Women Favour Dyadic Relationships, but Men Prefer Clubs: Cross-Cultural Evidence from Social Networking

Abstract

The ability to create lasting, trust-based friendships makes it possible for humans to form large and coherent groups. The recent literature on the evolution of sociality and on the network dynamics of human societies suggests that large human groups have a layered structure generated by emotionally supported social relationships. There are also gender differences in adult social style which may involve different trade-offs between the quantity and quality of friendships. Although many have suggested that females tend to focus on intimate relations with a few other females, while males build larger, more hierarchical coalitions, the existence of such gender differences is disputed and data from adults is scarce. Here, we present cross-cultural evidence for gender differences in the preference for close friendships. We use a sample of ∼112,000 profile pictures from nine world regions posted on a popular social networking site to show that, in self-selected displays of social relationships, women favour dyadic relations, whereas men favour larger, all-male cliques. These apparently different solutions to quality-quantity trade-offs suggest a universal and fundamental difference in the function of close friendships for the two sexes.

Machiavellianism, emotional manipulation, and friendship functions in women's friendships

“…Women spend more time discussing feelings and personal information and their friendships tend to be dyadic in nature, which does not allow for substitute partners if relationships break down (Benenson & Christakos, 2003;David-Barrett et al, 2015;Vigil, 2007). This focus on exclusive friendships characterised by information sharing may provide a context for specific types of manipulation to take place.…”

Evolution of students’ friendship networks: Examining the influence of group size

“…Although gender has not shown significant effects on friendship network, the same-gender dyads or triads are not explored in this study. Previous studies showed that women's dyads differ from men's and that women prefer dyads while men prefer larger, all-male cliques (David-Barrett et al 2015). Because there is a small number of males in this study, differentiation of the same-gender and the opposite gender relationships is not justifiable.…”

Life course similarities on social networking sites

“…We used a recently published Profile Picture dataset which focused on gender differences in close friendship (David-- Barrett et al, 2015). This dataset contains the profile picture type of 309 individuals and all their altogether 111,863 friends.…”

“…The dataset was constructed the following way (David-- Barrett et al, 2015). First, the coders used random search terms to select 309 users of Facebook, all of whom share their friends publicly.…”

“…The objective of the categorisation was to identify those pictures that contain only same aged adult humans ("peers") with identifiable gender (David--Barrett et al, 2015). According to Facebook rules, age and other demographic characteristics were not publicly accessible information in most cases, and thus were not collected.…”