Anyone who has watched Sex and The City will know that best friends Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda couldn’t be more different.
Now, a study shows that opposites really do attract when it comes to women forming friendships.
Researchers found that men are likelier to become friends with people who think and act like them, while women often form friendships with those who behave differently.
The study was carried out by researchers at Tulane University in Louisiana.
They asked 684 first-year college students to complete tasks which measured their risk-taking and social preferences, and who also reported who their closest friends were.
Analysis revealed that men prefer friends who behave similarly when it comes to risk-taking and cooperation.
Women, meanwhile, were more likely to choose friends with different approaches – valuing variety in their social circles.
This difference may be explained by how men and women prioritize friendships, the researchers said.
Anyone who has watched Sex and The City will know that best friends Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda couldn’t be more different. Now, a new study shows that opposites really do attract when it comes to women forming friendships
Researchers found that men are likelier to become friends with people who think and act like them. Pictured: The Hangover
While men tend to bond over shared activities and strategies, women usually focus more on emotional support and diverse perspectives.
These findings challenge the idea that ‘like attracts like’, showing it applies more to men than women, they added.
The study’s lead author, James Alm, said: ‘Our study reveals that while men often form friendships based on shared behaviours, women seek out connections with people who bring different perspectives.
‘This challenges the traditional idea that similarity always drives friendships and highlights the importance of diversity in social relationships, particularly among women.’
The findings were published in the journal China Economic Review.
In the hit series Sex and The City, which first aired in 1998, the main characters differ significantly in their personalities, attitudes towards relationships and overall life outlook.
Carrie is the romantic writer obsessed with finding ‘the one’, Samantha is the confident and sexually liberated PR executive, Charlotte searches for a traditional, ‘perfect’ partner and family life while Miranda is a cynical career-focused lawyer.
Despite their differences – and some fallings-out – they remain firm friends throughout the show’s six seasons while they navigate their careers, love lives and children.
Women are more likely to choose friends with different approaches – valuing variety in their social circles. Pictured: Girls
A previous study has found that men with dissimilar tastes in women are more likely to become friends.
Researchers discovered that during a ‘speed-friending’ session, men were more likely to say they had a better connection with another man if they had different ‘types’.
However, this was not the case for women in the group.
This could be because, from an evolutionary standpoint, men have more to lose from having a friend with similar mate preferences due to parental uncertainty, the researchers explained.
‘Men need to be sure any resulting child from their relationship is their own otherwise they risk investing lot of time and resources toward raising someone else’s kid,’ Professor Kelly Campbell, from California State University, said.
‘Therefore, they would prefer keeping male friends around them who do not find their wife or girlfriend appealing.’
WHY DO FRIENDS HAVE SIMILAR BRAIN SIGNALS?
A new study by researchers at Dartmouth College has found that friends are ‘exceptionally’ similar to each other in how they perceive and respond to the world around them.
The findings revealed that similar neural responses are strongest among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest across brain regions involved in emotional responding, directing one’s attention and high-level reasoning.
Even when the researchers controlled for variables, including left-handed- or right-handedness, age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, the similarity in neural activity among friends was still evident.
This similarity in neural response decreases with increasing distance in real-world social networks.
The team, based at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, studied the friendships and social ties of nearly 280 graduate students. 42 of the students were then linked to an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity using blood flow, while they watched videos on everything from politics and science to comedy and music
The researchers found that you can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to video clips.
Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends who, in turn, had more similar neural activity than people three degrees removed (friends-of-friends-of-friends).
The team also found that fMRI response similarities could be used to predict not only if a pair were friends but also the social distance between the two.
This phenomenon may be due to the fact that individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them, and similarities among friends may reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world.
For the study, the researchers built on their earlier work, which found that as soon as you see someone you know, your brain immediately tells you how important or influential they are and the position they hold in your social network.
