February 10, 2013
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Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, February 4, 2013 17:33 EST
Topics: men and women
A first-of-its-kind study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act.
“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is,” Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester explained in their study. “That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.”
Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical. In other words, the differences between men and women should be viewed as a matter of degree rather than a sign of consistent differences between two distinct groups.
Numerous studies have examined gender differences between men and women. Carothers and Reis were able to find a whopping 3,370 articles on the topic in 2011 alone. The vast majority of the research examined the average differences between men and women. The research can easily be misinterpreted as finding that “Men are better at X” or “Women are worst at Y” — ignoring the fact that the studies are comparing averages and contain variance.
“The world presents us with a huge amount of information, so we often take shortcuts to help process it all (this is known as the ‘cognitive miser’),” Carothers explained to Raw Story in an email. “One of those shortcuts is a tendency to categorize things — it’s easier to think of 2 things (men are one way and women are another) than it is to think of all of the nuances of overlapping distributions, particularly if they’re not brought to our attention when we hear about an average difference.”
Many researchers, particularly those who were “evolutionarily oriented,” appeared to “favor a more categorical interpretation of gender differences,” Carothers and Reis wrote. They speculated this was because no research had actually addressed the specific question of whether gender differences were categorical or dimensional.
If men and women were psychologically distinct from one another, then their scores on psychological measures should form large clusters at either end of a spectrum with little overlap between the two groups.
This is the case for physical characteristics such as height, shoulder breadth, arm circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio. Men tend to be tall, have broad shoulders, large arm circumference, and a small waist-to-hip ratio, while the inverse is true for women. A man is extremely unlikely to be taller than a woman, yet have narrower shoulders, for instance.
Yet the same could not be said for the myriad of psychological characteristics examined by the two researchers, including fear of success, sexual attitudes, mate selection criteria, sexual behaviors, empathy, and personality. A man could be aggressive, but verbally skilled and poor at math, for example, combining stereotypical masculine and feminine traits.
“It’s not enough that men, on average, score higher than women on a scale of masculinity,” Carothers told Raw Story. “Nearly all of the men would have to score higher than nearly all of the women on nearly every item of the scale. We did not see that level of consistency with the psychological variables we had.”
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[Man and woman in bed with gender symbols via Shutterstock]
Comments (11)
totally agree with that. i think it's all social prgramming that makes us different.
I agree with Amanda, gender is socially defined. It's kind of funny that it has taken someone this long to realize that gender is not categorical. I've always thought that gender identity was more on a gradient than anything else.
@Amandascowen, @Erika_Steele – My thoughts exactly.
I agree with everyone above. This finding makes more sense to me in terms of my actual experience with people. I have long believed differences are socially defined/socially put-upon. Living in Munich was for me a big wake up call as women and men there are on a more equal footing on many levels. It was quite refreshing to live in such an environment.
i personally don't really get how researchers make certain conclusion, in "social science", where the variables are harder to control, unlike in "pure science" (not sure the accurate terminology, hence the " "...
@maniacsicko – I've usually referred to them as the hard sciences though, like yourself, I don't know if that's a technical terminology.
As someone who majored in both for college, I want to say the largest difference is that it simply takes longer in the social sciences because the data is far less often consistent; thus, you have to spend far more time gathering all the possible data out there (this also means that many of the conclusions drawn, even in our own lifetime, may be disproven in the future).
However, the conclusion making process I find to be very similar; both must rest on logical deductions.
@TheSutraDude – I always wanted to go to Germany; and the reasons keep growing.
@thirst2 - I loved living in Munich. I've been back many times since. Regarding relationships, I came to have many friends there. This was in the early 80s. What struck me was 1. there seemed to be honest friendships between guys and girls. a guy and girl could go out for dinner with no thought about getting someone into the sack later and 2. I never saw one of my guy friends all of whom had girlfriends, fiances or wives ogling other women or talking about body parts when just us guys were out at a biergarten. I would have felt terribly out of place and awkward if I'd said something like "look at the ____ on that one." In other words I didn't see a predominance of regarding women as objects.
I've noticed similar in NYC since going to a few techno concerts and underground concerts. The young people seemed more like what I experienced in Germany. I found that encouraging.
@thirst2 - I loved living in Munich. I've been back many times since. Regarding relationships, I came to have many friends there. This was in the early 80s. What struck me was 1. there seemed to be honest friendships between guys and girls. a guy and girl could go out for dinner with no thought about getting someone into the sack later and 2. I never saw one of my guy friends all of whom had girlfriends, fiances or wives ogling other women or talking about body parts when just us guys were out at a biergarten. I would have felt terribly out of place and awkward if I'd said something like "look at the ____ on that one." In other words I didn't see a predominance of regarding women as objects.
I've noticed similar in NYC since going to a few techno concerts and underground concerts. The young people seemed more like what I experienced in Germany. I found that encouraging.
this study concludes what I've always believed. social programming had it's time and arguably still has some use (for what, i don't know). i think we're all entering a point of gender understanding in our history and that's a good thing in my book.
Neurological differences between men and women support there are gender differences... possibly in ways of thinking and perceiving. This study may turn out to be useful in some ways. I'll look it over further and compare it with other reports that I have. I downloaded the report:
http://www.psych.rochester.edu/people/reis_harry/assets/pdf/CarothersReis_2012.pdf
Thanks for posting this summary.
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