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All the research told Lynch School Assistant Professor of Education Julie Paquette MacEvoy that relationships were more important to girls than to boys. But more and more, MacEvoy heard a different story from boys.
“What I heard told me that boys do care as much about relationships as girls do, which was at odds with research that has found girls are better at relationships than boys,” said MacEvoy. “That led to this idea that there is this aspect of friendship that girls really struggle with, but that we just hadn’t tapped into it yet.”
Working with colleagues at Duke University, MacEvoy began to examine whether or not girls cope better than boys when friends violate core expectations of friendships.
What MacEvoy found was that young girls are more devastated than boys when friends let them down and as likely to pursue “revenge goals” – small acts of getting even that are on par with the perceived slight – the researchers reported last month in the journal Child Development.
The study of fourth- and fifth-grade children found that these violations – such as cancelling plans, sharing a secret with a friend, or failing to be supportive at a difficult time – upset girls more than boys and left them feeling angrier and sadder in response.
“Our findings stand in contrast to previous research that has shown boys to experience more anger than girls in their relationships,” said MacEvoy, the study’s lead author. “Here, we found that girls are in fact just as capable as boys are of anger. What leads boys and girls to feel angry, though, seems to be different. For girls, the anger comes out when they think that their friends have betrayed them or haven’t been there for them.”
The study of 267 girls and boys found girls were also more likely than boys to interpret friendship transgressions in a negative way, such as thinking that their friend does not care about them, does not value their friendship, or was trying to control them, the researchers report. In response, girls indicated they would be just as likely as boys to get revenge on their friend, or verbally scold their friend or threaten to end the relationship.
“There tends to be a perception of girls as being more passive than boys, but this just doesn’t seem to be true. It seems that when girls feel that something that matters to them is in jeopardy, like their friendships, they are just as likely as boys to want to retaliate and to respond with aggression,” said MacEvoy.
Earlier studies have shown that girls’ friendships are more emotionally intimate than boys’ friendships and that girls are better at supporting and helping their friends and demonstrate they’re more capable of resolving conflicts with their friends. But studies have also shown that boys’ friendships last as long as girls’ friendships, that boys are as happy with their friendships as girls are, and that boys are no lonelier than girls over time.
In the study, the researchers read brief stories describing how a friend violated a core expectation of friendship. For each story, the children were asked how they would feel about the incident if it really happened and how they would respond.
MacEvoy and co-author Steven Asher of Duke recommend that teachers, parents and adults interested in fostering healthy friendships among children help them learn to cope with the inevitable disappointments that can arise. Girls in particular may need extra guidance as they try to understand a friend’s behavior and decide how to respond.
MacEvoy said she is currently following up the study with new research into whether or not girls set higher expectations when it comes to friendships. Most recently, she interviewed 300 local kids on their friendship values.
“We’re looking at whether girls really do value their friendships more than boys do,” said MacEvoy, herself the mother of a four-year-old daughter. “When people talk about boys and girls, they think girls care more about having friends than boys do. But no one has ever really looked at that.”