Study findings and comparisons.

Going into this project, our team was expecting to mirror the findings in the YouTube video Why Men and Women Can’t be Friends (WMWCF), where college students are interviewed and asked if it is possible for men and women to be just friends. 

The humor in this video comes from a dichotomy of opinions: while women attest to the fact that it is possible to be friends, the men candidly say that it is not – that they will always have feelings for their female friends that go beyond mere friendship. The conclusion: despite what the women seem to believe, men and women cannot be friends.

In our own interviews, however, we found surprisingly different responses: out of twenty people, only one person (male) said that men and women cannot be friends. With each affirmative response, our suspicions about the journalistic integrity of WMWCF rose. Looking at our own nearly unanimous responses, we found it difficult to believe that the creators of WMWCF were being completely honest and objective with their findings.

After considering the interview practices used in WMWCF, it became clear that the creators of WMWCF were heavily biased. In one scene, a male being interviewed confesses, “I guess what I’m saying is no.” In the background, one can hear the cameraman cheer, “Yes!” as if they finally coaxed the correct answer out of him. In other scenes, the interviewer sets up the women being interviewed by asking them a series of loaded questions. In yet another scene, a woman clearly gets frustrated and ends up walking away from the interview (the camera crew counts this as a victory).

Although WMWCF is humorous, it is hardly objective, and we believe that this lack of objectivity resulted in findings that were different than ours. That being said, our team did acknowledge that the responses in WMWCF matched our own opinions (i.e. that men and women cannot be just friends) more closely than the responses that were given to us from the UIUC students in our interviews. One possibility is that the interviewer in WMWCF, although biased, pushed the people being interviewed towards honest answers. In contrast, our interviewing procedure was much less aggressive, which gave interviewees the freedom to answer without having their responses scrutinized. This important issue of interviewee honesty will be addressed in a future blog post.