Delusions of Gender (5 page)

The researchers then went on to show that these changes in the self-concept had an effect on behaviour. Galinsky and his colleagues found that pretending to be a professor improved analytic skills compared with controls, while a self-merging with cheerleader traits impaired them. Those who had imagined themselves as an African American man behaved more competitively in a game than those who had briefly imagined themselves to be elderly. The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behaviour. The maxim ‘fake it till you make it’ gains empirical support.

No less remarkable effects on behaviour were seen by Stacey Sinclair and her colleagues. You’ll recall that women who thought they were about to meet a man with traditional views of women perceived themselves as more feminine than women who expected to meet a man with more modern opinions. In one experiment, Sinclair arranged for her participants to actually interact with this man. (Of course, he was really a stooge, but didn’t know what each woman thought he thought about women.) Women who thought he was a benevolent sexist didn’t just think themselves more feminine, they also behaved in a more stereotypically feminine way.
²⁸
(As a psychologist who has worked for several years in philosophy departments, perhaps this is a good moment to suggest to any colleagues who have found tearoom conversations with me intellectually unsatisfying that they have only their low opinion of psychologists to blame.)

It’s not hard to see just how useful and adaptable a dynamic sense of self can be.
²⁹
As the pivot through which the social context – which includes the minds of others – alters self-perception, a changing social self can help to ensure that we are wearing the right psychological hat for every situation. As we’ve begun to see, this change in the self-concept can then have effects for behaviour, a phenomenon we’ll look at more closely in the chapters that
follow. With the right social identity for the occasion or the companion, this malleability and sensitivity to the social world helps us to fit ourselves into, as well as better perform, our current social role. No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive and useful is not the same as ‘hardwired’. And, when we take a closer look at the gender gap in empathising, we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking in the social context.

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

G
oodness, 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