Women Interact More Comfortably And Intimately With Gay Men: Article Analysis

The second article I read was “Women Interact More Comfortably and Intimately With Gay Men—But Not Straight Men—After Learning Their Sexual Orientation,”written by Eric M. Russell, William Ickes, and Vivian P. Ta. When first reading the title and summary for this article, I was a bit confused about its purpose. As a straight woman I already knew exactly why I was more comfortable around gay men and I didn’t see why that needed to be tested scientifically. But what I ended up learning from this article, more than new psychological information, was how much we can learn from scientific experiments, and how much about the way we act and think can actually be studied and quantified in logical, helpful, educational ways. The topics the article
Their results said that 70% of test subjects created false memories, which is far greater than the average found in previous false memory experiments. In the article Wade, Garry, and Pezdek work to show that Porter and Shaw were incorrect in their findings, and that the results of their tests actually aligned more with the ones others had done previously. One of the biggest flaws the authors of the article found with Porter and Shaw’s results was that when testing their subjects, they didn’t distinguish between false beliefs—just believing when someone tells you something happened in your past—and false memories—fabricating other details around what someone has told you happened and believing them. The second biggest flaw was the criteria Porter and Shaw used to determine when people had created false memories. From previous experiments there were sets of criteria that had been approved and shown to accurately identify false memories, Porter and Shaw used none of these, instead opting to create their own system where “subjects had to meet six criteria” in order to be considered having a false memory (Wade, Garry, and Pezdek, 2018). To rectify both these mistakes, the authors of the article gathered Parter and Shaw’s data and used “three different coding schemes” that had been used previously to decide whether or not each person did or did not form a false memory (Wade, Garry, and Pezdek, 2018). When replicating the results of Porter and Shaw using these new schemes, the authors found that the results began to align much more closely with that of previous experiments, with, according to two different schemes, 30% and then 26% of subjects having actual false memories (Wade, Garry, and Pezdek, 2018). Already, this was a significant amount of evidence