A TTRACTION AND A TTRACTIVENESS IN M ALE -F EMALE D YADS : D O D ATING C OUPLES D IFFER FROM C ROSS -S EX F RIENDS ? Whitney Joseph, Heather Williquette, and Bryan Donavan Faculty mentor: April Bleske-Rechek 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 cross- sex 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. B ACKGROUND M ETHOD D ISCUSSION R EFERENCES A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS 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. Past research on friendship has utilized a “bring a friend to the lab” design; in the current study, we approached male- female 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). R ESULTS 1 Luo, S., & Klohnen, E. C. (2005). Assortative mating and marital quality in newlyweds: A couple-centered approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, Bleske-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, Swami, 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, Prichard, 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. 5 Bleske-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, P ANEL 1: A TTRACTION P ANEL 2: A TTRACTIVENESS R ATINGS P ANEL 3: D ISCREPANCIES IN A TTRACTION As shown in the figure at right, men in cross- sex friendships did not report significantly more attraction toward their cross-sex friends than women did, t(39) = 1.64, p =.109, d = 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 = 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 male- female 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.