Except it's not. Among my male friends we have far closer relationships and I wouldn't describe any of them as status seeking. To quote someone with access to the paper:

> From Study 1: "Participants (N = 213, 109 women) were recruited from a small Northeastern college in exchange for partial course credit or a lottery entry for a $40 gift card. Of these participants, 190 (95 women) completed all focal variables and were included in further analyses. Sample size was determined by the number of participants researchers were able to recruit over the course of one semester. Sensitivity analyses indicated we have 0.80 power to detect an effect size of partial η2 = 0.076 for focal predictions. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 23 (M = 19.82 years, SD = 1.31). The majority of participants identified as White (75%), 14% identified as Asian, 4% as Hispanic/Latino, and 3% as Black."

> From Study 2: "U.S. Participants (N = 306, 141 women) were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and received $1.00 compensation. Given our shift from ‘ideal’ to actual friends, we anticipated a reduction in the effect size of our predicted sex differences and aimed to recruit a 50% larger sample than that of Study 1. Sensitivity analyses indicated that our sample size allowed us to detect effect sizes of partial η2 = 0.003 with 0.80 power. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 84 (M = 35.22, SD = 11.29) and primarily identified as White (74%) or Black (9%)."

> From Study 3: "U.S. Participants (N = 250; 97 women) were recruited through TurkPrime and received $1.00 for completing the study. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 70 (M = 34.43, SD = 9.88). Sensitivity analysis indicated that we were able to detect small effects (f < 0.10) with 0.80 power assuming 0.5 correlation between measures. The majority of participants identified as White (70%), 11% identified as Black, 7% as Asian, 6% as Hispanic/Latinx, 2% as multi-racial, 1% as American Indian, and 1% as Pacific Islander."

The thing that stands out to me is that a group of people thought it'd be appropriate to classify all or most men and women based on a specific college and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

>The thing that stands out to me is that a group of people thought it'd be appropriate to classify all or most men and women based on a specific college and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Do you think this is the be all and end all of the topic? Some researchers had an idea to test and did a study and tried to get as random a sample of people as they could that might be representative of the population. Or even a sub group of people. They got some results and published. If the results are interesting enough, they will try and do a better study.

The fact that your experience is different doesn't refute the study either. It's statistical. They aren't saying the 100% of all friendships are like X. I dare say it's also obvious that a sociological study has limitations and pointing them out isn't interesting.

From an academic perspective, it's no problem as the primary audience are other researchers where the limitations are a given.

However, I posted the details from the study's design for the readers of Hacker News, who might assume that the study is generalizable to the broader U.S. population, especially since only the abstract is available for most users who see the link.