Sex differences in intimate relationships (pdf)

by wallflower • 14 years ago

53 12 14 years ago

rgejman• 14 years ago

Aren't boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses/partners the obvious confounders here? They don't seem to address that point, yet they observe that the "best friend" is usually of the opposite sex. That may be true, but the study seems to be making an argument about "friends," not sexual/romantic partners.

In other words: this paper seems to fail the whiff test.

perokreco• 14 years ago

Uhm, best friend(1) = boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses/partner

ebiester• 14 years ago

I'd be much more concerned that it's talking about cell phone usage in a single European country, and tries to make more universal conclusions. Now, it may tell you something about the culture, but to use an evolutionary framework seems to be... a bit of a stretch.

TeeWEE• 14 years ago

From which country is this data. I cannot find it in the article.

zeroonetwothree• 14 years ago

They don't seem to do a great job interpreting their data. Looking at the chart, people have their "best friend" (aka, most called person) of the opposite sex until around age 50, when it becomes pretty even.

A better interpretation of this is just that until that age you generally call your partner the most, which is usually the opposite sex. But when you are older, you probably call your children the most, whose genders are uncorrelated with yours.

kylebrown• 14 years ago

"But when you are older, you probably call your children the most, whose genders are uncorrelated with yours."

Unless you are female, which is the salient point of the article. Mothers show a gender bias towards their daughters, whereas middle-age men don't appear to have a gender bias.

Figure 1a (best friend) is basically symmetrical: gender bias of the best friend is opposite sex. The bias peaks for women at 27 and for men at 32, gradually decreasing until the best friends for both are slightly female-biased in their 70s.

In Figure 1b (second-best friend), the 2nd-best friend for 20-something males is another male. The bias gradually declines until by 40 his second-best friend is 50/50 male/female.

But for second-best friends, "women show a striking reversal" from same-sex to opposite-sex. A 20-something female's 2nd-best friend is also female, but it strongly reverses towards males (peaking in her late 40s).

If my interpretation (of their interpretation) is correct, these graphs are showing that a female's best friend is initially her husband, but he is gradually replaced by her daughter: "the younger (25-year) peak for 50- year-old men is half that for women and shows a more even sex balance, whereas that for women is strongly biased in favour of female alters (presumably, daughters)". The husband, in turn, falls from 1st-best friend to 2nd-best friend (replacing the formerly female one).

"Finally, fourth, our results provide strong evidence for the importance of female matrilineal relationships in human social organisation. There has been a tendency to emphasise the importance of male-male relationships in an essentially patrilineal form of social organisation as defining human sociality [20], but our results tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships, as has been suggested by some sociological studies [21]."

EDIT: attempted to increase clarity. Not sure what the HN takeaway is.

ralfd• 14 years ago

> Mothers show a gender bias towards their daughters

Or men simply dislike it way more to be called by their mother (or calling her). I am a bit guilty of that myself.

gbhn• 14 years ago

Isn't that almost word-for-word the interpretation the article actually does in fact make?

roel_v• 14 years ago

It would be nice if they had more data in their network, e.g. a dump of the Facebook graph that they could match to the phone records they used, so that they had information on parent/child relationships and romantic connections. I wonder if social networking companies would be open to cooperating in such research.

Of course, it opens a can of worms on the privacy front. I'm not sure where they got the data from that they used, but I can't help but wonder how they could legally do this research, since prima facie any use of phone records for this purpose would be against most EU privacy legislation. (not saying they did anything 'illegal', just that at first glance it seems to be at least pushing the envelope).

speedracr• 14 years ago

Document over at Google Docs PDF Viewer https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201...

Sex differences in intimate relationships (pdf)

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