ATTRACTION AND ATTRACTIVENESS IN MALE-FEMALE DYADS:
DO DATING COUPLES DIFFER FROM CROSS-SEX FRIENDS?
Whitney Joseph, Heather Williquette, and Bryan Donavan
Faculty mentor: April Bleske-Rechek
BACKGROUND
• Heterosexual dating partners tend to be
similarly attractive.1,2 They are also highly
attracted to one another; and both men
and women rate their partners as more
attractive than they rate themselves.3, 4
• Less is known about attractiveness and
perceptions of attractiveness among
heterosexual cross-sex friendship dyads,
although a common finding is that men
report more attraction toward their
female friends than women do toward
their male friends. 5
• In the current study, we aimed to (1)
replicate the finding that men are more
attracted than women are to their crosssex friends; (2) investigate variability
within each sex in attraction to cross-sex
friends; and (3) determine whether
friends – like romantic relationship
partners – rate their partners as more
attractive than they rate themselves.
• We also aimed to determine whether
discrepancies in friends’ attraction to one
another were related to discrepancies in
friends’ perceptions of one another’s
attractiveness.
METHOD
• Past research on friendship has utilized a
“bring a friend to the lab” design; in the
current study, we approached malefemale dyads in a social environment to
increase ecological validity of our data.
• Two researchers, themselves a dyad,
approached male-female dyads at the
university student union and asked them
if they were interested in participating in
a study “for the Psychology Department.”
• Upon consent, each member of the dyad
independently completed a survey about
their perceptions of their own
attractiveness relative to others of their
same age and sex, their counterpart’s
attractiveness relative to others of the
same age and sex, and their attraction to
their counterpart. All attractiveness and
attraction ratings were on 7-point scales,
not at all to extremely, and much less to
much more.
• Each member of the dyad also reported
the status of their relationship: just
friends, in a romantic relationship, or
other (e.g., “it’s complicated”).
• Finally, we photographed each dyad and
asked for their permission to use their
photographs in the research, specifically
by having judges from another university
rate their attractiveness (data not yet in).
• When data collection was complete, 8
dyads were excluded because they held
discrepant views on their relationship
status (4), were related (2), or included a
homosexual member (2).
DISCUSSION
RESULTS
PANEL 1: ATTRACTION
The four histograms below show that
men’s and women’s reports of
attraction toward their cross-sex
friends varied quite widely, whereas
among dating couples, nearly all men
and women reported very high levels
of attraction toward their romantic
partner.
As shown in the figure at right, men in crosssex friendships did not report significantly
more attraction toward their cross-sex friends
than women did, t(39) = 1.64, p = .109, d =
0.26. Both men and women in cross-sex
friendships reported less attraction toward
their partner than did men and women in
romantic relationships, whose attraction
toward their partner was at ceiling, t(36) =
1.14, p =.264, d = 0.19.
PANEL 2: ATTRACTIVENESS RATINGS
Men and women in both
types of dyads were likely
to give their partner a
higher attractiveness rating
than they gave themselves.
This was particularly the
case among dating couples,
where there were no men
and only one woman who
gave themselves a higher
attractiveness rating than
they gave their partner.
PANEL 3: DISCREPANCIES IN ATTRACTION
REFERENCES
1Luo,
As anticipated from the variation in attraction
discrepancy scores among cross-sex friends, men’s and
women’s attraction toward one another were not
correlated, r(40) = .10, p = .556. That is, feeling
attracted toward one’s friend provides no indication of
whether that friend feels attraction in return. Women
who gave themselves lower attractiveness ratings than
they gave their friend were also more attracted to their
friend than he was to them, r(40) = .45, p = .004.
We computed a discrepancy attraction score by
subtracting women’s attraction to their male partner
from men’s attraction to their female partner;
positive scores reflected more attraction from the
male toward his partner and negative scores reflected
more attraction from the female toward her partner.
Among cross-sex friendships, in 33% of the dyads the
woman reported more attraction to her friend than
he did to her (33%); in 50% of the dyads, the man
reported more attraction to his friend than she did to
him (50%). In contrast, dating partners commonly
reported the same level of attraction toward one
another.
• In this study, we approached malefemale dyads around campus, and then
evaluated their attraction toward one
another and their perceptions of one
another’s attractiveness as a function of
whether they were
romantically
involved or “just friends.”
• Although men trended toward more
attraction to their female friends than
the reverse (as found in several prior
studies), the difference was not
statistically significant. We speculate
that because we approached dyads in
the field, we captured an ecologically
valid sample of friendships among young
adults in which the two friends vary
widely in their attraction toward one
another.
Moreover,
one
friend’s
attraction was not at all correlated with
the other’s. Thus, our data suggest that
asymmetries in attraction, which have
the potential to cause hurt feelings and
confusion about the status of the
relationship, are quite prevalent in
college students’ cross-sex friendships.
• We also found that men and women in
both types of dyads gave their partner
higher attractiveness ratings than they
gave themselves. We are in the process
of obtaining outside judges’ ratings of
partners’ photos to determine whether
participants’ perceptions of each other’s
attractiveness converge with “objective”
evaluations. We will also use those
ratings to examine whether cross-sex
friends – like dating partners – are
similarly attractive.
S., & Klohnen, E. C. (2005). Assortative mating
and marital quality in newlyweds: A couple-centered
approach. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 88, 304-326.
2Bleske-Rechek, A., Remiker, M. W., & Baker, J. P.
(2009). Similar from the start: Assortment in young
adult dating couples and its link to relationship
stability over time. Individual Differences Research, 7,
142-158.
3Swami, V., Stieger, S., Haubner, T., Voracek, M., &
Furnham, A. (2009). Evaluating the physical
attractiveness of oneself and one’s romantic partner.
Journal of Individual Differences, 30, 35-43.
4Prichard, I., Polivy, J., Provencher, V., Herman, C. P.,
Tiggemann, M., & Cloutier, K. (in press). Brides and
young couples: Partners’ weight, weight change, and
perceptions of attractiveness. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships.
5Bleske-Rechek, A., Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L.,
Matteson, L., Schumacher, B., Stocco, C., & Ritchie, L.
(2012). Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex
friendship. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 29, 569-596.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the Office of Research and Sponsored
Programs at UWEC for supporting this research into the
upcoming year with a Summer Research Experiences for
Undergraduates grant. We also thank Lyndsay Nelson,
our collaborator and UWEC alumnus who is collecting
outsiders’ ratings of participants’ attractiveness for
subsequent analyses with this dataset.