“Chasing Tail”: Testing the Relative Strength of Sexual Interest and Social Interaction as Predictors of Furry Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Furries can be described as a mediacentric fandom, similar to other fandoms, which organizes around an interest in anthropomorphic art. Past research has also aimed to highlight and understand the sexual motivations of furries, leading to questions regarding the relative strength of fandom and sexual motivations for joining and maintaining membership within the group. The goal of the present study was to test the relative contributions sex- and fandom-related motivations (e.g., social belonging) have in determining furry identity to provide better conceptualizations of this unique community for future research and education. In a sample of furries (n = 1,113), participants reported sexual attraction to facets of their interest and were found to be sexually motivated to engage in specific fan behaviors. However, a series of follow-up analyses revealed that non-sexual motivations were not only stronger in magnitude than sexual motivation was, but were also much more strongly correlated with furry identification.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".