The Fascinating Differences Between Male and Female Friendships
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Summary
Dr. Jamie Krims, who runs UCLA s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. She explains why men have a greater tolerance for their friends flaws than women do, why men want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy.
Transcript
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We're at McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Friendships are a central part of the lives of both men and women.
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But from personal observation, you probably noticed the dynamics of male and female friendships
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You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what's
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While there's still a lot of facets of friendship that haven't yet been researched, Dr. Jamie
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Krims, who runs UCLA's Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what
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we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently.
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Today on the show, she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences
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in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they
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We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends flaws than women do, why
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men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Krims.
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So you are a social psychologist who researches friendship, but you do it through an evolutionary
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Well, I studied classical archaeology and translated Latin.
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And then I let myself get bored and found books by Steven Pinker.
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Other people think about the world and the mind like this.
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And I came to evolutionary psychology, worked in Rob Kurzban's lab at Penn, Robin Dunbar's
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lab at Oxford, and Newberg and Kenrick's at ASU.
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And I thought, this is the way to make the world make sense.
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As for what I study, it's in part because two of my best friends had a 26-page, two-hour
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And I found it because one of them was a moron and did it on my computer.
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So I wanted to understand friendship dynamics for quite some time.
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Yeah, friendship dynamics amongst women, particularly.
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A lot of your studies are on what friendship dynamics look like with women.
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But you also, in the process, look at how it differs from men.
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That whole thing about finding the G-chat, about how your friends hated you.
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If you have a sister, you probably encountered this as well.
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I remember growing up, my sister, something like that happened.
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She found out that this girl that she thought was her friend was just dogging her.
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My friend that I was on the phone with, I was crying to her.
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She couldn't understand a damn word I was saying.
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Oh, you know, like their parents never loved them.
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And so, yeah, thanks to them, I get to work at UCLA.
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Okay, so I want to talk about your research on how men and women socialize and form and manage friendships.
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And from an evolutionary perspective, why do men form friendships?
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So I don't think that we can really pull apart why men and women do these.
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So the function of friendship seems to be about social insurance, and that's for both men and women.
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So John Tooby and Lita Cosmides have a really great idea that friendships solve the problem
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of accessing resources and other support when people are most in need.
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So if I asked you, Brett, you're a bank, you have some money to invest in, one person.
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Would you rather invest that money in sort of a Ryan Gosling in the beginning of the notebook
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or a slick, suited, rich Ryan Gosling in crazy, stupid love?
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The rich guy, the slick, that's what I'd probably invest in.
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And so the paradox is that people in need often don't get what they need, right?
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Banks invest in the rich folks, and people invest in those likely to repay it or reciprocate.
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But we need help when we're in need, and friendships might be the way that we solve this problem.
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These relationships where another person has a stake in my continued welfare means that
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when I am in need, they'll invest in me, and so I survive helping them when they eventually
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Because I have a stake in their continued welfare.
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So it's when you're most in need of help, people are least inclined to want to invest
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in you because people want a relationship that's more benefit than cost.
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But if you already proved yourself to be a valuable friend, then people, they'll stick with you
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because they see value in continuing the relationship.
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All right, so friendship builds our credit for hard times.
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Like, why not just rely on grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins?
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Some people do think that friends act like family.
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A related explanation, the alliance hypothesis of friendship, suggests that it's more about
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So on this view, friendship is in part the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to
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assemble support for future agonistic conflicts and fights.
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And so in a conflict between two of my friends, I should preferentially support the friend who's
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more likely to support me in the future, helping that person win their conflict and survive to
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Whereas our siblings might be around to do that, our parents and our grandparents will eventually
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So we might need to generate more kin, generate more other folks who have a stake in our welfare,
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who are going to maybe be at the same life stage as us and live longer than our elderly kin.
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There's some idea that women's friends act as sort of kin replacement, given a long history
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Women left their community and married someone else and went to that community.
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And so being without family, women really needed to replace those kin.
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And that might be why their friendships are so close.
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By contrast, men may have been sort of co-fighters in intergroup warfare and group defense.
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But even then, friends can act and probably do act as social insurance.
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Among hunter-foragers in South America, for example, illness, injury, it's inevitable.
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And it would have been in our evolutionary history.
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And so you can imagine that looking at these folks, when they do get ill and injured, they
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They're less likely to die if they have good friends.
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So generally, what social psychology has found is that women's relationships or friendships,
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Men's friendship networks tend to be they're larger and they're looser.
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Why the difference between how those friendships manifest themselves?
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Yeah, so you'll hear me say this a lot, but we don't have a good answer to this.
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It could have to do with the function of what men's friends do versus what women's friends
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They help one another in intergroup warfare and group defense.
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Women's friends tend to be more along the lines of alloparents.
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Part of it could just have to do with function and the time constraints of group structure.
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So because women spend so much time or maybe have to spend so much time creating any one
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friend and investing in those really close and, like you said, dyadic, intense relationships,
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they don't necessarily have time to spend on a lot of other friends.
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So it could be that the way that women's friendships work, being close and dyadic like that, force the
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fact that they can only have so many friends, whereas men are allowed to put more eggs in
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So just to recap there, men have that looser, larger, they want a lot of friends who are
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It's the intensity of the relationship is not going to be as much as women who prefer the
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close-dyadic relationship because women are looking for an alloparent.
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And I think it makes sense if you argue, okay, well, the reason why men form these clubs or
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gangs or coalitions, if it's to fight and war, if one buddy dies or gets eaten by a saber-toothed
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tiger, it's like, well, I can just replace them with another guy who can do the job.
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If a female friend, like an alloparent, you're trying to replace your kin, if that person goes
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away, that's a problem because you can't, it's hard to replace.
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Not only is that person hard to replace because you must have built up a lot of trust to put,
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you know, this tiny packet of your genes that we call our offspring in their hands.
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They can also be dangerous to replace if you lose them, not through death.
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So because women's friendships are so intense and emotionally open and so on,
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Much more than men do, we talk about people we don't like, what we don't like,
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And that information can be ammo for the friend that we told.
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And that could be very dangerous if the friendship ends as well.
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So it's kind of like you're afraid that they're going to blackmail you.
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Like you, you got information on them and they got information on you and you want to
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keep the relationship together because you don't want them talking about you if it goes south.
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And that honestly, that's kind of a difficult situation to be in because for women,
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this kind of self-disclosure is almost required to ratchet up the closeness of the relationship.
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And then if the relationship dies, that same self-disclosure can come back to bite them.
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For women, is there a greater benefit than cost in female friendships?
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She'd marshal the evidence and say, nah, I don't think so.
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She'd say that female friendships are probably on average costlier than beneficial and costlier
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I think that there can be a lot of benefits from female-female friendships, protection against
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predators, protection against male coercion, advice and guidance, especially in friendships
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where two women are not necessarily at the same life stage.
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And we don't really study those friendships very much.
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So I do think that there are benefits, but I could just be blinded by the fact that my
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Let's talk about some of the other differences between men's and women's friendships.
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Are there any differences between men and women in how long their friendships last?
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So the data right now suggests that women's friendships or really girls' friendships are
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We don't know what this looks like across the lifespan.
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It could be that, you know, your adult wife's friendships are going to be just as long-lasting
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But in girlhood, she would have experienced more best friends than you did.
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We also don't know what this looks like across cultures.
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And we also don't know the average time to unfriend, right?
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We don't have sort of a survival analysis of male and female friendships or cross-sex friendships.
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But what I can tell you is that if you ask a room of even awkward scientists, tell me about
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a time that you lost a friend, all of the women's hands shoot up and they want to tell you about
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this acrimonious split they had and this horrible person that they're no longer friends with.
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And the men sort of act like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise.
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So there does seem to be a difference even in how people, at least in my generation and
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those folks older than I am, have experienced friendship loss.
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Because when I look at my own life, I can't think of any friends that I've lost because
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Like, you know, we moved or, you know, we just, our lives went in different directions
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When I talk to women I know, they've all got stories of like, oh, this is this, I had this
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roommate and she did this and we were best friends, but we're no longer best friends anymore.
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That is something that might affect both men's and women's friendships and the ability to
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And so that's interesting to hear that that's really what did some of your friendships in.
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Yeah, I would say that's what did most of them in.
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What are the theories of why do, with the research we've done, I guess it's just been
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And why do their relationship tend to be shorter lived than men's friendship?
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So there's sort of these paradoxes in female friendship the way that I see it.
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One paradox is that female-female friendships are at once like the paradigm of friendships.
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Girls are so close and emotionally intense and open and affectionate with one another.
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Versus other folks say female-female friendships are actually an impossibility.
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There's so much, they're rife with actual envy and jealousy and hatred that they can't
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The second paradigm is that they are so emotionally intense and close and open.
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But we also know from the data that they're fragile and shorter lived.
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The third is that they seem to be strictly egalitarian.
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There are these rules and friendships among women that, or at least girls, that you really
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So they're strictly egalitarian and non-competitive.
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But in reality, there's a lot of competition going on there.
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I mean, the term relational aggression, which some people often use as indirect aggression
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or social aggression, was really coined to be able to characterize the kinds of aggression
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that takes place characteristically in female-female relationships.
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So it could be that they are unable to tolerate the sort of everyday issues in friendships, the
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turbulence that men are more likely to look at and either not be bothered by or reconcile
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And in fact, there's some really cool evidence suggesting that male-male friendships are more
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likely to experience issues and get back together than female-female friendships.
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As to why that happens, again, the best idea that we have right now is that insofar as women's
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friendships need great trust because of a long history of evolutionary functionality of
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alloparenting, so we have to really trust this person to be able to take care of our
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offspring and our future offspring, we don't brook any turbulence.
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Whereas among men, you know, yeah, he might be a dick.
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Yeah, he might have, you know, run over my bike.
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But in the end, more is better than fewer because we might have to come up against this other
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Yeah, speaking to the tolerance that men have for their friends, for their just their foibles
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and the intolerance that women have, I think Joyce Benenson did a study on roommates and
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she found that men and men roommates, they just tolerate each other.
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Yeah, the guy ate my Cheerios and I was pissed for a little bit, but then I just got over it.
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Yeah, the emotional reactions there kind of suggest that women often see other women,
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even their friends when things go awry, as the other woman's mere existence is costly.
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And I think Joyce would trace this back to a sort of behavioral ecology idea in our primate
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ancestors that every extra female added to the group could, you know, take my mate, could mean
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that I'm carrying this infant and now I have to walk further for food, they're costly to me.
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Whereas every extra guy added to the group doesn't cost other men in the same way and provides a
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So women, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong on this, women, even their best friends, women might still
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Absolutely, at least in the women that we've studied, right?
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So that's typically college students and then in developmental psychology.
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When we talk about men's and women's friendships, you know, we can compare men and women, we can
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compare some women to other women and some men to other men, but all of this relies on having
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One of the problems in this area of research is that we have a lot of good data from girls
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and boys because people are interested in studying friendships in girls and boys.
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But as soon as girls and boys grow up, they hit puberty and they can have romantic relationships.
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It's as if researchers flee for the romantic relationship hills and just want to study those
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So we don't have great data beyond some young adults and certainly not in, say, mothers or
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We're starting to get them, but we don't have great data on male-male, female-female friendships
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across the lifespan for me to actually tell you this is what's going on.
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It would be interesting to get that data because I think you could theorize that maybe some of
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the conflict among college-age women underlying that, even unconsciously, could be competition
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And then later in life, when each person is married, each secured their mate, maybe friendship
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So are there studies being done on that today, like looking at friendships, how they change
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So, I mean, if you went to the big social psych conference of any talk about a relationship,
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seven out of 10, they're going to be about romantic relationships.
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Fewer than one out of 10, on average, is going to be about friendships.
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We've developed the UCLA Center for Friendship Research.
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There are multiple faculty that want to understand friendship and solve the problems of friendship,
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Not nearly as well-studied as you'd imagine it would be, certainly.
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Do men and women today look for different things in potential friends, and what would evolutionary
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So a lot like the research on mating or romantic relationships, we often talk about the things
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I should emphasize the fact that the biggies, the things that everybody wants in friends,
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I'll also note that in my lab, we've actually figured out that that doesn't hold the way
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So we want our friends to be really kind, right?
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And we don't want our friends to be mean, right?
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We want our friends to be really kind to us, less kind to other people than they are to
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And sometimes we even want our friends to be more vicious than they are kind when they're
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But at the same time, yeah, men and women also face some sex-specific challenges.
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And to the extent that their same-sex friends help them solve those challenges, then men
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So what we've found is that women tend to look for friends who provide emotional support,
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They also tend to rate intrinsic traits, like being supportive, trustworthy, and respectful
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Whereas men tend to prioritize male friends' physical formidability, high status, and wealth.
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Their sort of wingmanship or ability to afford access to potential mates as really important
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And they also rate instrumental traits more highly than women do.
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Traits like being able to provide material benefits.
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Dudes with skills, with high status that can help them out.
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So hunter-gatherers wanted male allies who were big and strong.
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Men today still respect strength in each other.
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But today, you know, guys want to be friends with a guy who can help them fix their car.
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Or maybe they have a large professional network.
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You know, maybe they can help you find a job, start a business, meet women, etc.
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And there's some preliminary data that suggests that even the way that men and women use their
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So women will use their best friend as a study buddy, as a wing woman, as a you name the challenge,
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they're going to take their best friend with them.
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They have one guy for studying, one guy for wingman, one guy for the basketball game.
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But I've got, I don't have a problem with having a friend.
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And I think when I look at the women in my life, they want a friend who can do everything.
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Yeah, so this relationship scientist, Eli Finkel, talks a lot about how in the modern U.S. in particular,
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we put so much pressure on our romantic relationships to do everything for us and even take the place
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And it's kind of the way that the data suggests women are thinking about their friendships.
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They want one best friend to be a Swiss army knife.
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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.
00:24:09.360
Women typically tend to have close didactic, intense, emotionally intense relationships.
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I'm curious, is there any research on male best friends?
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So like men tend to have like, you know, a large group of friends that they go to.
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But, you know, men have best close didactic relationship with one of those friends every now and then.
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So we often include male best friendships in our studies, if only to look at the differences
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And there's some developmental work on, you know, boys friendships.
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But what I think you're asking is more about research into sort of the potentially distinct
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qualitative nature of male and female best friendships.
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And there, we really haven't paid attention to men as much as we have to women.
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And in fact, that attention is sort of doubly small, so to speak, because we're not looking
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What I can tell you anecdotally is that, so again, more than ever, people are moving.
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And when couples move later in life, which happens a lot in academia, there are a lot of women
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who essentially try and find playdates for their husbands.
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They would just like him to have some friends, you know, put him on a kickball team, sign
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And so I feel less bad about working and going to my friendships and tending to all my friends.
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We don't know why it's harder for men to maybe make friends in later life, as it seems to be.
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We have no idea because we haven't paid attention yet.
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Just listening, why is it hard for men to make close friends?
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I know a lot of men might join a club or like a CrossFit gym, and they'll have maybe some
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But for the guys who want a closer friend, I think it's just harder for guys because
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they might have less time than some women because they're working and then they've got
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family responsibilities and then they're doing kid stuff.
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He's done this research on how long it takes to make a friend.
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I forgot the number, but it was just a really long time.
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Ryan, you think about that when you're in high school and college, it was easy to acquire
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that 200 hours because you're with these people at school every day and then you got to hang
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out with them after school, doing your extracurricular activities, hanging out on Friday night.
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To get 200 hours with somebody, that's really hard when you're a working adult.
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But let me say this, people, especially young folks, spend a ton of time on apps trying to
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We don't spend the same amount of time trying to find our 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.
00:27:18.500
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
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That is, men are friends with men typically, women are friends with women typically.
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Have you done or have you come across any research on heterosocial friendships, so like when men
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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?
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There is some cool work on the way that people pick their cross-sex friends.
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So for men in particular, it might be the case that when they're looking for a friendship,
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Um, so they want the same thing in their prospective girlfriends as they would in their
00:28:31.160
So there is some work there, but this is another place where we don't do it.
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I'll say part of the reason that we don't is honestly that in, in, in much of my work,
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I specify same-sex friends because I don't want there to be a presumption of romance or
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So we got to find out if, is, is Harry right and Harry met Sally?
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I mean, I think that's probably easier when men are already investing in their offspring.
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And especially if they are friends with a woman who's investing in hers, there does seem to
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be a sort of fundamental trade-off that people face in investing their energy in mating and
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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
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But yeah, that will remain a question that people ask forever.
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
00:29:46.740
Well, going back to this idea of why men and women would choose to be friends with each
00:29:51.260
So men, they might be friends with a woman as a backup mate, right?
00:29:56.060
So, well, if I can't get this one gal, then maybe I can go for her.
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
00:30:20.220
I mean, they likely have knowledge that the other sex doesn't have, including the very
00:30:29.900
Some other folks have talked about that women can potentially be the people that men talk
00:30:41.800
But folks like Amanda Rose would question whether or not men even want to engage in that kind
00:30:50.920
Just because we know women want to and seem to benefit from it doesn't mean that men want
00:30:59.060
So it's another place we need to be really careful about telling people what to do with
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
00:31:15.120
So it's like, well, you know, friends should disclose things and be really intimate with
00:31:23.480
And it's like, well, maybe you guys don't want that.
00:31:26.620
Why do we why do you think we put female friendship as the ideal of friendship?
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,
00:31:47.080
well, women can't really be friends with each other because there's always this underlying
00:31:54.000
So now we more often see something different that women's friendships are privileged.
00:32:05.240
And honestly, part of me wonders if that's not just because that's what sells.
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.
00:32:29.540
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
00:32:47.900
I don't think that'll really answer the question of why do we tell people to be like women's
00:33:09.920
So men might be friends with women because they're a potential backup mate.
00:33:14.320
Or a female friend might help him secure a mate.
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.
00:33:33.260
So if I'm worried about the coercion or physical attacks from other men, or I'm a woman, I'm
00:33:41.760
Having another woman might not necessarily be as effective in protecting me from that
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.
00:34:07.100
Men might have some information about even simply their friend group that the women won't
00:34:16.920
One thing I've heard anecdotally, why some women like to be friends with dudes, is they're
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
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.
00:34:55.020
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
00:35:11.220
And women tend to aggress like this, aggress in ways that are more subtle and sometimes
00:35:18.300
So when a woman is talking to another woman, it's almost like there's a secret language
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.
00:35:37.580
Women tend to notice or at least infer that other women's disgust faces directed maybe at
00:35:44.780
them, maybe not, means that that woman is going to try and avoid me.
00:35:49.800
And the more worried I am about having friends, the more I think that that woman's disgust
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.
00:36:03.840
We talked about this idea that the female friendship is like the best.
00:36:14.440
But the research shows that women are just as aggressive as men.
00:36:19.500
Talk to us more about what does female aggression look like with each other?
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
00:36:38.160
And given people the idea that when men aggress, they punch, they don't gossip, which I think
00:36:45.500
So what's really going on here is that women are way more likely to use tactics of aggression
00:36:50.600
that we'd call indirect aggression, social aggression, or relational aggression than they
00:36:58.940
Those tactics of aggression are really characterized by hurting other women where it hurts, which
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.
00:37:28.100
Because we say what a horrible friend she is, how selfish she is, that she has an STD and
00:37:37.660
So it's basically like, if you've seen Mean Girls, is it like that?
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.
00:38:01.660
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.
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?
00:38:34.620
Why do men prefer the direct conflict and women prefer the indirect social conflict?
00:38:42.160
So I don't know that I'd say women, uh, men necessarily prefer direct conflict, but they'd
00:38:50.580
Some of our data suggests that if another person pisses a man off, the most likely thing
00:38:58.620
After that, then maybe he'll avoid the guy or exclude the guy.
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.
00:39:20.040
And the logic, and this is some work by Ann Campbell called Bjorkvist is that women are really
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
00:39:45.460
And in fact, Ann Campbell studied girl gangs and found that, yeah, when there's physical
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?
00:40:04.600
Again, this is Ann Campbell's work, but some of the ideas are that women are more expensive,
00:40:15.700
We have a high possibility of having a child if we want to versus men's sort of small, cheap
00:40:22.480
gametes, their sperm, and it's harder for men to find a mate than it is for women to find
00:40:30.240
So we really don't want to ruin our ability to pass on our genes.
00:40:36.300
And that seems to be the idea that has taken hold the most is that women are trying to avoid
00:40:43.140
aggression because we're potentially more fragile, but much more than that, we're more expensive.
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?
00:40:59.600
If it's about protecting your reproductive potential or if you're a mother, you...
00:41:05.900
So I should have said part of what Ann Campbell also says is that women avoid aggression that
00:41:11.740
could be physical or lead to physical aggression because as mothers, we're much more important
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
00:41:35.160
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.
00:41:56.160
I think we do now have a very good handle on the fact that women and men aggress differently.
00:42:02.740
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
00:42:17.040
There's been a lot of research done on romantic jealousy.
00:42:19.960
You've done some research on friendship jealousy.
00:42:30.940
Robin Dunbar would point out that having friends is the next best thing you could do
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
00:42:52.540
But it's particularly, we want that friend's support for us over other people, their other
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
00:43:16.540
People are more jealous when their closer friends might be usurped by other people versus their
00:43:24.140
And people are really attuned to cues that their best friends are replacing them with
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
00:43:53.620
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.
00:44:04.720
People are more jealous when their friends form new friendships, particularly new same-sex
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.
00:44:26.620
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
00:44:55.100
There might just be a lot of them until we find the friend one, but that does seem to be
00:45:02.620
So when we do find sex differences, we find that females report greater jealousy at losing
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
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.
00:45:39.000
You can amplify men's jealousy by saying, Hey, he's your teammate and friend, and he's
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,
00:46:00.420
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.
00:46:14.100
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.
00:46:39.340
Other work seems to suggest that, yeah, okay, young people feel jealous when their friends
00:46:45.620
But if they're normally developing, they grow out of that because no one friend can fulfill
00:46:52.040
So if you do feel jealousy in adulthood, when your friends make other friends, you've developed
00:46:58.760
And still other work seems to suggest, you know, you just don't understand friendship
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.
00:47:30.140
So if you started feeling friendship jealousy, you start doing the, hey, I'm going to invite
00:47:35.080
Like you try to be more proactive to nurture that friendship.
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
00:47:57.780
But in between, there are these behaviors that are probably more characteristic of adults,
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.
00:48:28.300
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.
00:48:46.000
And to recap, women feel more friendship jealousy than men do on average.
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.
00:49:03.920
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
00:49:20.360
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.
00:49:33.020
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.
00:49:51.300
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,
00:50:06.920
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
00:50:16.880
And if you haven't done this already, I'd appreciate you taking one minute to get a
00:50:23.380
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think you'd
00:50:26.940
As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:50:28.740
And until next time, it's Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what