In the cleverly-titled The Distance Between Mars and Venus, the authors argue that personality-wise, the differences between men and women have been underestimated by previous studies because they used simplistic statistics.
Traditional studies of gender and personality have given some men and some women a personality quiz, and calculated the average male and female scores on the different aspects of personality.
When you do this you find that there are differences, but that the standardized effect sizes are fairly small, which means that there is a lot of overlap. Even on measures where men score above women on average, lots of men score below the female average, and vice versa, like this:
The authors of the new paper say that this approach fails to capture the true difference and they give a helpful analogy of why:
Consider two fictional towns, Lowtown and Hightown. The distance between the two towns can be measured on three (orthogonal) dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude. Hightown is 3,000 feet higher than Lowtown, and they are located 3 miles apart in the north-south direction and 3 miles apart east-west.The main novel argument of this paper is that if you calculate the distance (technically the Mahalanobis distance) in 'personality space' between men and women then you get a larger value than if you just average the differences on each measure.
What is the overall distance between Hightown and Lowtown? The average of the three measures is 2.2 miles, but it is easy to see that this is the wrong answer. The actual distance is the Euclidean distance, i.e. 4.3 miles – almost twice the "average" value.
The paper also uses a couple of other methods that increase the effect sizes, namely using 15 different personality measures instead of the more common Big 5, and adjusting the differences upwards to take account of the fact that quizzes only imperfectly measure underlying 'latent' personality traits.
I don't want to get into the debate over how valid the underlying data are (a 1993 sample of over 10,000 American adults, used to standardize the 16PF questionnaire). There are lots of technical comments here. I'm going to focus on the distance method.
It's a very interesting approach and certainly raises questions about merits of the old approach, which when you think about it, does seem a bit crude. But I'm not sure that the average person is talking about distance in a hypothetical space when they talk about "personality differences".
They are distinct breeds. This surely means that when you take all of the differences together, they define distinct regions of "dog space" (which has dozens or hundreds of dimensions), with little or no overlap.
Yet they are still regarded as similar. "Similar" and "distinct" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, isn't the definition of 'distinct yet similar' that two things separate in some kind of feature-space, but don't differ much on any one measure?
So I would say that these data show that, while men and women may be distinguishable in personality, they could still be similar. This is something of a semantic point but not "merely" semantic: it changes the interpretation of the numbers.
J. S. Hyde, who is most associated with the view that gender differences are small, makes a similar (or do I mean distinct?) point in her comment on the paper:
The gender difference found is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables transformed into latent variables...[but] the resulting dimension here is uninterpretible. What does it mean to say that there are large gender differences on this undefined dimension in 15-dimensional space created from latent variables? The authors call it global personality, but what does that mean?Her questioning of what the direction along which men and women differ means, is (I think) the same question I'm asking about whether it disproves the idea of "similarity", in the ordinary sense of the term.
Finally, take a step back and the whole debate seems a bit circular because, by definition, "personality" means "things that differ between individual people". Things we are have in common aren't even in the picture. Two groups could differ in personality space but still be very close in the much larger space of "possible creatures". There's no personality trait for 'being human'.
Del Giudice, M., Booth, T., and Irwing, P. (2012). The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality PLoS ONE, 7 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029265
36 comments:
man is to woman like Labrador is to Golden Retriever?
jamzo: That or the other way around... I'm a cat person, I don't know which one is more "manly" ;)
I guess that men and women differ greatly in the social expression of their feelings, their sexuality and also in the care of the offsprings.
An example, at least in our western societies,most men will forget about a very sick child -or a bullied at school child or whatever- as soon as they get into the work or leisure place.
A lot of them will divorce a wife who produced autisitc child(ren) and let her deal with the child(ren) special needs as a single mother.
Some women will also do that but very few. And often a psychiatrist will think about severe addiction problem, borderline personality disorder or antisoccail personality disorder in such cases (and search for other telling signs).
The progesterone hormone may play a part for "motherly instinct"
but testosterone is the libido hormone in both sex and the attitude and enjoyement of sex is -well sexualy different between men and women.
The social expectation of behaviour in a given society may also play a great part in the differences between men and women.
Not enough is done -for my taste- in research about the rank of birth when so many people will marry and have their best intimate friends according to the rank of birth: a unique child will marry another unique child or a first born, a second born will find second born spouse.
When there is not arranged mariages it is striking: just look around in your personal circle of friends and family.
It not new and I was told about it in Montreal in the eighties- as part of a family oriented psychotherapeutic approach.
But it is less sexy than the sex difference.
But what exactly is being "human"?
ramesan,
In that post, my understanding is that by humans neuroskeptic meant men and women.
Ethologists might not agree and think that humans have some "personality traits" compared to other species.
Eigenvalue analysis, which is basically what latent variable analysis boils down to, is not exactly some revolutionary new invention. The basic ideas have been around since before George Washington was President of the United States, and one of the popular current algorhythms has been in wide use since it was proposed in 1961.
Basically, it is a way of quantifying stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine clusters of behavioral tendencies. In the same vein, a preference for pink clothing, by itself, isn't a terribly accurate way to predict gender in a West Coast city full of metrosexuals (only if guys wear it, it is called salmon). But, add fourteen other individually weak gender indicators and put them together, and you can get a pretty good take on which ones are male, which ones are female, and a way of quantifying who is particularly androgynous (or at least, atypical of either gender).
I have other ways of discerning who is male and female.
Seriously, why do we need such a metric?
Ds,
We need some awareness about gender differences in order to help people communicate better their emotional, personal and professionnal needs.
Plus help psychologists and psychiatrists work better:
-to take an example I know about-we are,as a group, accused of a failure to diagnose many cases of Asperger in women because men have been the focus of studies in the field and men and women present different clinical pictures.
That such studies as the subject of that post are a way to see light is another story.
PS: Not bad either if we could know a little more about what is education and what is inborn in gender differences.
The one on the right is me in greener pastures, the one on the left is Dr. Paramedic mumbling something about testicular cancer in women. Apart from being extremely bored with my life I noticed on the train today a man sitting in front of me picking his ear, behold the man beside him picking his ear as well with his wedding ring. Rather than dogs I'd say women - delicate butterfly, men - grubs.
Men smell.
Hey, Neuroskeptic, lay person here. It's funny--the other day I was curious about the Myers-Brigg typology and looked it up. Weird thing is they found that only found construct validity for the extraversion.
Part of me is wary of gender minimizing and I think Hyde does that, because there are some sizable sex differences.
Yet, this concern resonates about how undefined the dimension is. Do we truly not need to come up with an underlying trait that means something?
That point from one commenter that these authors used methods to maximize sex differences also seems salient.
I think there are merits to having multivariate and univariate gender analysis, but it seems like developing and validating meaningful constructs is important too.
It's clear that understanding sex differences in occupational pursuits, academic achievement, and
psychopathology have several contributing factors and multivariate analysis could be very useful.
Still, it seems like coming up with the multivariate traits that show very large sex differences also has the potential to mislead and there might be limitations here as well.
For example, several factors like aptitude, interests, etc. clearly contribute to sex differences in science careers.
Still, some areas that showed very large sex differences related to interest in science were sometimes mediated by another factor or had to be broken down for better understand.
Sex differences on the people-thing orientation are so pronounced and invoked frequently in career outcomes, but some researchers have argued that people-things is not best construed as a bipolar dimension, and research relevant to science outcomes and sex differences supports that.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cou/58/3/424/
Like Beltz et. al 2011 looked at CAH females compared to normal girls and found they did differ in some ways, but the optimal description might involve using two dimensions separately rather than 1 bipolar dimension:
" Realistic and Social occupations, resulting in a score on the Things–
People component that is close to 0, which should not be interpreted
as a lack of occupational interests. Moreover, compared to unaffected
females, females with CAH were as interested in Social occupations
but more interested in Realistic occupations (although not as
interested as unaffected males). This suggests that the scores of
females with CAH on Things–People reflect an increased interest in
Things-related occupations and not a decreased interest in People related occupations."
This research also found that several well known personality dimensions are not strongly associated with "thing orientation."
A recent study in the British Journal of Psychology also found that some of the measures Simon Baron Cohen uses are not as strongly associated with science and math after controlling for spatial thinking styles.
I am definitely of the opinion that more complex statistical methods are needed (now that we can actually make use of them) to explain the world around us, due to it being much more complex than y=mx+b. However, any such metric based solely on one culture cannot be taken as more than defining the differences set by that culture. The human ability to adapt to the life they are born into is actually something we prize, but often overlook in such research. So I think the main issue here is people seeing these differences as biologically instead of culturally defined... and unfortunately that is usually what the media makes of such results, whether that was intended by the authors or not.
ramesam: "But what exactly is being "human"?"
It's a good question. But clearly it is something very different to being a cat or chimpanzee.
Anonymous: Thanks for the great comment.
"It's clear that understanding sex differences in occupational pursuits, academic achievement, and
psychopathology have several contributing factors and multivariate analysis could be very useful."
It could - and this is why this method is certainly interesting & not to be written off as just statistical fiddling - but it's an open question whether the multivariate dimension on which men and women differ in personality, is the same one that makes you a good physicist (say).
Even if the gender differences are bigger than previously found, this article says nothing specific about it.
It isn't explained what the differences might be, or what might have caused them. Are the differences social, or genetically predisposed? What are the specific personality traits that are more common in women than men, and so on.
I think that those questions are more interesting than the non-quantifiable "the differences are bigger than we thought they were".
There are just too many games that could be played with the variables chosen to define the space. Does this render the metric meaningless? No. But the only thing that would make the metric meaningful is including it in a model that proves to be predictive. Until such model is available then the space, let alone its metric, will be without use.
In other words the analogy they gave (the distance metric in 3-space) is deceptive because we already know that modeling space as composed of three orthogonal dimensions has proven to be so useful in our highly predictive models used in physics.
The personality distance between women and men is, in the average, 2,71 times that between men (or between women). That is a concrete result.
So if I am a woman who has played mostly with other girls and most of my friends are women, there is a high risk that I do not understand how men communicate and behave. That is why women often think that men are malicious even though they actually did not mean so. Or why men think that women are crazy and difficult.
Anonymous said:
"The personality distance between women and men is, in the average, 2,71 times that between men (or between women). That is a concrete result."
It's the result of the calculation of a proposed metric. The number of possible metrics one could propose is infinite.
I think Anonymous' most recent comment gets to the most important point here, which most everyone--including the researchers!--has underplayed: the between-gender differences are being compared with the within-gender differences. I'm not sure that the researchers' D=2.71 finding exactly means that the avg between-gender personality distance is 2.71 times the avg within-gender difference [should be 2.71 times the avg distance, whether btwn or within gender, right?], but it is quite big, according to the study.
That gets to the question raised by Neuroskeptic about the human personality, which is defined [in one sense, at least] by the entire range of personality variation. In this case, the measure of the between-group distance is compared with, and makes sense only in comparison with, the within-group distance.
But the thing I can't figure out about this is how the multivariate distance D between the male and female distributions could be so much bigger than the univariate distances d between male & female *in relation to the within-gender distances*. Hyde says their technique exaggerates the differences between genders, and that's true, but it also exaggerates the distances within genders.
The researchers use an example of how distance in 3D space is greater than the the avg of the distance of latitude, longitude, and altitude. But that should affect between- and within-group distances all the same, shouldn't it? How would that effect increase the between-group distances in comparison with the within-group distances?
At first I was thinking that it had something to do with some funky, clustered, multivariate distributions [as I think Andrew is alluding to] that might get averaged out in univariate analyses. But then I saw that the researchers said in the research to Hyde that all the distributions are pretty normal.
Any ideas on what this means, or what I'm missing? My eigenbrain is eigenbroken.
DS,
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks (as my hero Garfield the cat would say) for:
"But the only thing that would make the metric meaningful is including it in a model that proves to be predictive."
Thanks also anonymous 10 January 2012 08:41 for
"A recent study in the British Journal of Psychology also found that some of the measures Simon Baron Cohen uses are not as strongly associated with science and math after controlling for spatial thinking styles."
Nb: the gender researchers are full of bright(and sometimes not so bright ) people biased by their politicis and the autism research suffer from some neuroscientists ego but also from popes and popess quality of some author of theories about the autisms.
Anon, somewhere up there. I agree men are malicious. Look how professor Paramedic attacks me with researchy verbose going straight over my head. When will men like him understand I don't care about science? I care about my breasts, my body, my life! Then we all just die.
Ivana, I love Garfunkle.
I like the "similar yet distinct" interpretation of these results. If you measure a whole bunch of personality traits, you can make a reasonably good prediction of whether someone is male or a female (using the combined data). The reverse doesn't hold though - if you already know someone's gender you can't really predict how they'll rank in a particular personality trait.
I would like to see this multivariate "global personality" model applied to another dataset, to see how accurate it is at predicting gender. That way we can see if these latent variables are actual constructs or just artifacts of the analysis method.
Unknown,
So what?
If you compare the average values of two groups of subjects, it is expected that one subject taken from the population at large or even from the sample you did measure and put into your study will not show tha average value you find for his group.
But my methodoly knowledge is not up to date and if you know better please, help me there because you lost me.
omg
What is this "Dr. Paramedic" thing of your's about?
"'But what exactly is being "human'?"
It's a good question. But clearly it is something very different to being a cat or chimpanzee."
FWIW, most of the traits that we colloquially are referring to when we talk about someone displaying their "humanity" are things that human beings have in common with almost all mammals (e.g. rats, cats, chimps), but are not shared by reptiles and are not, in fact, the kind of rational, higher order thought process that are actually unique to human beings.
All mammals (but not many other animals) tenderly rear their young, have intense emotional bonding intertwined with reproduction, and but themselves at risk sometimes to help a fellow member of their species. Neither chimps nor dolphins nor rats nor cats nor any other living thing does algebra, plays chess (or anything like it), or builds complex machines.
That's a good point Andrew. I didn't mean "Being human" as "being nice" - lots of animals are nice to each other. I meant it as "being smart" :)
neuroskeptic,
I am afraid of the "smart" criteria for allowing "free will" because you will end up with ethical difficulties of cosmic proportions.
Like when you want to oppose those thinking that every disabled person should be sterilized and that every mentally ill person should be sterilized like they did -in Sweden actually and in "good faith" it is said.
Anon, Professor Paramedic, represents all those snobilicious men who are too caught up in their own profession to give ear to lay people like me. They must "educate" and impose their values so they can validate their sense of security.
omg
But who are you referring to and what is the paramedic thing about?
Spat with some random dude on another post about my breasts. Forget which post. He's apparently a paramedic / researcher. Whatever. He's probably right I don't care. I have my whiskey noone can stop me now.
OMG
What on earth you jabbering about?
Don't jabberwocky yes dear me! I can smell you from here. Men.
Here give a good post. This is a very interesting approach and certainly made the old way, when you think about it, seems a bit thick advantage of the problem.
common circle education
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