The Psychology of the 'Friend Zone'
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What is the psychology behind the 'friend zone'?
The Last Show with David Cooper, where we utilize nonlinear reverse inverse backward thinking protocols. It sounds like this. The friend zone. Why do teenage boys sometimes think a girl likes me while the girl insists I was just being nice? Is that simple confusion? Is it something deeper? Well, new research weighs in on these romantic misreadings that start to take shape in high school. I'm here with Marius Stavong, who's a psychology researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he is a member of the sexual conflict research group. Marius, welcome to the program. Thanks a lot, David. Thanks for having me. So what exactly is meant by sexual misperception? Are we talking about just awkward hallway vibes in high school or is it something more deep that happens to young people?
So allow me to explain the context and background by illustrating a situation a lot of people might have found themselves in at some point in their life or for many people, many times in their life. Say you're interacting with someone from the opposite sex. Let's restrict the pronoun to heterosexual individuals, to men and women.
Why do teenage boys misinterpret female friendliness?
If a guy is interacting with a girl he knows, and say he has feelings for her, he is romantically interested in her. he kind of faces this dilemma that he doesn't really know why is she hanging out with him, right? Maybe she's hanging out with him because she shares those romantic feelings for him. But in principle, he doesn't know that because people are typically very opaque about the romantic interest in someone. People are like... typically keep those cards very close to their chest and are reluctant to reveal the romantic interest to someone. So you sort of engage in this guessing game, trying to figure out, okay, is she interested in me or is she just hanging out with me because she wants to be friends?
And it turns out that when men try to find that out, they usually, or very often at least, mistake her friendliness for being romantically interested. So, like, to put it simply, she's hanging out with him because she thinks he's a great friend and he's hanging out with her because he's really into her and he thinks she's into him and she thinks he just wants to be friends. She has no idea he's into her. And the sexual misperception that comes in when he misperceives her friendliness as her being romantically interested in him. And a lot of research has shown that this tendency to misperceive women's friendliness as romantic interest, that's very robust in adult men. And we wanted to find out when does this occur, like men's tendency to sort of misperceive women's femininity as sexual interest.
And we found out it is already there by around age 16, and it sort of grows in strength gradually. throughout adolescence of men from age 60 to 19, they more strongly tend to start to believe that a girl is into him more than just for the sake of being friends. I remember being that age, like puberty, a lot of hormones running through my system. Is that the reason for it? Or is this kind of culturally learned, this behavior? Like where does it come from at that age? That's one of the things we kind of wanted to find out because on the one side, if you see it as from like an evolutionary perspective, you don't think it is very much a cultural thing. The underlying idea is that To put it bluntly, it is pretty rare that a girl is interested in a guy in a romantic sexual setting.
That's sort of just how the statistics are. Sure, for me, it's actually never happened in my whole life. No, I'm kidding. I don't know why I'm making light of this, but please keep going. But if you're like other men, it's...
How do sexual misperceptions develop during adolescence?
Much more likely that the girls that you've been into, they probably haven't been that into you. That's just how it is for men, right? So kind of romantic and sexual opportunities for men, they are pretty rare throughout their lifetime often. So the idea is that... that one time or a couple of times when she is interested in you, you kind of, it's important to sort of not let that opportunity pass.
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