
Sex differences in intimate relationships (pdf) - wallflower
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.5722v1
======
zeroonetwothree
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
"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
> 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.

~~~
lrhot9
It makes complete evolutionary sense, though: Women are always completely sure
that their children are theirs, and men can never be.

So if your daughter physically came out of you, any people that physically
comes out of her are undoubtedly your actual grandchildren. A safe investment.
Your son, on the other hand, could always get cuckolded.

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roel_v
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).

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rgejman
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.

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

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speedracr
Document over at Google Docs PDF Viewer
[https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.5722v1)

