I Like You As A Friend Analysis

In the third journal article by Heidi M. Reeder, ‘I like you…as a friend’: The role of attraction in cross-sex friendship, she begins by defining friendship and breaking it down as to what is attractive to each party in a friendship. While most other research has been focused on how sexual attractiveness is the underlying motivator for an opposite-sex friendship, Reeder conducts research to conclude if that is the only motivator. She performs a study using in-depth interviews of 20 opposite-sex friendship pairs and discovers four type of attraction that can occur. She then gives out a questionnaire to college aged participants to determine the frequency of each of the four types of attraction. The research methodology, rationale and results were presented for each study. In the first study, Reeder “discovered that there are four qualitatively different types of attraction: subjective physical/sexual attraction, objective physical/sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and friendship attraction.” (Reeder, 2000) She explains that the first two types of attraction occurred when the friend was perceived to be a good-looking person and could be experienced subjectively or objectively. Subjectively a friend would …show more content…
She does not separate out gender and whether one or the other has more of an interest in attractiveness or not, whereas the research done by Bleske and Buss gender is a large determining factor in whether there are benefits and/or cost to a relationship. Bleske and Buss use a more evolutionary framework in which to base their research, stating that as people and cultures evolved the perception of opposite-sex friendships have changed. While once, men viewed women as more of a vehicle for enlarging the gene pool, they now have conflicting thoughts about the benefits and cost to having an opposite-sex