Why straight women and gay men are often so close.
New psychology study
Will and Grace knew it. Ditto for Stanford and Carrie. Now a new psychology study has provided evidence that gay men and straight women are the perfect friends with benefits – as long as the benefits have to do with trustworthy relationship advice.
“I was interested in the evolutionary perspective as to why gay men and straight women form close friendships,” says Eric Russell, a visiting psychology researcher at the University of Texas in Austin and lead author of the study, published in the latest issue of Evolutionary Psychology.
Russell wondered if it had something to do with the exchange of mating advice since gay men and straight women aren’t romantic partners or mating competition and were “uniquely positioned to exchange trustworthy information.”
To test his hypothesis, Russell enlisted the help of 88 straight women and 58 gay men, all undergrads from the Texas ChristianUniversity, and conducted two experiments.
In one, straight women were presented with a scenario involving a party, a friend who bags out at the last minute and a substitute “date” named Jordan. Researchers asked the women to look up a Facebook profile for Jordan — who was presented as either a straight woman, a straight man or a gay man – and then answer a series of questions. In the second study, gay men were presented with the exact same scenario except the Facebook profile depicted Jordan as either a straight woman, a gay woman or a gay man.
