Cultural differences as a potential mediator?

In our short interviews with random passersby in and around the Union building, we maintained control over some variables.  For instance, the wording of the initial question was the same: "Do you believe that men and women can just be friends?"  We also determined that the male group (2 group members) and the female group (3 group members) were to each interview five males and five females.  However, we did not record any other demographic information about our interviewees.  On reflection, perhaps race and ethnicity would have played a mediating role in the responses we received from this short study.

Despite the overwhelmingly uniform response of "Yes!" to our initial question, our team made some post-hoc observations to subtle differences in interviewees elaboration of their responses.  These disparate answers were occasionally tied to potential differences in culture.

One notable encounter was a single male interviewee who responded "No" to our initial question.  He was an international student from Korea, and explained that males and females could not be just friends "because the different sexes are biologically different, so they aren't meant to be friends."  His response, although not necessarily related to culture, may hint at a confusion between sex, which is biologically determined, and gender, which is socially constructed.

Another male interviewee identified himself as a student from Africa.  Though he responded "Yes" to the initial question, he also admitted to treating his male and female friends differently.  He said, "I think it's just [natural] to treat people the way you've been raised."  He also further mentioned that he thought that this was because of culture, explaining that for himself, being raised in Africa, "men and women have different gender roles in society."  Although he was unable to give an example of how these different treatments play out in the friendship context, he gave a situation where in church, males and females sit on different sides from each other.  A third interviewee, who our team observed to be a Hispanic female, explained the difficulties and pressures presented by society on a cross-gender friendship.  "It's hard to have a really close relationship with a guy," she explained, drawing from her own personal experiences.  "Nobody believes that you are just friends - they think you [spent] the night together. ... My friends ask me, 'What's going on with him?  Do you have [feelings] for him?  Why are you spending [so] much time with him?'"

From these answers, our team observed a degree of interaction between cultural gender norms and the possibility of cross-gender friendships.  Whether pressures come from larger societal expectations of gendered behavior, or from individual friends questioning the nature of the relationship, culture seems to play a role in mediating individual perceptions of platonic friendships.