Sex Conflicts On Myspace
By Steer, Birch, Impey & Hall
Forward: if you've got here and are hoping for an easy-read version of what we've found out about MySpace then try this article. The current page is the drier, sciency bit that we've only put up to let everyone know that we did actually do all this work and haven't made it up.
Patterns of Sexual Conflict in Online Community Sites
Introduction
The battle of the sexes has interested scientists for years, mainly in the hope that they’ll finally understand how to get a girlfriend themselves. One of the more interesting themes is the difference between what men and women want out of a relationship. Consider the following from an evolutionary perspective. What each of us wants is to pass on as many genes to the next generation as possible. This means having as many children as possible. However, we also want those children to be fit, healthy and virile so that our genes carry on passing down into the future. Therefore we should try and give our children as good a start in life as possible.
So, women should want their men to hang around after his child is born and help bring it up, providing food, resources and other assistance. Men, on the other hand, are less constrained. They don’t have to spend nine months nurturing their unborn offspring in their bodies; for men making a baby is a straight in and out job. However, it’s not going to be totally worth a man’s while to just flit around fathering children left, right and centre when other men are hanging around giving extra help to their children. The children of these other men will therefore be bigger and stronger. It might then be worthwhile for a man to hang around with one partner (for example a wife) and help her to raise their children. However, if he can get the chance to father a few extra children on the sly without having to look after them too much, then all well and good.
This study was designed to see whether differences in human sexual strategies are discernible from the different ways in which men and women use the social networking website MySpace. Are married men more promiscuous than married women and men in a relationship? Do they have more female friends? And do they ‘pimp’ their pages more?
‘Pimping’ pages involves altering the layout, background colour and fonts an individual’s MySpace page from that which given as the default. It can also include the addition of slideshows and videos to the site.
Methods
2500 separate MySpace profiles were selected at random and the following data was extracted:
- Name
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- Relationship status
- Number of friends
- Proportion of non-band friends of the opposite sex
- Whether the page had been pimped or not
For profiles that showed more than fifty friends the proportion of friends of the opposite sex was calculated from the first fifty non-band friends. In pilot testing this proved to be a good estimation of the true value.
Profiles were excluded if they failed to meet the following criteria:
- Must be viewable to the public.
- Must have all the required information.
- Age must be lower than 100.
- Must have more than five non-band friends – it was assumed that profiles with fewer than five friends were of people who weren’t using MySpace heavily as a social networking device.
- Founder, Tom Anderson wasn’t counted as a friend since he is automatically assigned as a friend when people sign up to MySpace.
1412 profiles were excluded from the analysis, leaving 1088 usable profiles comprising 700 males and 388 females. Data was statistically analysed using MINITAB® with proportion data being arc-sine square root transformed for appropriate analyses.
Results
The age profile of sexes wasn’t significantly different between men and women (t = -0.95, df = 834, p = 0.340), nor was the trend for women to pimp their pages more (χ2 = 2.67, df = 1, p = 0.096). However, men did have a greater proportion of opposite-sex friends than women (t = -6.33, df = 929, p = 0.000 – see table 1).
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Significant differences were observed between the numbers of men and women claiming to be in each of the relationship status categories (see table 2). The proportion of men claiming to be single was much higher than the proportion of women claiming they were single (χ2 = 62.614, df = 4, p = 0.000).
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Divorcees and swingers were excluded from the following analyses due to the small numbers of females falling into these categories meaning that robust statistical analysis could not be carried out on these groups.
To test whether the sex profile of men’s and women’s friends differed in response to relationship status a general linear model was performed. This took arcsine-square root transformed values as the proportion of friends of the opposite sex as the independent variable. The model included sex and relationship status as factors and age as a covariate. Age had no effect and was subsequently removed from the model by stepwise deletion. A significant interaction between sex and relationship status was observed (F2,1038=3.48, p=0.031). Men had the lowest proportion of female friends when they were in a relationship, the exact opposite of what was found in women, where those in relationships had the most male friends, although the difference between women in a relationship and single women is relatively minor (figure 1). Overall men had a greater proportion of opposite-sex friends than women.
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As shown previously, there was no significant difference between how many men and women pimped out their pages. There was also no difference between the proportion of opposite-sex friends that pimped and non-pimped profiles had (F1,1040=3.11, p=0.078), nor was there any interaction between pimping and the sexes (F1,1040=1.08, p=0.298). However, pimped sites do tend to have a higher number of friends in total (Kruskal Wallis: H = 81.86, df = 1, p = 0.000). It is possible that there might be an interaction with sex in this case, but the highly skewed nature of the data for the number of friends precludes parametric testing (figure 2).
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Conclusions
The most interesting result from this study is the inter-sex difference in the proportion of opposite-sex friends of people in different relationship categories. Women have, proportionately, the most male friends when they are in a relationship whereas this is when men have the fewest. One explanation for this result is that men, in unmarried relationships, feel they should prove their trustworthiness to their partners. If they can show that they will be faithful and resourceful spouses then their partner may be more willing to bear their children. However, once men have married they then can have more confidence that their relationship is stable and, by working together, have a good chance of raising quality offspring. Once a man has reached this marital state then it might be worth his while spending a little extra time looking for brief flings elsewhere. If the man can produce a few extra children by other women via other liaisons then he might well increase the numbers of genes passing into the next generation, as well as the genetic diversity of his offspring. However, if these extra children don’t fare so well it is of lesser consequence because the man’s main attention is taken up in providing for his main family.
It might be more important, on the other hand, for a woman to be sure about her choice of long-term partner. If her partner leaves then she is left either with the prospect of bringing up her costly children on her own or finding a new partner. It is well known from the animal kingdom that new males often treat existing young badly, for example, male lions taking over a pride will kill all existing children. It is possible that similar mechanisms occur in humans, or have occurred in the past. From an evolutionary perspective, it is not much of a fitness benefit for a man to raise another’s children. Thus women have more to lose if a partner by whom she has had children leaves. It might therefore be advantageous for a woman, when in a pre-child relationship, to keep comparing her current partner to other potential mates to check that she is getting the best deal. However, once she has committed to one partner then she wants to keep them close by. She then wants to maximise the chances of her current partner of staying around because he will be the one who maximises her current and future fitness.
It is also interesting that there seems to be little effect on the proportion of opposite-sex friends of pimping a page. Therefore it seems that modifying pages isn’t a sexual signal; if it had been we would expect pimped profiles to show a greater proportion of opposite-sex friends than non-pimped profiles. As it is, pimping is associated with a greater number of friends, which indicates that those people who pimp their site are those who simply are more active and sociable online.
We can supply some references if you'd like - but we're hoping that no-one's read this far!
Image: Jonathan Natiuk
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