Has anyone actually read the studies linked by the author to back up his drivel? I'll save you some time: the 2007 study isn't valid even by the low levels of scientific burden required for psychological studies (it's entirely based on self-reporting), and the 1982 study support the opposite conclusion to the author's. In fact, the 1982 study [0] finds that men and women simply have different kinds of friendships, where men are likely to only engage in emotional sharing with their closest friends, and women are more likely to engage in emotional sharing with all their friends.
This brings me on to challenging the true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role. It's no accident that the author turns to the authority of feminists for perspectives on men -- despite that being so laughly outside the remit of feminism -- because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women. In lieu of any studies which actually support his point (note that only the first two studies in the article actually even discuss his point about male friendships, the rest are an irrelevance), he instead uses anecdote as evidence for a point neither study can support, and then goes on to blame the entire mess on the traditional male gender role. I won't defend the male gender role, because I have no stock in doing so, but I would at least ask that if something's going to be blamed for mens' terrible friendships then we at least provide some proof that men do indeed have terrible friendships.
Lastly, the article, like so many in the media, is yet another argument that encourages you to accept its faulty form by providing you with a false dichotomy: the argument begs the question that either type of friend (the emotional numerous friends of women, or the close few friends of men) is a superior type of friend, links some 'evidence' which doesn't support its point, and then encourages you to ask yourself whether men or women 'have it right' before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation.
I will say one thing though: if this is the kind of stuff Men's Journal prints, then either its readership is mostly women, or men sure do love self-flagellation.
> men and women simply have different kinds of friendships
I think you nailed it there. This matches what I've been picking up from books by Deborah Tannen, an author recommended to me by a guy at work.
Tannen describes men and women as having two massively different styles of communication. Communication is not at all addressed in the attached article, yet, when I perceive the dialogue in the article, it matches Tannen's model to a T. In a nutshell: men communicate in the domain of independence while women communicate about intimacy. If you remember _nothing_ else about what I write here, remember those two words: intimacy vs. independence.
So for example, when the wife in the article repeatedly asks for "dish," that's a blatant signal of intimacy. She wants to be in on secrets. She wants intimacy with her husband and is sending out "sonar" to see how intimate her husband is with his friends. Even her use of the idiosyncratic term "dish" and expecting her husband to pick up on it can be perceived as calls for intimacy.
Meanwhile, when the author describes "activity" or "convenience" friends, (with an undeserving negative air), he's failing to perceive that these types of friendship allow the men to preserve their independence. It also explains why the men felt intruded upon when the women scheduled an activity for them. The author perceives it in the parent-child spectrum, which is okay, but not insightful imo. Tannen's model of men's independence I find superior. It also explains the author's ignoring phone calls from his friend - it's a meta-communication about preserving his own independence.
Just to get meta about publishing in the 2010s, the article is a smorgasbord of irritainment, pseudo-psychology and self-doubt. Certainly not the kind of thing most men would find useful, valuable or insightful. Although that certainly doesn't it make the author "gay" as someone below suggested! However, this article is neither empowering through interdependence nor through independence, just a slab of rage press with a bit of correlation without causation statistics. (Can't you just hear an editor saying "Great, now finish up with some stats to back it up.")
So let's read Tannen's books to help our relationships and communication along, then get back to talking about Linux and signal processing and shit.
Sure. She has numerous books now, but the first one that started her off on this path was _That's Not What I Meant!_, which was about differences in communications styles in general. One chapter of it was about the diff. b/t men and women and that got the most attention and requests for more info, so she wrote _You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation_. (There's a lesson for startups about listening to your audience there, too.)
The main one to recommend is the latter, but the first one is great, too. I haven't read her other ones. And TBH I haven't finished either one after several months, b/c the material in the first few chapters just got me so far along I was surprised and it shifted my perspective quite a bit. Especially for a literally-minded person like myself, it was like learning to see not only a new color, but a new, parallel spectrum.
> because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women .... true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role.
That was not my reading at all and on re-reading I still can't see it.
Then Liz would let out a big theatrical groan that said, in essence, What kind of friendship is that?
I thought it was a great friendship, if I thought about it at all.
To me, this suggests that there is a model for male friendships that works perfectly well. I perceived the problem to be that not all men are good at implementing or maintaining this model, especially over distance.
The author acknowledges that the female model isn't necessarily the single optimal model:
At the same time, a wave of feminist sociologists and psychologists began describing female friendship, with all its confessional talk, as the optimal model. Many feminist thinkers now see those views as overly simplistic.
> ...before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation
But there is something to get right! Not feeling lonely.
> Has anyone actually read the studies linked by the author to back up his drivel?
No. I skimmed over that bit and didn't feel it was actually necessary for the point of the article. The author spoke to me on a personal level, through a narrative that I can relate to. They didn't need to prove anything to me: speaking to my lived experience was more than enough to make me think.
The problem is that the only point of the article, besides telling a story, is to raise the question of whether the author is unsatisfied with (or sometimes merely insecure about) his friendships because men are bad at friendship compared to women. It doesn't make it better to present both sides and say "but who knows," it just makes it a worse article. Without any real facts or insight to talk about, attributing something you don't like about yourself to your gender is just psychological projection and spreads negative feelings towards men.
Imagine if a Dad wrote an article, "Do men suck at parenting?" that assessed men on what was essentially their ability to "mother." Or imagine if a male teacher wrote, "Do men suck at teaching?" or a female programmer wrote, "Do women suck at programming?" None of them motivated by a new study or based on anything but a personal anecdote. We'd all rightfully rise to the defense of men and women in general.
There are whole field of scientific study based almost entirely on self-reports. As such, there has been much research done on its veracity, which has shown that it is largely valid and reliable when reporting on simple things (like friendship behavior) so long as it's anonymous, does not require introspection(1), and there is no fear of reprisal(2).
The 2007 study meets all those requirements, so I see no scientific reason to question its results.
Also, I can't think of any practical methodology for studying friendship behaviorally - but would love to be proven wrong.
1. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior?. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 396-403. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). http://users.business.uconn.edu/jgoodman/mgmt%206201%20assig...
2. Brener ND, Billy JOG, Grady WR. Assessment of factors affecting the validity of self-reported health-risk behavior among adolescents: evidence from the scientific literature. Journal of Adolescent Health 2003;33:436-457. Summary at http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/TonkaCares/RwR/Documents/Val...
Oh, very well. Thank you for proving that the scientific community disagrees with me, and proving evidence for your point. I can't say I actually agree with those criteria; especially since one is wholly impossible: there is never a possibility that there's 'no fear of reprisal' when the reprisal can take the form of conflicting with one's self-identity. To be honest, to accept a self-report I'd have to see the following:
1) A study which shows that the questions themselves do not introduce bias. An actual study, where multiple groups of participants were asked the same questions in different forms so as to prove the language of the question cannot influence the result. Of course, this would cause every questionnaire and interview study to fail, because the language does indeed affect the results and is thus a confounding variable (which cannot be controlled without pretending that some language "just doesn't affect people", and yet still functions as language).
2) A proof that the demographic of the sample was controlled for all controllable factors other than those measured. For instance, in this study it wouldn't be good enough to test for the correlation between gender and friendship satisfaction by just getting a bunch of men and women: they'd all have to be the same class, race, wealth etc.
3) The study cannot draw conclusions, nor interpret its results as causative. This is really quite self-explanatory: correlation does not imply causation. Yet, especially in sociology and psychology, this logical maxim seems to get forgotten amongst the excitement of having produced a study.
I'm sure there's more objections, but you've already put up with me arrogantly berating the scientific community for 3 points now. If I were allowed to edit my post to state that the scientific community disagrees with me regarding the validity of the 2007 study, I would.
As for an experimental methodology for studying friendship, I can't say that I can think of any studies which would do so and get past an ethics committee (bloody ethicists), but making the study longitudinal over childhood through to young adulthood would help, as it would show what age-bound variables affect the output. It might just be that young adult men are, for instance, too busy developing a career to have friends, or too busy drinking beer to have friends, or whatever; either way, making it longitudinal would allow some of the uncontrollable confounding variables (such a life experiences) to become more apparent.
1) Questions that introduce bias are known as leading questions, and researchers have devised multiple methods of avoiding that - including, as Dan noted, asking the same question more than once with different wording, and using only neutral language. Also, keeping questions simple, clear, specific and brief - with no implicit assumptions or loaded phrases.
2) Good research controls as many variables as possible. The more uncontrolled the variables are the less valid the data is - but this applies to all studies, not just self-reports.
3) Correlation ≠ causation is rarely forgotten in the actual research - the discussion sections of research in reputable journals are overly modest at best, noting the limitations and weaknesses of the study and typically making few claims for generalizability. Mass media reports, however, tend to take more than a few liberties.
I agree any valid study of friendship has to be longitudinal - the issue becomes one of measurement. You do not trust self-reports, yet how else could it be measured? Hire a researcher to follow people around? Ask them to carry an audio recorder with them every day for a few years?
The only practical alternative I can think of is to ask their close friends or relatives. However, this may be unnecessary because research has already compared self and other reports on a sensitive issue (life satisfaction) and found a high correlation (1).
And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships. It is my own experience, and that of my brother and my father, and most of the other men I know - more than enough to suggest something is not quite right - that it warrants a thoughtful discussion and not be dismissed out of hand.
> And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships.
See, you used the term 'suggests' rather than 'proves' because you know that claiming a stronger relationship between upvotes and motive would be affirming the consequent. But this is precisely the sort of weasel-wording which I've seen in observational studies, and it seems deliberately crafted to trick an uncanny reader ill-versed in logic into misinterpreting 'suggests' as 'proves'. Of course, we both know that we cannot infer anything from a consequent other than one of the possible antecedents must have occurred, and we both know that the antecedents in this case -- motive for clicking upvote -- is huge, and thus nothing meaningful can be inferred about the consequent. I'm happy to have a discussion about almost anything, but if someone comes to the party with nonsense evidence pretending the discussion has already been studied and decided, I'm going to call them on it.
I also feel like you've also dodged every point I've raised (or perhaps I didn't explain my objections very well). With regards to #1, the issue wasn't that I think researchers are deliberately crafting leading questions, but that in order for the study to be valid they'd have to show that their questions either do not lead thus aren't confounding (which I've argued is impossible), or that they lead predictably thus can be countered in the analysis (which I also argued is impossible).
With #2 you're correct that this is an issue for all studies, but it's a particularly large issue for studies of things which are irreducibly complex, like people. Since we can't (easily) take specific facets of a person and study those in silo from the rest of a person, controlling confounding variables becomes a bigger issue. Even in other observational sciences we can usually demonstrate the core parts of our assumptions in a controlled experimental manner. For instance, in the study of global warming, we can demonstrate in a controlled, experimental way that the combustion of fossil fuels releases CO2. With studies of human behaviour this is rarely possible.
With #3 you're correct that the media is far guiltier of this than the scientists, but I'd argue that scientists need to be more vocal about this issue. I appreciate this treads a fine line between asking for more scientific social responsibility, and holding scientists responsible for the behaviour of society, but I feel this is a valid concern due to the way that politicians like to fund studies such as these to validate their personal opinion. The reason I believe this important isn't that I think scientists are trying to dupe us, far from it, but because it worries me that as burden the of proof for a posteriori logic falls from the strongly codified and philosophically justified rules of empiricism and falsifiability, so scientists move from being discoverers of truth to yet another controllable authority figure.
Also, thank you again for citing evidence for your point. I apologise that I have not done so, but I seriously doubt any scientists actually agree with me here. Having read your linked study, I would say it both stands to reason and doesn't really seem to prove the point it claims to prove. If you set out to prove that self-reporting isn't invalidated by confounding variables, and you do so by invoking self-reporting which contains almost exactly the same confounding variables, then you can't really claim to have proved anything. Relatives and friends of a sample in such a study would be just as likely to change their answers, consciously or subconsciously, to avoid internal conflict, and because they're tied to the sample in such a way that would produce a similar personality and similar self-identity reprisals if the subject's life choice were cast in doubt, it's also not a large leap of logic that their changed answers would usually change along the same lines as the sample.
Again, I can't really think of a better way of studying complex issues like human behaviour, but since we started at the point of 'science agrees self-reporting is fine' and are now at 'we agree it is the best we can get', I feel we're moving in the right direction. I do agree that well-controlled self-report studies are probably the best we can get in this field, it just seems to me that the best we can get isn't as valid as the best we can get in experimental sciences, and should be noted as such.
About 1) - don't most forms ask questions more than on e using different wording? This helps eliminate people just filling the form out randomly, but couldn't it also help keep language neutral?
Yes, this is correct. Most self-reporting relies on having the same question asked in different ways and places to catch people whose inconsistent answers suggest they should be removed from the sample.
However, my objection is that I don't believe language can be easily classified in terms of the response it'll elicit. Obviously, one can (usually) correctly guess the response that'll be received if one were to run up to a stranger and yell "You're a [swearword of choice here]", yet the fact that I've had to preface this with the modifier 'usually' betrays my point; some people will get aggressive if you swear at them, some will laugh, some will respond in kind, and so on. My concern is that if we can't even predict the effect of language in its most obvious state, we probably can't predict its effect in subtler states.
This unpredictability of language leaves us in a tricky position when it comes to asking questions on a self-reporting study. In order to solve that one objection, we'd have to come up with a method of using language which manages to communicate its point, without causing that point to make people feel emotion. This is further complicated by the fact that people are complex beasts with internal and external factors playing in to how they behave, such that a question formed neutrally for one person would probably not be so neutral with others. This also makes avoiding 'fear of reprisal' for one's response to a question impossible, as we can only remove external reprisal. It would not be possible for us to, for instance, removal the internal upheaval of a conflicted homosexual admitting to a survey that they were gay.
I am not sure I understand what you are claiming here?
Are you saying that self-reports (a.k.a. anecdotal evidence) has happened so often on this subject that it in itself has created a big enough dataset to label it a proper study?
Without it we wouldn't have had this great debate about male friendships. Sure, the original article may very well be crap, but the resulting debate is not.
I'd sooner say that men and women _currently_ have different kinds of relationships, for the most part. For men who have been conditioned toward independence but who have greater emotional needs than that model allows, the independence model can feel repressive. Likewise, I've known a number of women who lean more toward independence than intimacy. (This switching of relationship models seems to happen more than a little among the trans-men and trans-women that I know.) It isn't clear to me that the relationship categories are linked to anything other than cultural/societal conditioning.
Listening to feminists talk about relationships is actually helpful, in that by acknowledging the basic equality of women, we as men can allow ourselves to form the kind of relationships that we each want individually, rather than the kind that is trained into us from childhood. Escaping from societal pigeonholes can be good for men as well as women.
I don't think he attacked the traditional male gender role. In fact, I think the article supports your general opinion. it starts by entertaining the idea of the male friendship deficiency, and even giving some anecdotal evidence.
But then, it turns around. He could enjoy his friendships without sharing "deep feelings", just centering around activities. That's what the ending means, when the wife asks him for entertaining gossips, and he can't tell anyone.
This brings me on to challenging the true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role. It's no accident that the author turns to the authority of feminists for perspectives on men -- despite that being so laughly outside the remit of feminism -- because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women. In lieu of any studies which actually support his point (note that only the first two studies in the article actually even discuss his point about male friendships, the rest are an irrelevance), he instead uses anecdote as evidence for a point neither study can support, and then goes on to blame the entire mess on the traditional male gender role. I won't defend the male gender role, because I have no stock in doing so, but I would at least ask that if something's going to be blamed for mens' terrible friendships then we at least provide some proof that men do indeed have terrible friendships.
Lastly, the article, like so many in the media, is yet another argument that encourages you to accept its faulty form by providing you with a false dichotomy: the argument begs the question that either type of friend (the emotional numerous friends of women, or the close few friends of men) is a superior type of friend, links some 'evidence' which doesn't support its point, and then encourages you to ask yourself whether men or women 'have it right' before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation.
I will say one thing though: if this is the kind of stuff Men's Journal prints, then either its readership is mostly women, or men sure do love self-flagellation.
[0] http://www.peplaulab.ucla.edu/Peplau_Lab/Publications_files/...