Social Constraints: The Effects Of Gender On Hugging Someone

Improved Essays
Effects of Gender on Hugging Someone We noticed that other than saying hello to friends, or people and their partners, there is little touch viewed in public settings. Due to social constraints, we hypothesized people might have a challenging time leaving their comfort zones to hug a stranger. Society has social constraints, or social “rules” when it comes to hugging, such as relationship with the person and years known. If people were able to move past their social constraints of hugging a stranger, we thought they would probably be opposite genders and those walking in groups. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the female confederate would receive more hugs from males, than the male confederate from women. To test if the woman or male …show more content…
The findings showed that men were more likely to touch women than vice versa, and cross-sex touch occurred twice more than same-sex touch. In another similar study, the findings showed no overall likelihood for either gender to touch the other more than the other and a tendency for more female’s to have same-gender touch than male same gender touch. (Stier, & Hall, 1984). Both of these past experiments had conflicting results on touch between opposite and same sex genders so in doing our experiment we wanted to find which gender is more likely to hug each …show more content…
The observer’s job was to write a 1 or 2 and M or F for every hug the confederate received and we recorded other notes that could be useful. Our operational definitions were the independent variable, or the manipulated variable, being the gender of the person being hugged, and our dependent variables were the gender of the person hugging and the hugger being alone or in a group while walking by. After the experiment, we put all the observers’ data into Excel to create our charts and graphs and we used Vassarstats and Graphpad to find our P-values to detect if we had statistically significant data.
Results
Our female confederate received more overall hugs, more hugs from the same sex, and more hugs from the opposite sex. Our female confederate 36 of the 55 hugs, 16 from women and 20 from men. Our male confederate received 19 hugs overall, 10 from males and 9 from females. There was a statistical significance of total hugs between the woman and man (P=.054, SD 5.19). There was no statistical significance found between same sex hugs and opposite sex hugs (p=.83, SD 5.19) and alone hugs and group hugs (P=.36, SD 9.54).

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