I am surprised that men are not more subject to anger, personally. One of the reasons I find the "Agreeableness" wording matching my own experience better than "more emotional/less logical" is that I think it is more that men are prone to different emotions, not less emotion overall. But I could be wrong.
Hmm... This whole thing seems wierd to me. The OCEAN model has a neurotisicm metric which closer to emotionality than Agreeableness.
Also most of these tests aren't please report your level of agreeableness. They are like How often do you agree with a group decision..and then measured in a scale like, never, occasionally, sometimes, often, always.... Not sure if the effect you mention will be that strong
I strongly suspect it's much more complicated. Lots of our self-assessment is really remembered feedback from others. So suppose women tend to have less of X property than men. In most interactions a woman who simply has more X than the average woman will be told she's very X and will report as such. And that's probably an increase in underreporting in terms of actual behavioral incidence but that's different than disposition (eg suppose your a woman who would be very aggressive if that was judged as praiseworthy but instead you learn to act very passively to avoid violating female norms). And just changing the comparison class isn't likely to help (few experience both so can't compare and it's likely confounded by stereotypes and desire not to use them).
This is why the reports from trans-individuals reporting much greater differences in expectations and behaviors than they expected are so fascinating.
What we want to know is the actual personality base rates. I think a study that involved totally gender blinded discussions online with personality ratings would be fascinating!
Imagine that Bob is listening to a person tell him something. He is trying to decide how much weight to give that person's testimony. Do you think Bob would be advised to think, "well, she is a woman, so she is probably being emotional," or "he's a man, so I guess I can trust what he saying"? Obviously not. Obviously making decisions on those grounds is unthinkable. (Not that plenty of people in history haven't done so.) As to your example, I actually often am in exactly the position you paint and I know from experience that a person who makes relationship decisions on the basis of gender is going to be wrong a ridiculous number of times.
I don't understand the point of this essay. Obviously any given feature exists in a spectrum -- especially features like being "emotional" or "logical" -- and the distribution of men and women over these spectra overlap. I understand when the overlap is marginal or absent it makes sense to assume an identity but we all have known men who "acted like women" and women who "acted like men". So why is knowing a purely statistical distribution interesting? Again, what does it tell you?
There was at least one empirical test of the reference group hypothesis:
Lukaszewski, A. W., Roney, J. R., Mills, M. E., & Bernard, L. C. (2013). At the interface of social cognition and psychometrics: Manipulating the sex of the reference class modulates sex differences in personality traits. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 953-957.
Common human experience, identified by philosophy, is the context of science. Public opinion polls are not science. Arbitrarily selected and interpreted statistics are not science. Every single time that men and women interact, sexual difference is clear. Try telling a woman that you dont recall her name.
It's really ridiculous how one man's hyteria about "Metoo going too far" leads him to use pseudo-intellectual arguments and using junk science like Myers-Briggs (*) to declare one whole gender "too emotional" so that he can defend men from accusations. In fact, it shows the opposite - how can you be so emotionally triggered by Metoo that you go around telling "Women are hypersensititive, illogical, irrational, it's very important to not take their accusations too serious!" This is a very emotional overreaction.
My goodness, every non-autistic man can talk to women without problems, including at work, men are not in danger, and there's no reason to believe that men are less emotional, especially considering how almost all violent crime is committed by men. Anger is an emotion too.
"If everyone rates their personality relative to the average person of their own gender, then researchers will automatically find no gender gaps no matter how large they really are!"
I actually don't understand the reasoning is this statement. Why would this result in no gender gap? For this to be true, the male average and the female average for any given variable would have to be equal. What am I missing here?
One pretty big caveat. You are comparing averages between sexes. You should overlap their actual distributions to see how many men and women are alike and you might be surprised by the conclusion. Also take into account that male distributions have fatter tails and that this affects average: a real average man might not even exist.
This is fascinating and deserves a good hearing. But you’re going to get more of a hearing from skeptics if you take down the image. The corollary to boys building things isn’t that girls put on make-up.
I am surprised that men are not more subject to anger, personally. One of the reasons I find the "Agreeableness" wording matching my own experience better than "more emotional/less logical" is that I think it is more that men are prone to different emotions, not less emotion overall. But I could be wrong.
Somebody has done this exact study! The result is that gender differences become much larger when you specify humans as the reference class: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259096041_At_the_interface_of_social_cognition_and_psychometrics_Manipulating_the_sex_of_the_reference_class_modulates_sex_differences_in_personality_traits
Hmm... This whole thing seems wierd to me. The OCEAN model has a neurotisicm metric which closer to emotionality than Agreeableness.
Also most of these tests aren't please report your level of agreeableness. They are like How often do you agree with a group decision..and then measured in a scale like, never, occasionally, sometimes, often, always.... Not sure if the effect you mention will be that strong
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
I strongly suspect it's much more complicated. Lots of our self-assessment is really remembered feedback from others. So suppose women tend to have less of X property than men. In most interactions a woman who simply has more X than the average woman will be told she's very X and will report as such. And that's probably an increase in underreporting in terms of actual behavioral incidence but that's different than disposition (eg suppose your a woman who would be very aggressive if that was judged as praiseworthy but instead you learn to act very passively to avoid violating female norms). And just changing the comparison class isn't likely to help (few experience both so can't compare and it's likely confounded by stereotypes and desire not to use them).
This is why the reports from trans-individuals reporting much greater differences in expectations and behaviors than they expected are so fascinating.
What we want to know is the actual personality base rates. I think a study that involved totally gender blinded discussions online with personality ratings would be fascinating!
It's called the reference group effect and there's a lot of papers on this. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/reference-group-effects-shifting-standards
Imagine that Bob is listening to a person tell him something. He is trying to decide how much weight to give that person's testimony. Do you think Bob would be advised to think, "well, she is a woman, so she is probably being emotional," or "he's a man, so I guess I can trust what he saying"? Obviously not. Obviously making decisions on those grounds is unthinkable. (Not that plenty of people in history haven't done so.) As to your example, I actually often am in exactly the position you paint and I know from experience that a person who makes relationship decisions on the basis of gender is going to be wrong a ridiculous number of times.
Why assume this: “respondents rate their personality relative to the average person of their gender” ?
I don't understand the point of this essay. Obviously any given feature exists in a spectrum -- especially features like being "emotional" or "logical" -- and the distribution of men and women over these spectra overlap. I understand when the overlap is marginal or absent it makes sense to assume an identity but we all have known men who "acted like women" and women who "acted like men". So why is knowing a purely statistical distribution interesting? Again, what does it tell you?
There was at least one empirical test of the reference group hypothesis:
Lukaszewski, A. W., Roney, J. R., Mills, M. E., & Bernard, L. C. (2013). At the interface of social cognition and psychometrics: Manipulating the sex of the reference class modulates sex differences in personality traits. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 953-957.
Common human experience, identified by philosophy, is the context of science. Public opinion polls are not science. Arbitrarily selected and interpreted statistics are not science. Every single time that men and women interact, sexual difference is clear. Try telling a woman that you dont recall her name.
I am not a blank-slater by any stretch. But how can you tease our nature/nurture? Is this true in every culture?
It's really ridiculous how one man's hyteria about "Metoo going too far" leads him to use pseudo-intellectual arguments and using junk science like Myers-Briggs (*) to declare one whole gender "too emotional" so that he can defend men from accusations. In fact, it shows the opposite - how can you be so emotionally triggered by Metoo that you go around telling "Women are hypersensititive, illogical, irrational, it's very important to not take their accusations too serious!" This is a very emotional overreaction.
My goodness, every non-autistic man can talk to women without problems, including at work, men are not in danger, and there's no reason to believe that men are less emotional, especially considering how almost all violent crime is committed by men. Anger is an emotion too.
(*) Myers-Briggs is bullshit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/09/29/the-mysterious-popularity-of-the-meaningless-myers-briggs-mbti/?sh=4ad370bd1c79
"If everyone rates their personality relative to the average person of their own gender, then researchers will automatically find no gender gaps no matter how large they really are!"
I actually don't understand the reasoning is this statement. Why would this result in no gender gap? For this to be true, the male average and the female average for any given variable would have to be equal. What am I missing here?
One pretty big caveat. You are comparing averages between sexes. You should overlap their actual distributions to see how many men and women are alike and you might be surprised by the conclusion. Also take into account that male distributions have fatter tails and that this affects average: a real average man might not even exist.
This is fascinating and deserves a good hearing. But you’re going to get more of a hearing from skeptics if you take down the image. The corollary to boys building things isn’t that girls put on make-up.