26 POST | Issue 3 January/February 2014 Issue 3 January/February 2014 | POST 27

Myth Defied

By Mary Stone

Illustrations by Chris Lyons

Are MEN and WOMEN really that different?

If your partner is of the opposite sex, chances are you have blamed his faults on his gender more than once.

“That’s such a typical guy thing to do,” is a common refrain among women. Turns out, however, it has little to no scienti!c basis.In reality, men and women psychologically are far more similar than they are different, although anecdotal and even academic research seem to indicate the opposite. Researchers at the University of Rochester, however, decided to test the prevailing beliefs by re-analyzing data from 13 studies that showed signi!cant psychological differences between men and women. The U of R also collected their own data on a range of psychological characteristics. Total, they assessed 122 traits from more than 13,000 people and found that from empathy to academic inclinations, from extroversion to mating criteria, men and women psychologically are largely the same. Instead of dividing into two groups, researchers showed men and women’s traits overlap in multiple areas such as their interest in casual sex or the allure of a potential mate’s virginity. Psychologically, they showed, we are not predictably or even identi!ably different. The study, titled: Men

and Women Are From Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender was published last February in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It examined qualities often associated with behavior

in men and women. (It did not look at abilities or skills.) The

overarching objective was to do what almost 4,000 other articles on

human sex differences did not show: whether psychological differences

between men and women are categorical or a matter of degree. Characteristics such as assertiveness and the value people place on close friendships showed similar scores

between men and women. Because these traits exist to one extent or another in everyone, the authors concluded they should not be used to label men and women. Unless you’re OK with being wrong.

People are inclined to categorize each other, and gender often is the

!rst label we attach, explained researcher Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study. One main reason it is supposed we do this is economy, psychological scientists explain. To this end, Reis and his

co-author Bobbi Carothers point to two other researchers in the !eld. In 1991, Susan Tufts Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, professors of psychology at Princeton

Issue 3 January/February 2014 | POST 29

University and University of California, respectively coined the term for the tendency to reduce people into categories. They called the mental shortcuts the “cognitive miser” hypothesis. The cognitive miser idea describes the way people —even scienti!c researchers—organize the bombardment of data they receive every day. Because it is theorized as impossible to analyze and understand all the stimuli a person experiences, she ignores information to make quick conclusions, resorting to labels and past judgments in the process, Fiske and Taylor explained. These mental shortcuts help people categorize learned information, solve problems, and make decisions faster. But while people conserve their cognitive resources by dichotomizing, it usually comes at the expense of truth. “To the extent that people are much of the time cognitive misers, they simply take well-worn shortcuts because they cannot always deal with other people in all their complexity,” Fiske and Taylor wrote in the updated version of their book Social Cognition published in 2013. In the U of R’s study, Reis and Carothers wrote: “Sex is one of the most readily observed human traits, it forms an easy and common basis for categorizing other persons. As a result, because other qualities tend to be accommodated to accessible categories, and because men and women do differ in myriad ways, category-based generalizations maximize the difference between the sexes while minimizing differences within them.” In a Nov. 2010 article by Fiske in Perspectives on Psychological Science, she wrote that people often do not consider that even positive characteristics attributed to a sex can be damaging. “For example, by saying women are so communal, and regarding it as a great virtue, there are expectations that these attributes apply to all women, which is not true. Moreover, this ambivalence turns out to be more general than just gender relations,” Fiske wrote.

Past judgments affect our interactions every day, moment to moment, without our even knowing it. “When people encounter another person or group, the !rst questions people ask are ‘Are they on my side or not? Are they friend or foe?’ And if they are a friend, then they are warm, trustworthy, and sincere. But if they are a foe, they are cold, untrustworthy, and callous,” Fiske wrote.Unlike the advice commonly espoused in pop psychology books, men and women do not think about their relationship that differently, Reis and Carothers wrote. The best evidence of that, they note, is that gay and lesbian relationships often have the same problems relating to each other that heterosexual couples do. The conclusion is that a person’s sex is not the reason for couples’ differences. It’s their characters. Concluding the problem is a person’s gender not only misinforms the partner with the complaint, it can keep the other partner from exploring change. The assumption that there are sex differences entitles people to believe that those characteristics are genetic and as such unchangeable, Reis and Carothers wrote last April in a New York Times story titled: The Tangle of the Sexes. “Consider a marital spat in which she accuses him of being emotionally withdrawn while he indicts her for being demanding,” they wrote. “In a gender-categorical world, the argument can quickly devolve to ‘You’re acting like a typical (man/woman)!’ Asking a partner to change, in this binary world, is expecting him or her to go against the natural

tendency of his or her category—a very tall order.“The alternative, a dimensional perspective, ascribes behavior to

individuals, as one of their various personal qualities,” Reis and Carothers wrote. “It is much easier to imagine

how change might take place.”To determine if gender differences were dimensional or categorical, Reis and Carothers reopened previous studies on what are considered

the ‘big !ve’ personality traits: extroversion, openness, agreeableness, emotional stability,

and conscientiousness. Using three separate statistical procedures, the authors searched for

evidence of attributes that could reliably categorize a person as male or female. Some men, they found, possess characteristics that societally are more ascribed to women, such as thoughtfulness, while some women do not express that quality at all. Even if one were to examine a list that measures a full range of one’s psychological characteristics, such as their capacity for empathy or aggression, there is no reliable way to conclude the person’s gender from the list alone. All of this is not to say that there are not important differences between the sexes. They are many, the authors con!rmed, they’re just not associated to character. Instead, they have more to do with preferences, activities, self-care, physical strength, anatomy. In these cases gender, the authors explained, can be a reliable predictor for interest in stereotypic activities, such as women’s af!nities for scrapbooking and cosmetics and men’s interests in boxing, watching pornography or playing video games. But for character, their psychological traits such as fear of success or empathy, men’s and women’s scores did not cluster at one end of the spectrum as they did with height, for example. Instead, their psychological traits overlap, with very few exceptions. Reis, the study’s co-author, is an expert in the !eld of relationship research. In 2012 he received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Association for Relationship Research. Reis, who early in his career was credited with applying complex statistics to social psychology, joined the University of Rochester in 1974. He is responsible for helping to launch the !eld of relationship science, advancing theories such as intimacy theory: now a leading psychological model of relationships. He has written or edited seven books and published more than 170 studies and articles. Reis’ co-author Bobbi Carothers completed the study as part of her doctoral dissertation at University of Rochester. She now is a senior data analyst for the Center for

Public Health System Science at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the implications of categorizing our partners is limiting them, Reis explains. “Having gender stereotypes hinders people from looking at their partner as an individual. They may also discourage people from pursuing certain kinds of goals. When psychological and intellectual tendencies are seen as de!ning characteristics, they are more likely to be assumed to be innate and immutable. Why bother to try to change?” Carothers and Reis say their !ndings support the “gender similarities hypothesis” put forth by University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde. Using different methods, Hyde also challenged ‘overin"ated claims of gender differences’ with analyses of psychology studies, demonstrating that males and females are similar on most psychological variables. The results were not a surprise for Carothers, who was raised by physical education teachers. The self-described tomboy grew up knowing stereotypes did not apply to her. That experience, she says, fueled a lifelong interest into the biological basis of behavior. In graduate school she realized she could apply her skills with statistics to exploring sex differences. Reis and Carothers recognize that on average there may be gender

differences in people, but not “consistently and in"exibly” gender-typed individuals. The belief that men and women are fundamentally different, they note, is endemic in media, and serves to bolster the idea that men and women are separate human kinds. In reality, the authors showed, sex-based differences exist on a continuum; they manifest to one extent or

another, and this they postulate is due in part to our modern culture. (The questionnaires came primarily from psychology students at U.S. universities.)

Reis and Carothers note it is entirely possible that these !ndings would have been very different in previous generations, in other cultures, and in other parts of the world, where traditionally male-identi!ed traits are discouraged in women. Right now, however, American men and

women are not that different anymore, even if we persist in ignoring it.

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STRENGHT

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On physical characteristics men and women fall into separate groups with very little overlap. The physical strength graph shows statistical analysis of the scores for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s long jump, high jump, and javelin throw competitions.

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28 POST | Issue 3 January/February 2014 Chris Lyons

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175MASCULINITY-ASSERTIVENESS

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WOMEN

OVERLAP

For most psychological attributes, however, including masculine attitudes, there is extensive variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes.

The masculinity-assertive-ness graph is based on self-reported measures of competitiveness, decisive-ness, sense of superiority, persistence, confidence, and the ability to stand up under pressure.

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