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An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes. The researchers argue that women's friendships in particular drive the process of finding a mate and supporting the next generation.
The data could also undermine traditional notions about how humans like to organize themselves. "There has been a view in anthropology that the ancestral state for humans is a form of patriarchy, and I'm not sure that that's true," says University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, an author of the study published April 19 by Nature Scientific Reports. (Scientific American is a part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Dunbar and an interdisciplinary team examined cell phone data from a single provider in an undisclosed European country. (Specific locations were kept anonymous to protect cell phone users' identities.) The researchers worked with data gathered over a seven-month timeframe and restricted themselves to studying communications between cell phone users of a known age and sex, making a data set of about 3.2 million subscribers, or about 20 percent of the nation's cell phone users. Working on the assumption that close friends communicate most frequently, the team analyzed the top three friendships of each cell phone user based on the frequency of communication to spot patterns in the average male or female user at various ages.
The researchers expected to find "homophily," or the tendency for an individual to pick a friend like him or herself. Instead, it seems that romance trumps other forms of friendship: The data revealed that an individual's best friend, particularly in one's 20s and 30s, happens to be someone of the opposite sex and a similar age. In addition, striking differences exist in how men and women communicate with their presumed romantic partner. For one, the man in a woman's life was her very best friend for roughly 15 years, compared with seven years in the case for men. The peak age for partner parlance also differed: 27 years old for women and 32 for men.
After age 50, however, things change. The preference for a romantic partner peters out in both men and women, and toward the oldest age range in the data set, both sexes seek companionship first and foremost. For a woman, friendship with her man was replaced by a strong relationship with another woman, usually about a generation younger. Dunbar and his colleagues interpret this pattern as a mother–daughter relationship.
Putting together the strong preference in women for first a man and then a daughterlike figure, the researchers conclude that biology shapes female behavior, which in turn affects men. Dunbar suggests that women initiate and prioritize the relationship with a romantic partner earlier in life than men, an action that gradually leads men to reciprocate. This relationship remains top priority throughout the average woman's childbearing years. After that, she turns her attention to supporting the next generation of women as they approach childbearing.
"Generally, we have probably underestimated how important these family support networks are," Dunbar says. He speculates that contemporary declines in family size may reflect the mobility of modern women, isolating them from their supportive maternal network. In addition, he believes that the bonds between mother and daughter and the strength of a woman's influence on mating are so strong that they may underlie human society's natural tendencies. "I think the default for humans, if all else is equal, is actually a matrilineal society."
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10 Comments
Add Comment"Working on the assumption that close friends communicate most frequently, the team analyzed the top three friendships of each cell phone user based on the frequency of communication to spot patterns in the average male or female user at various ages."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think this is a poor assumption and it makes any conclusion they draw from it meaningless. I communicate with people from work on the phone much more frequently than I do with close friends. I willing to bet that a lot of other people are in that same boat. If that is the case, then their data is greatly skewed.
I can't access the unreferenced research report mentioned as the basis for this article, but I don't think its possible to draw general conclusions about "how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes" from "An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages" that must have been only recently collected.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article explains the methodology employed:
"Dunbar and an interdisciplinary team examined cell phone data from a single provider in an undisclosed European country. (Specific locations were kept anonymous to protect cell phone users' identities.) The researchers worked with data gathered over a seven-month timeframe and restricted themselves to studying communications between cell phone users of a known age and sex, making a data set of about 3.2 million subscribers, or about 20 percent of the nation's cell phone users. Working on the assumption that close friends communicate most frequently, the team analyzed the top three friendships of each cell phone user based on the frequency of communication to spot patterns in the average male or female user at various ages."
Conclusions include:
"The data revealed that an individual's best friend, particularly in one's 20s and 30s, happens to be someone of the opposite sex and a similar age. In addition, striking differences exist in how men and women communicate with their presumed romantic partner. For one, the man in a woman's life was her very best friend for roughly 15 years, compared with seven years in the case for men. The peak age for partner parlance also differed: 27 years old for women and 32 for men."
Most importantly, since European countries generally have somewhat distinct cultures, how can it be determined that selected population's phone use represents the social characteristics of the rest of humanity?
Some of the conclusions seem to require information not likely to be contained in phone records or, for the 3.2 million subscribers studied, any other source. How could it possibly have been determined that "the man in a woman's life was her very best friend for roughly 15 years, compared with seven years in the case for men" or that "peak age for partner parlance also differed: 27 years old for women and 32 for men?" Could the duration of relationships be determined from customer account records or seven months of call data?
Perhaps these questions regarding relationship information is explained in the research report, but I still question whether this specific population represents all others.
'Assuming...'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAssuming is not science. It's meaningless speculation.
No, I don't communicate most with friends on my cell but with work related activities.
Once again, I think of a humorist, who said "Academics studied for years to discover what the rest of us knew all along".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImagine, do women really bond more with their daughters (maybe even with their sons) than men do?? Other studies have shown, that a mother is very important for the health/success of her grandchildren.
I am waiting for the academic study that shows men to have much fewer problems with their mother-in-laws than women have, contrary to the "wisdom" of jokes and cartoons!
Whoa! At 76 I look back and can see how typical I am!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article does not directly address the statement that "The data could also undermine traditional notions about how humans like to organize themselves. "There has been a view in anthropology that the ancestral state for humans is a form of patriarchy, and I'm not sure that that's true," says University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar". Since this is a news report, not the paper itself, that is understandable. However, I challenge that idea that anthropology has held the view that patriarchy is the ancestral state for humans. At least not in the anthropology I am familiar with. I know a number of cross-cultural papers that show that patriarchy is associated with agriculture which in human terms is a late comer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is really bad science. Actually, I blame SciAm for letting this out under their umbrella. I like many others who posted before me immediately thought of the work related "Skew" that would throw this whole thing out the window. Evolution has dictated what females and males want/need for the next gen to come about and procreate. Societal pressures have divested the bulk of behavior. If two twin girls were separated from birth - one became the daughter of a poor rice farmer in China - and the other a Paris Hilton clone, taken in by a rich western family...... well, I don't really know, but I hypothesize that it would make for some high rating TV reality show that would conclude the vast differences in human self worth - and the sorted ugliness we like keep out of our selfish thoughts. I was a 20+ year subscriber to SciAm. It was fecal-particle based science like this and lack of backbone on the part of the editors that stopped me from subscribing last year. The oldest publication in the US - It’s almost sacrilegious to see this kind of article - if I may steal a term from uniformed editorial staff.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat. When can we expect to see a research paper on why advertisers pander more to women than men?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"making a data set of about 3.2 million subscribers, or about 20 percent of the nation's cell phone users" Why would you collect so much data? A sample of 3.2M does not sound random and the conclusions are therefore suspect. A random sample of 1-2K could probably produce results that would actually be meaningful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore, the law of large numbers says that all the data is driven towards the mean.
As for the "undisclosed European country", which one has about 3.2M/.20% = 16M cell phone users?
This research has been done! 'Why and wherefore?'- we may ask ourselves:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was found that women determine overwhelmingly, with 80% rates, about WHAT's to be bought - from food to cars even. 'Ladies' Choice' is the preferred choice of Dame Eve O'Lution, SHE who has to be obeyed...
Interestingly, 80% of our brain activity is in the visual department. The advertising industries are having a field day not for nothing.
See 'Colorific Manifesto', under "Colour Eating" for more.