Can I Trust You to be a Friend? Investigating the Role of Women's Friendship Preferences in Friendship-Making Decisions

Although research has documented the importance of friends, little research has explored the impact of women’s preferences on whether people want to be their friends. This study builds off Bradshaw (2021) to investigate how women’s friendship preferences influence the likelihood of her pursuing potential friends. We hypothesized that 1) women who prefer to have male friends (guys’ girls) would have higher sociosexual orientation (SOI) scores compared to women who prefer to have female friends (girls’ girls) and 2) participants who viewed a profile of a guys’ girl would rate her as having lower SOI attitudes than participants who viewed a profile of a girls’ girl. Contrary to our predictions, results showed that girls’ girls had higher SOI attitudes (p =0.005), desire (p = 0.039), and overall (p = 0.015) scores, compared to guys’ girls. Additionally, we found that when viewing the target, there was no effect of the participant’s friendship preferences (p = 0.743), but there was a significant condition effect such that participants thought a target who was described as a guys’ girl would have higher SOI attitude scores (p = 0.001). Finally, when determining if participants would want to be friends with the target, we found a non-significant effect of participants’ friendship preference (p = 0.241) and condition (p = 0.228), but there was a significant interaction such that girls’ girls were significantly less likely to want to be friends with a target who was described as guys’ girl (p = 0.012).