One morning at breakfast, my patient Jane looked up to see that her husband, Evan, was smiling. He held the newspaper, but his gaze was lifted and his eyes darted back and forth, though he wasn’t looking at her. She had seen this behavior many times before in her lawyer husband and asked, ‘What are you thinking about? Who are you beating in court right now?’ Evan responded, ‘I’m not thinking about anything.’ But in fact he was unconsciously rehearsing an exchange with counsel he might be having later that day – he had a great argument and was looking forward to mopping up the courtroom with his opponent. Jane knew it before he did.
—Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (2007)1
Goodness, but Brizendine sets the bar high for women. I am trying in vain to recall an occasion during our many years together when, glancing up to see my husband’s fingers twitching over the cereal bowl, I startled him by presciently asking, ‘What are you thinking about? What invoice are you paying right now?’ To be brutally honest, at breakfast I prefer to reserve the majority of my neurons for the thinking of my own thoughts, not those of others. But while Brizendine’s claims are somewhat extravagant – is it really true that women have more privileged access to men’s thoughts than they do themselves, or that ‘a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm’?2 – we’re all familiar with the concept of womanly intuition and womanly tenderness.
It’s important, by the way, not to jumble together these two distinct ‘feminine’ skills. When a man looks for a soul mate to refresh his overlaboured faculties and unbend his learned brow, if he is wise he will check for two different qualities in his potential candidates. First, he needs someone who is quick to discern – from, for example, its furrowed appearance – that his brow is indeed in need of straightening. This is cognitive empathy, the ability to intuit what another person is thinking or feeling. But in addition, she needs to be the kind of person who will use her powers of interpersonal perception for good, not evil. Affective empathy is what we commonly think of as sympathy – feeling and caring about the other person’s distress. Put the two together and you have an angel in human form. As Baron-Cohen describes it in The Essential Difference, ‘imagine you not only see Jane’s pain, but you also automatically feel concern, wince, and feel a desire to run across and help alleviate her pain.’3
As we already know, according to Baron-Cohen it is women on average who are ‘predominantly hard-wired’ to see, feel, wince, run and alleviate. His Empathy Quotient (or EQ) questionnaire asks people to report their skill and inclination for both cognitive and affective empathy with statements like I can easily tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation and I really enjoy caring for other people. (The person filling in the questionnaire agrees or disagrees, slightly or strongly, with each statement.) To diagnose what he calls brain sex, Baron-Cohen uses the EQ together with its brother the Systemising Quotient (SQ), which poses questions like If there was a problem with the electrical wiring in my home, I’d be able to fix it myself and When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football league scores or stock market indices.4 People who score higher on the EQ than the SQ have an E-type or female brain, and the opposite result indicates an S-type or male brain. The large minority who score approximately equally on the two tests are deemed to have a balanced brain. Baron-Cohen reports that just under 50 percent of women, but only 17 percent of men, have a female brain.5
As journalist Amanda Schaffer pointed out in Slate there is something curious about equating empathising with the female brain when, albeit by a whisker, the majority of women do not claim to have a predominantly empathising focus. She reports that when she asked Baron-Cohen about this, he ‘admitted that he’s thought twice about his male brain/female brain terminology, but he didn’t disavow it.’6 And, while we’re on the subject of terminology, calling a test the ‘Empathy Quotient’ does not, on its own, make it a test of empathising. Asking people to report on their own social sensitivity is a bit like testing mathematical ability with questions like I can easily solve differential equations, or assessing motor skills by asking people to agree or disagree with statements like I can pick up new sports very quickly. There’s something doubtfully subjective about the approach.
As it turns out, doubt is well-justified, for both affective and cognitive empathy. In an important review of gender differences in affective empathy, psychologists Nancy Eisenberg and Randy Lennon found that the female empathic advantage becomes vanishingly smaller as it becomes less and less obvious that it is something to do with empathy that is being assessed.7 (So, gender differences were greatest on tests in which it was very clear what was being measured, that is, on self-report scales. Smaller differences were seen when the purpose of the testing was less obvious. And no gender difference was found for studies using unobtrusive physiological or facial/gestural measures as an index of empathy.) In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)’, as Eisenberg put it to Schaffer.8
As for cognitive empathy there is, it appears, no shortage of people in the world who can unwittingly offend, misunderstand and steamroller over the delicate signals of others, all while maintaining the self-perception that they are unsurpassedly sensitive to subtle social cues. When psychologists Mark Davis and Linda Kraus analysed all the then-relevant literature in search of an answer to the question, what makes for a good empathiser? their conclusion was surprising. They found that people’s ratings of their own social sensitivity, empathy, femininity and thoughtfulness are virtually useless when it comes to predicting actual interpersonal accuracy. As the authors conclude, ‘the evidence thus far leaves little doubt that traditional self-report measures of social sensitivity have minimal value in allowing us to identify good or poor judges.’9 A more recent study ‘found only weak or non-significant correlations between self-estimates of performance and actual performance’, while another, with a sample of more than 500 participants, supported the ‘still surprising conclusion that people, in general, are not very reliable judges of their own mind-reading abilities.’10
A few studies have found links between self-perception of empathising skill and actual ability, I should note. Recently, a large Austrian study of more than 400 people found that EQ score correlated modestly with something called the Reading the Mind from the Eyes test.11 (In this multiple-choice test, the participant is shown just the eye region of a series of faces and asked to guess each person’s mental state.) But this relationship is the exception rather than the rule. (And in this case, there might be an unexpected reason for the link.)12 As an expert on the subject of empathy, University of Texas–Arlington professor William Ickes, suggested in his book Everyday Mind Reading, ‘most perceivers may lack the kind of metaknowledge they would need to make valid self-assessments of their own empathic ability’,13 which is a politely academic way of saying that if you want to predict people’s empathic ability you might as well save everyone’s time and get monkeys to fill out the self-report questionnaires. And so to find, as Baron-Cohen does, that women score relatively higher on the EQ is not terribly compelling evidence that they are, in fact, more empathic. Nor is it hard to come up with a plausible hypothesis as to why they might give themselves undeservedly higher scores. As we saw in the previous chapter, when the concept of gender is primed, people tend to perceive themselves in more stereotypical ways. The statements in the EQ could conceivably prime gender on their own. As philosopher Neil Levy has pointed out, the statements in the EQ and SQ are ‘often testing for the gender of the subject, by asking whether the subject is interested in activities which tend to be disproportionately associated with males or with females (cars, electrical wiring, computers and other machines, sports and stock markets, on the one hand, and friendships and relationships, on the other).’14 And in any case, the questionnaire asks participants to note their sex before filling in the questionnaire, which
we know can prime a gender identity. So are women actually better at guessing other people’s thoughts and feelings?
The idea of womanly intuition isn’t without empirical support. In the Austrian study, women scored higher than men on the Reading the Mind from the Eyes test. However, the difference was small: women, on average, correctly guessed 23 of the 36 items; men, 22.15 Women also score reliably, if modestly, higher than men on a test called the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS). In this test the participant watches a woman acting out a series of very short, and very stripped down, scenes. Each scene is just two seconds long, and the viewer sees only a few channels of information: such as only the body and hands, or just the face. From this minimal information, the viewer has to choose one of two possible descriptions of the scene.16 Yet despite women’s slight advantage on the PONS overall, the detailed picture is a little more nuanced. At a dinner party, when you listen to someone explain the system they have discerned in the latest football league scores, you are easily able to convey your fascination by way of a polite smile. But the so-called leaky channels of communication – for example, your body language and fleeting microexpressions – are less readily controlled. On the PONS, women are particularly adept at decoding the most controlled forms of communication, like facial expression, but, the leakier the channel, the smaller their advantage.
This is odd. Isn’t women’s intuition supposed to specialise in the hidden stuff other people can’t see? Brizendine, for example, describes women’s intuition as an ability to ‘feel a teenage child’s distress, a husband’s flickering thoughts about his career, a friend’s happiness in achieving a goal, or a spouse’s infidelity at a gut level.’17 But it now seems that womanly intuition is the authority in posed feelings rather than the perhaps more interesting true emotions that leak out in other ways. One explanation put forward for this is that women are socialised to be polite decoders who would as soon peer through the keyhole of an occupied restroom stall as scrutinise someone’s unintended emotional leaks.18
What’s more, tests like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and the PONS are not exactly what you would call realistic simulations of everyday mind reading. Trying to penetrate the expression of the Mona Lisa, or talking to a time-pressed Muslim woman in full burka might come close to what they assess – but arguably, social interactions more typically involve a stream of rich and changing information from other people (who do not offer multiple-choice options as to what they might be feeling). In the 1990s, William Ickes and his colleagues developed a new empathy test, one Ickes probably rightly claims is ‘the most stringent test’ of a person’s ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of others.19 In this empathic accuracy test, two people wait together for an experiment to begin. The experimenter has departed to find a replacement for the projector bulb that has just blown – and in fact, the experiment has already begun. As they sit there and wait, they are unobtrusively filmed and recorded for six minutes. On her return, the experimenter explains the true purpose of the experiment. If both parties are happy to continue, they then view the film clip of their interaction individually, and as they go through the tape they pause it every time they recall having had a specific thought or feeling, and jot down what it was, and whether it was positive, negative, or neutral. Then, in the last part of the experiment, each person watches the tape again, but this time it’s stopped every time the partner reported a feeling or thought. The task is to infer what this was. This can then be compared to what the partner actually reported feeling or thinking at that very moment.
You will probably agree that, of all the tests mentioned so far, this seems to most closely approximate real-world empathising. There are no actors posing expressions, no narrow strips of eyes, no disembodied voices and hands, no carefully choreographed and scripted scenes. Instead, people are interacting in a natural and unscripted way that generates a stream of successive mental states to be inferred from a rich variety of clues. You might expect men to struggle with such a demanding test, but they do not. As Ickes reports in Everyday Mind Reading, much to everyone’s surprise, in the first seven studies to use this measure no gender differences were found:
Where was the empathic advantage that we commonly refer to as ‘women’s intuition?’ It wasn’t evident in the interactions of opposite-sex strangers, or in the interactions of heterosexual dating partners, or even in the interactions of recently-married or longer-married dating partners. It wasn’t evident in comparisons of female-female dyads with male-male dyads or of all-female groups with all-male groups. It wasn’t evident in Texas, in North Carolina, or even in New Zealand. Was it nothing more than a cultural myth? A fictitious bit of folklore that was ripe for scientific debunking?
But then, something ‘baffling’ happened.20 The next three studies, all of which took place four or more years after the first empathic accuracy study, did find gender differences. The researchers quickly spotted that there had been a slight change in the form that the viewers used while going through the tape of the interaction. In the new form, for each thought and feeling that they guessed, they had to say how accurate they thought they were. When this version of the form was used womanly intuition existed; when the old form was used, it didn’t.21 Why might this be? Ickes suggested that this small change reminds women that they should be empathic, and therefore increases their motivation on the task. He concludes from his lab’s research that ‘[a]lthough women, on average, do not appear to have more empathic ability than men, there is compelling evidence that women will display greater accuracy than men when their empathic motivation is engaged by situational cues that remind them that they, as women, are expected to excel at empathy-related tasks.’22
If so, then if the experimental situation can instead be designed to motivate men, then their empathic performance should also improve. This is exactly what researchers are beginning to find. Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges used an empathic accuracy test in which participants watched a video of a woman talking about her failure to get a high enough score on an exam to get into the graduate school she wanted to attend.23 When the feminine nature of the empathic accuracy test was highlighted by asking participants for sympathy ratings before the empathic accuracy test, women scored significantly better than men. But a second group of women and men went through exactly the same procedure but with one vital difference: they were offered money for doing well. Specifically, they earned $2 for every correct answer. This financial incentive levelled the performance of women and men, showing that when it literally ‘pays to understand’ male insensitivity is curiously easily overcome.
You can also improve men’s performance by inviting them to see a greater social value in empathising ability. Cardiff University psychologists presented undergraduate men with a passage titled ‘What Women Want’.24 The text, complete with bogus references, then went on to explain that contrary to popular opinion ‘non-traditional men who are more in touch with their feminine side’ are regarded as more sexually desirable and interesting by women, not to mention more likely to leave bars and clubs in the company of one. Men who read this passage performed better on the empathic accuracy task than did control men (to whom the test was presented in a nothing-to-do-with-gender fashion) or men who had been told that the experiment was investigating their alleged intuitive inferiority.
Clearly, one’s performance on cognitive empathy tasks involves a combination of motivation and ability. If social expectations can create a motivation gap, could they also be responsible for an ability gap? Women on average score better than men on another social sensitivity test called the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT). Here, participants watch and hear people acting out unscripted interactions. From the actors’ verbal and nonverbal behaviour, the viewers have to try to work out the nuances of their relationships. For example, from watching a scene between two men and a child, the participant has to work out which man is the child’s father. Recently, psychologists Anne Koenig and Alice Eagly used the IPT to explore the i
dea that the gender stereotype of women’s superior social skills might furnish women with an unfair advantage.25 To one group, the test was accurately described as a measure of social sensitivity, or ‘how well people accurately understand the communication of others and the ability to use subtle nonverbal cues in everyday conversations.’ Before the participant took the test, the experimenter casually mentioned that ‘We’ve been using this test for a couple of quarters now. It’s 15 questions long and, not surprisingly, men do worse than women.’ In this group, the men did indeed do slightly worse than the women. But to a second group of participants, the test was described in a more gender-neutral way. It was presented as a measure of complex information processing, or ‘how well people process different kinds of information accurately.’ In this group, the men performed just as well as the women.
The take-home message of these studies is that we can’t separate people’s empathising ability and motivation from the social situation. The salience of cultural expectations about gender and empathising interacts with a mind that knows to which gender it belongs. So what would happen if we could temporarily trick a female mind into thinking it was male? As we saw in the previous chapter, when people take the first-person, ‘I’ perspective of someone else, the stereotypical traits of the other permeate and seep into the perspective-takers’ own self-concept. This merging of identities can cross gender boundaries. A few years ago, psychologists David Marx and Diederik Stapel asked a group of Dutch undergraduates to write about a day in the life of a student named Paul. Half of the students wrote in the first-person (‘I’) while the other half used the third-person perspective (‘he’). Afterwards, they were asked to rate themselves on technical-analytic skills and emotional sensitivity skills. For the female undergraduates, thinking of themselves as Paul in the ‘I’ perspective altered their self-conceptions. Women who attempted to be Paul living his life actually incorporated his stereotypical male characteristics into their own self-conceptions. They rated themselves as higher on analytic abilities and lower on emotional sensitivity, compared with women who had written a third-person story. In other words, there was ‘a merging between the self and [Paul], such that female participants became more “malelike” as a result.’ 26 Indeed, they became so malelike that their self-ratings on these stereotypical traits were statistically indistinguishable from the men’s. For men, there was no such effect of being Paul on their self-concept, presumably because they already were a male student.
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