The role of emotional support in men’s and women’s friendships
– by McQueen Li, Eric Chung, Jessica D. Ayers, and Keelah Williams
Consider the last time something in your life went wrong: An argument that upset you, a project that didn’t go as planned, a difficult moment at work. To whom did you reach out? For many of us, we look to our friends to provide emotional support in such situations–not necessarily because they will fix the problem for us, but because they make us feel better.
There are differences, though, in the extent to which men and women think it’s important that their friends provide them with emotional support. In general, women prioritize the provisioning of this type of support from their friends more so than men. In our recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, we asked whether this pattern holds true not only in the United States, where most friendship research has been done, but in other societies as well.
Why might this sex difference exist? It likely has to do with tradeoffs in how we select our friends. Our time and energy are finite. Every hour we spend cultivating one friendship means another hour that we cannot spend on other goals in our life. This constraint makes strategic friend selection an adaptive problem, leading to evolved friendship preferences: We want friends who can bring us the most benefit in return for our investment.
Many of those benefits are universally sought after. For instance, both men and women want friends who are loyal and trustworthy. Preferences for some qualities, though, differ based on sex. This is because friendships have historically helped men and women solve somewhat distinct challenges. For example, male friendships facilitated success in intergroup warfare. Banding together with allies brought access to territory and resources, making men more attractive as potential romantic partners. Women, by contrast, were rarely participants in those kinds of conflicts. Instead, their same-sex friendships likely supported the complex work of raising children. This may have mattered especially under patrilocality (the practice of women leaving their birth families to join a partner’s group). Without relatives nearby, a woman’s same-sex friends could take on kin-like roles, providing the support that relatives might otherwise supply. If this is the case, women should place greater value on friends who are nurturing and who offer the kind of investment we associate with close kin. Emotional support is a clear sign of that investment, so we would expect women to prioritize it in their same-sex friends more than men do.
A robust body of research already suggests this is indeed the case. Compared with men, women disclose more to same-sex friends, are more likely to name a “best friend,” and report greater closeness in those bonds. However, most of this evidence comes from studies carried out in the United States. The aim of our paper was to begin exploring whether this sex difference in friendship preferences exists across societies.
To do so, we ran five studies across four countries: Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States (sampled twice). Our measure was simple and direct: Participants rated their agreement with the statement, “It is important to me that my same-sex friends provide emotional support for me.” For the Chinese sample, we had bilingual speakers translate and back-translate the survey.
Our results were consistent across societies. In all five samples, women prioritized emotional support significantly more than men did, although the magnitude of this sex difference varied by country. This suggests that the importance of emotional support in friendship may be attributable, in part, to the distinct adaptive problems men and women faced over evolutionary history. However, cultural factors may also influence how people give and receive emotional support. For example, people in individualistic cultures generally engage in greater emotional expressiveness and self-disclosure than those in collectivistic cultures.
As robust as the pattern was across our samples, it also raises questions for future work. Our findings are based on a single self-report item, yet “emotional support” spans a wide range of behaviors, such as listening, validating, and giving advice. Might the sex difference we observed depend on how emotional support is defined? Preliminary results from our lab suggest this is likely the case.
In sum, our work demonstrates once more that women in particular tend to prioritize same-sex friends who provide them with emotional support. This pattern exists in multiple countries, including both Eastern and Western societies. Altogether, our findings are consistent with a functional view of friendship—the notion that the preferences men and women bring to their friendships today trace back to the reproductive advantages those bonds once provided. In our modern world, where loneliness has reached ‘epidemic’ levels, it is more important than ever to understand the psychology behind our valued social relationships.
