

00:49:12.620 And so, the loss of a network member for a man might be more costly than an acquaintance

00:49:18.960 network member is to a woman. 0.83

00:49:20.360 Well, Jamie, this has been a great conversation.

00:49:23.260 Where can people go to learn more about your work?

00:49:25.680 So, they can visit my lab website, the Social Minds Lab at UCLA.

00:49:30.960 I'm Jamie Krems on Twitter.

00:49:33.020 And very soon, they will be able to hear about some of our research or maybe even see some

00:49:38.500 public-facing talks at the UCLA Center for Friendship Research if they're in the LA area.

00:49:44.080 Fantastic.

00:49:44.720 Well, Jamie Krems, thanks for your time.

00:49:45.800 It's been a pleasure.

00:49:46.740 Thank you so much.

00:49:47.620 This was great.

00:49:48.180 My guest today was Dr. Jamie Krems.

00:49:51.300 You can find more information about our work at our website, kremslab.com.

00:49:54.660 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash krems, where you can find links to resources,

00:49:58.440 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:50:06.920 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:50:09.500 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives,

00:50:12.980 as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything

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00:50:28.740 And until next time, it's Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what

00:50:32.500 you've heard into action.

00:50:33.520 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - June 26, 2024

The Fascinating Differences Between Male and Female Friendships

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