Angry And Hysterical. More on "Sexual Regret as Evolved Sex Difference."

I came across a post about how others have commented on the Galperin et al. study I write about in the post below this one.  It is on the site of Evolutionary Psychology (Google it for the link), by Robert Kurzban,  and criticizes several other reviews of the study as angry, venomous and even hysterical:

Erin Gloria Ryan was, it seems, not amused. She wrote about the work in a piece entitled: “Women Are Hard Wired To Feel Bad About Being Sluts, Says Suspect Study.” In typical fashion from my experiences reading Jezebel, the piece opens with some false, hysterical claims, including that substitute for good writing, ALL CAPS to make her point emphatic. She writes: “A new study claims that women are HARD WIRED (sic) regret casual sex whereas men are HARD WIRED to think random sex is great.”

While Galperin et al. do motivate their work with an evolutionary approach, neither the word “hard” nor the word “wired” appear anywhere in the piece. Further, the authors explicitly acknowledge that there are “social factors that might moderate or exacerbate evolved dispositions in each sex to regret certain sexual experiences.” My sense is that this idea is the sort of thing that the author of the piece favors, given what I take to be her favored explanation, which is that “… civilizations place high value on controlling female sexuality and humans are social creatures with an aversion to ostracization.” I’m not quite sure how feeling regret saves someone from ostracism – or ostracization, as Ryan would have it, but in any case, the venom in Ryan’s piece seems to have invited similar tones from the people who commented on her brief remarks, which comments included the usual name-calling, epithets, and use of ALL CAPS for emphasis.

Bolds are mine.

Rather than say anything more about that anger or hysteria, let me address the bit in this quote which applies to Ryan's argument:

My sense is that this idea is the sort of thing that the author of the piece favors, given what I take to be her favored explanation, which is that “… civilizations place high value on controlling female sexuality and humans are social creatures with an aversion to ostracization.” I’m not quite sure how feeling regret saves someone from ostracism – or ostracization, as Ryan would have it

Bolds are mine, again.

Here's the answer, from the Galperin et al. study:

The experience of regret is hypothesized to serve several functions. Regret about a recent event can motivate corrective reactions to undo the root cause of the regret (Beike, Markman, & Karadogan, 2009; Roese & Summerville, 2005). For example, regretting a conflict one had with a friend could motivate steps toward mending the relationship.

Regret could also serve to improve future decisions when a similar situation arises again (Beike et al., 2009; Zeelenberg, 1999b). Simply anticipating regret about not using a condom, for instance, is associated with greater anticipated condom use and greater actual future condom use (Richard, De Vries, & van der Pligt, 1998; Richard, van der Pligt, & De Vries, 1996).

If regret could play an evolved sex difference role, it could equally play a role in avoiding future causes for regret when those causes are based on societal sanctions.

Kurzban then disapproves of the comments at Jezebel:

...the venom in Ryan’s piece seems to have invited similar tones from the people who commented on her brief remarks, which comments included the usual name-calling, epithets, and use of ALL CAPS for emphasis. One writer seems to have taken Ryan at her word that the authors of the study used the term “hard wired,” writing: 

Besides the fact that this “study” is a bunch of misogynist evolutionary psychology bullshit, I also really hate the phrase “hard wired.” 

Other comments strike similar tones, with some inexplicable animated gifs thrown in for good measure, including Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and I think Rita Hayworth.

All that is unfortunate.  So is the very first comment (about the need not to respond to the Jezebel post as an adult but as one would reply to a hysterical child) currently attached to Kurzban's own post, liked by sixteen, which links to a blog where terms such as "alpha and beta males,"  "flapping of the vaginas," "pussboys," "manginas" and "cad-chasing sluts" appear. 

Sexual Regret: Evidence for Evolved Sex Differences. My Take On This Article.

Introduction


I have read the Galperin et al. study* (in evolutionary psychology) which argues that it has found evidence for evolved sex differences in sexual regret.

Read that again. The crucial word in both the title of this post and in the above sentence is "evolved."  Keep that in mind.

What that little word means is the assumption that the different reactions men and women might have, on average, are not because societies, in general and certainly during most of recorded history, have punished women much more severely for casual sex than they have punished men.  What that little word also means is the assumption that the different reactions men and women today might have, on average, are not because women and men are quite aware of the fact that the possible costs of casual sex, even today,  are different for the two sexes.  Women can get pregnant when pregnancy is not desired, women are more likely to be the victims of violence in a sexual encounter with a stranger than men and women are much more likely to be called sluts or whores if they engage in casual sex than men do.

Those are not the things the authors mean when they talk about "evolved" differences.  What they mean is that in some sense women are "hard-wired" (pardon the term) to regret having had casual sex and that men are "hard-wired" to regret not having had casual sex.

If that is the case, then why have societies all over time and place punished women more for casual sex (both legally and in terms of ostracism)  than they have punished men?  Is it that our evolved differences concerning it are somehow not strong enough?

In any case, the authors' theses are based on such an evolved difference about casual sex and say nothing about the societal differences in the treatment of men's and women's promiscuity:

The logic described above suggests that there will be sex differences in the regrets women and men have concerning their past sexual decisions and the regrets they anticipate having in hypothetical future decisions. We examined two hypothesized differences between men and women. First, women more than men will regret poorly chosen sexual actions (doing something and later wishing they had not). Second, men more than women will regret poorly chosen sexual inactions (not doing something and later wishing they had).

For men, who are not obligated to invest in pregnancy and raising offspring, choosing the‘‘wrong’’ sex partner might often have been associated with little negative impact on fitness. Although failing to invest may entail a decrement in offspring survival if the woman lacks kin or another investment partner, it nonetheless frees up the man’s resources and effort to devote to alternative uses, including securing additional mating opportunities. Thus, women on average have more to lose from casual sexual actions and consequently could regret them more than men do. This logic leads to our first hypothesis: Compared to men, women will have more numerous and stronger sexual action regrets, particularly those involving ‘‘casual’’ sex.

Because every sexual encounter with a fertile woman in the ancestral past could have led to a viable offspring, sexual inactions for men amounted to missed opportunities to reproduce. Along the same lines, the time that a man spent in a relationship without having sex could have been spent on a different, sexually active relationship in which reproduction was more likely. The cost of delaying sex was not necessarily as high for a woman, who could actually have benefitted from some additional time spent assessing a man’s value as a reproductive partner, including his long-term commitment to her and her potential children (Wachtmeister & Enquist, 1999). These differences in costs suggest that men will tend to regret missed sexual encounters and‘‘delayed’’sex more than women do. This logic leads to our second hypothesis: Compared to women, men will have more numerous and stronger sexual inaction regrets, particularly those involving missed opportunities for casual sex or not leaving a sexually inactive relationship.

Emphasis is mine.

These are the usual arguments of Evolutionary Psychology (EP).  The sexually "good" evolutionary strategy for men is to spread their seed widely and then bolt (where?  Remember that these people probably lived in small kin-based nomadic tribes), the sexually "good" evolutionary strategy for women is to look for the high-quality provider (usually interpreted as a man with resources, whatever that might have meant in a nomadic kin-based small tribe in some hypothetical area of evolutionary adaptations) and to try to tie him so that he won't bolt.  That looking requires coyness, crossing one's legs and waiting on the woman's part.  But the actual prediction all this would give us is that women won't want to engage in casual sex whereas men do.

The first problem I see with these EP hypotheses is that the actual risks of casual sex today are different for men and women, never mind some hidden evolutionary meme in our brains, and that the actual societal condemnation of promiscuous women is very different from the way the same society treats promiscuous men.

The second problem concerns the fact that women in some more recent tribal communities indeed have been found to have casual sex, and not necessarily only for the reason of finding some better genes in a quick encounter for their future children, but because it makes more men in those tribes the possible fathers of their children and thus offers those children more later assistance.

Thus, the third problem, for me, in this hypothesis is that it is ultimately based on a simple analogy about the many sperms and the few eggs and the differential resource requirements that men and women must absolutely spend to bring a child to adulthood.  How those prehistoric ancestors actually lived when various evolutionary adaptations were assumed to "stick" to us as unchanging aspects of our minds does matter.  If, as one of the researchers of this study himself has stated, these adaptations stuck in small nomadic kin-based communities, the ability of the men to spread their seed widely might have been much restricted, and this, in turn might not have rewarded an evolutionary adaptation towards promiscuity as much in men as the simple analogy model assumes.

And that brings me to the fourth problem with this approach:  We have several possible hypotheses about the distant past (which some  EP people no longer seem to position exactly in some specific place and time in the Pleistocene), but one (a fairly simple thought model) is privileged over the other.  The fact that the evolution of our minds is assumed to have stopped some 30,000 years ago is an opinion, not a proven fact.  The stories that are told about the evolutionary past favor some recent data over other recent data.

And, finally, and most importantly, we cannot really state, given all this, that a study looking at sexual regret among today's people in some Western countries is evidence for evolved sex differences in regret over casual sex.

It isn't that I mind the approach these authors have taken.  It's always worthwhile to see what drops out of the bag when we shake it.  But we should be pretty careful in imputing evolutionary explanations for data which can be equally well explained by more proximal causes.


The Three Studies in The Galperin et al. Article

Study Summaries

The three studies in the article consist of one study (Study 1) done on heterosexual undergraduates (78 men and 122 women), one study (Study 2) done on heterosexual volunteers obtained thorough craigslist.org (156 men and 239 women, with a difference in average age which for men was 40 and for women 33)  and one very large study, with 24,230 participants (Study 3), based on people who answered a banner ad at msnbc.com.  The third sample, also self-selected, included both heterosexual men (11,203), heterosexual women (11,612) as well as gay men (334), lesbian women (215), bisexual men (359) and bisexual women (507).  That sample has the advantage of not focusing only on heterosexual people.  The disadvantage of all the studies is that they are not based on random samples.

The first study consists of asking the participants to list their top five life regrets, top five regrets from the past few years, top five action and inaction regrets, and top five sexual /romantic action and inaction regrets.  These data were used to create a questionnaire about regrets for Study 2.  The student participants in Study 1 were then asked to rate four vignettes about sexual and romantic action and inaction.

The second study (the Craig's List one) uses the regret lists created in Study 1. Those were manipulated by the researchers to create a list of 88 sexual regrets, divided into 39 action regrets, 30 inaction regrets and 19 regrets not easily categorized.  The study participants were asked to indicate which of those regrets they had experienced, and to set up lists of the five top regrets they regretted the most.

The third study (the MSNBC one), had two additional goals.  It tried to standardize for the base of casual sexual activity by asking about the last time a person had each of the possible experiences linked to having casual sex or having an opportunity for it but not taking that opportunity.  It also included sexual preference as a further category.

The authors argue that the overall results provide support for the evolved role of sex differences.  More correctly, perhaps, the evidence supports the view that women are more likely to report having regretted casual sex than men and that men are more likely to report having regretted missed opportunities for casual sex. 

Even the data on gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents supports it, they argue, because within each category (gays vs. lesbians, bisexual men vs. bisexual women) women report more regret for having casual sex, men more regret for not having it.  On the other hand, within the category "women" lesbian and bisexual women are less likely to regret casual sex than heterosexual women and more likely to regret missed opportunities for casual sex.  This, to me, suggests that the very real proximal explanation of pregnancy, say, could be an important part of the real-word explanation.

Where I Got Stuck 

It is the first of these studies (Study 1) which halted my review work.

Here's why:  The authors state that each study participant was given four vignettes, stories which depicted regret caused by either action or inaction.  Two of the stories were about casual sex (regret for having it or regret for not having it), two the authors regard as having been regret about romantic action or inaction.

The participants were asked to rate how strong the regret of the person described in the scenarios might be and also how strong their own regret in a similar situation might be.

According to the authors, the results showed that men regretted inaction in casual sex more and women regretted action in casual sex more.  Rather astonishingly, to me, there were few gender differences with respect to romantic action or inaction.  My surprise comes from the fact that the basic simple EP model used would certainly predict those!  Men should almost overwhelmingly show more regret for romantic action, because that is about longer-term mating with a single partner, and the model used here privileges the casual sex model of ancient prehistory for men.

Got all that?  Now note this (from the article):

The actor in the scenario matched the sex of the participant and participants rated their beliefs regarding the regret experienced by the actor, followed by their own anticipated regret if they found themselves in this scenario on a 9-point scale (1 = No Regret at All; 5 = Moderate Regret; 9 = Extreme Regret).

And:

The primary goal of Study 1 was to examine differences in men’s and women’s anticipated regret intensity in response to hypothetical scenarios of sexual versus romantic (non-sexual) actions and inactions. The sexual scenarios focused on events that women (one-night stand) and men (missing a one-night stand opportunity) were predicted to regret more strongly compared to the other sex. The primary goal was to
examine differences between men and women and not differences across scenarios, so the scenarios were allowed to vary in ways that permitted a vivid and specific depiction of casual sex actions and inactions.

And:

As predicted by Hypothesis 2, men anticipated finding the casual sex inaction scenarios more regrettable than did women when rating their own anticipated regret, t(192) = 7.40, p\.001, and the presumed regret for the actor, t(192) = 5.41, p\.001. Although the action and inaction vignettes in this study differed in a number of ways, such as overall length, these differences did not confound the critical comparison by sex of rater because men and women rated identical scenarios. Such factors therefore cannot account for the sex differences observed here.

Bolds are mine.  If I understand the above correctly, men and women were given different vignettes.  But the version of the study I have gives only the sexual action and inaction vignettes given to men.

So I asked the study authors for the female sexual action and inaction vignettes.  I have not received a response.

This point is pretty important.  The authors tell us that the way the vignettes differed didn't matter because men and women rated identical scenarios?  I would like to see all the vignettes and the statistical work which shows that there was no confounding effect.

A Few Comments on The Study Findings

This possible problem doesn't necessarily make the other two studies meaningless.  But I find myself reluctant to proceed without understanding what those vignettes for women are, and thus I only have a few scattered comments to make about the three studies and their findings which usually are that men regret not having casual sex more than women,  and that women regret having casual sex more than men.

When a finding appears to go counter to the simplest EP theories, those theories are fleshed out more, as is done here (about Study 2):

Women’s top regrets also included having sex with a physically unattractive partner and women (17 %) were more likely than men (10 %) to list this as one of their strongest regrets. This result might seem somewhat counterintuitive, given the expectation that men place a greater premium than do women on physical attractiveness in potential mates (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). However, this result is consistent with two other replicable findings. First, women substantially increase their standards for attractiveness for casual sex partners (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Kenrick et al., 1993; Li & Kenrick, 2006), possibly to gain genetic benefits for offspring. Second, men dramatically lower their standards in short-term mating contexts, including standards for physical attractiveness, and hence are less likely to regret casual sex with an unattractive partner. Although men do value physical appearance in potential mates, a low-cost sexual encounter with an unattractive partner historically would have still afforded a valuable reproductive opportunity that might offset collateral costs such as reputational damage.

Or here, about Study 3:

Men and women reported similar rates (56%) of having engaged in casual sex. Men (66 %) were somewhat more likely to report passing up a casual sex opportunity than were women (59 %), v2(1, N = 24,230) = 148, p\.001, a counterintuitive result that could stem from a reporting bias rooted in other evolved sex differences: men’s misperception of women’s sexual interest or sex differences in defining what constitutes an ‘‘opportunity.’’ 

Evidence indicates that men tend to overestimate women’s interest (Haselton & Buss, 2000; La France, Henningsen, Oates, & Shaw, 2009). In addition, women might consider some situations in which they technically could have had sex so undesirable that these situations do not register as sexual ‘‘opportunities,’’ whereas the same situations might ‘‘count’’ as such for men. Men could therefore perceive casual sex opportunities in circumstances where women do not, leading to the biased result of men providing higher estimates than women of opportunities they passed up or did not act on.

Note also the sentences I bolded.


Or the explanation is brought in from elsewhere, without necessarily appearing to refute the basic hypotheses, such as is the case here, about Study 2:

We highlight the regrets that were most often reported in the ‘‘top five’’ by women (Table 1) and by men (Table 2). Few of the top regrets overlapped between women and men and the top regrets that showed no sex difference (e.g., having unprotected sex) were those for which we did not have predictions about sex differences. A noteworthy and common regret that showed no significant sex difference was cheating on one’s partner, with 23 % of women and 18 % of men listing it as one of their five strongest regrets. Possibly, the lack of a sex difference here is a consequence of the fact that discovered infidelity carries extremely high costs for both sexes, including the possibility of relationship dissolution (Betzig, 1989).

And in this case, about Study 2:

Notably, none of the 39 sexual action regrets were more common for men than for women and only one of the 30 sexual inaction regrets was more common for women than for men. This regret was ‘‘not engaging in sexual activity with someone only because I did not want to appear promiscuous’’; 16 % of women in comparison to 8 % of men reported this regret, v2(1, N = 395) = 6.23, p = .014. This difference possibly reflects the fact that women are more likely than men to worry about appearing promiscuous (Crawford & Popp, 2003). Because women are more likely than men to face negative consequences to their reputation for engaging in casual sex, they may make more sexual decisions in which reputational concerns are an issue.

It is partly in this manner that the article succeeds in firmly concluding for evolved sexual differences, I believe, though the bigger problem lies in the fact that the evidence supports at least as well the other two obvious theories about what might be going on:  First, the fact that casual sex has higher costs for women now, and not only in some evolutionary murky deep time, because it is women who can get pregnant when they don't wish to do so and because the risk of sexual violence from stranger partners is greater for women, based on body strength differences.  Second, the societal sanctions for casual sex still are, and certainly have been, much greater for women than men.


------
*The abstract:

Regret and anticipated regret enhance decision quality by helping people avoid making and repeating mistakes. Some of people’s most intense regrets concern sexual decisions. We hypothesized evolved sex differences in women’s and men’s experiences of sexual regret. Because of women’s higher obligatory costs of reproduction throughout evolutionary history, we hypothesized that sexual actions, particularly those involving casual sex, would be regretted more intensely by women than by men. In contrast, because missed sexual opportunities historically carried higher reproductive fitness costs for men than for women, we hypothesized that poorly chosen sexual inactions would be regretted more by men than by women. Across three studies (Ns = 200, 395, and 24,230), we tested these hypotheses using free responses, written scenarios, detailed checklists, and Internet sampling to achieve participant diversity, including diversity in sexual orientation. Across all data sources, results supported predicted psychological sex differences and these differences were localized in casual sex contexts. These findings are consistent with the notion that the psychology of sexual regret was shaped by recurrent sex differences in selection pressures operating over deep time.

Note the new practice of replacing the view that  evolutionary adaptations came to stick to us about 30,000 years ago, in Pleistocene, with the diffuse concept of "deep time."

**
**You might also be interested in the anger and hysteria post about this study








 

  

 

For The Sake of the Husbands

Fox News isn't exactly helping the Republicans' problem with how to talk at women by having Suzanne Venker write for their website so frequently.  I looked at her archive at Fox, and now you may, too, by clicking on that link.  Her recommendations amount to the need for male supremacy because any alternative to that means that men are treated like second-class citizens.

Her most recent essay argues that (heterosexual, though she doesn't make that distinction) women should let their husbands bring home most of the bacon and just focus on cooking it.  That is the path to a balanced life!  And of course to financial dependency.  But Venker (whose website is Women For Men, focusing on improving gender relations and providing much-needed support for the American male) isn't terribly bothered by the problems her advice might give to women.

She is the anti-feminist niece of the anti-feminist  Phyllis Schlafly.

She shares more with her aunt than the desire to have heterosexual women stay at home and submissive to their husbands, and that's the exceptional status of Herself.  While other women should behave in a certain manner, both Schlafly and Venker had or have careers outside the home.

That Venker writes as she writes is not unexpected, given her family background.  That Fox brings her in so often teaches us a lot about what this major Republican organ really thinks about women's proper roles.

The points that Venker misses are several.  First, most families cannot afford to follow the model she advocates, were they somehow persuaded to do so, and this is for economic reasons.  Second, the kind of arrangements Venker advocates were once in place for white middle-class families in the United States and women revolted against them as the only acceptable solution.  Third, her solution to the time press of women with jobs and families to take care of ignores alternative possibilities except the return to some mythical era when all women were happy and all men proud.  For instance, fairer sharing of the chores at home could also make many women quite a bit happier, but Venker doesn't discuss that.

Then, of course, if all women with children followed her advice this country would lose much of its trained labor force and that would hurt the economy, not to mention the fact that any attempts at gender equality in places of power would pretty much be on the shoulders of those women who do not have children.  Back to the fifties!  Men everywhere except in the kitchen!

It wouldn't work, of course, because the average earnings of American men cannot cover the arrangement Venker finds most desirable.

And what does Venker promise women, if they follow her blueprint?  As far as I can tell, she promises women marriage and children.  But women can get those without Venker's rules, and her rules do not prevent divorce but simply make it much more painful for women.

How To Popularize Science: Final Thoughts on The Girl Brainz Boy Brainz Study And Its Reception

You can read my initial reactions in an earlier post but now that I've had more time to digest the results (and others have had more time to react to the results), a couple of things are worth noting:

First, as is frequently the case with the Big-Splash Popularizations of research, the discussion continues but that  isn't allowed to make a splash*.  This is a general problem, not limited to any particular type of science reporting.

It is a Bad Thing for the understanding of science.  Just as the popularizations of some study findings which were later retracted (or never actually approved for publication in the first place) can still be found, uncorrected, all over the Internet,  bits and pieces of that retracted research will still float around in the brains of the original readers of the said popularizations. The incentives to correct this problem appear nonexistent.

That argument is not about the Ingalhalikar et al. study, specifically, and I am not saying that it would be retracted or not replicated.  The point I want to make is that neither the science community nor the community of science journalists is given incentives not to push for the Big Splash form of science reporting, even when something that causes a big splash may have more than the usual probabilities of finally being found incorrect or at least exaggerated or misapplied.

The research community rewards new research, not replication of old research or criticism of the research of others (unless that is the basis for new research).  The research community definitely does NOT get rewarded for negative findings.**  Hence the usual omission of mentions to gender differences when they were not found.  That biases the findings of the field on, say, brains and gender, towards reporting differences, not similarities.

The journalistic community is stressed for time and expertise and under the pressure to get more eyeballs to read the popularizations.  The arrival of the Internet has created a setup where the first to get to the goal line gets the goodies!  So if a press release of a  new study is sent to all the journalists before it is even available in a published form and if it looks like a Big Splash, out go the popularizations!  A few careful science writers ask for comments from some person not involved in that research.  Often those comments are fuzzy and general and cold weak tea, and that's probably because the paper isn't actually available for scrutiny yet!

By the time  perhaps critical responses to the study start dribbling in, the journalists are pressed to look for new Big Splashes, to get more eyeballs and more clicks for the advertisers.

What is supposed to keep this system from collapsing?

I think it's the idea of peer review.  If academic peers have passed on article, it must be OK, right?  But the peer review system was never as strong as outsiders might think, and the proliferation of new research, new e-journals for science and the increased pressure to publish-or-perish, not only in the top research universities, has created impossible demands for those who do the reviewing.

Most don't have access to the original data, and even if they did, would not have the days, months or years looking at the analyses in detail would require.  Indeed, peer review was never expected to do that kind of work, just to check that the numbers and calculations etc. looked reasonable.

A different problem arises when a study is about a particular theory and uses a particular, perhaps novel method.  If the peer reviewers are selected on the basis of their knowledge of the theory, they may know nothing about the method, not even, whether it is the correct one for the particular questions.  If the peer reviewers are selected on the basis of their knowledge of the methodology, they may not be able to state whether the conclusions about the theory are correct.

This is a particular problem in social sciences.  In some sense, every review of empirical research should have a statistician looking at the study.  But statisticians are few and already busy with reviews of their own fields.

Then you have the bubble fields.  In those all peers believe in the same basic theories, so the reviews they provide will never attack the theories themselves.

Second,  the tendency of negative findings being left in the file drawer and not published could be particularly severe in fields such as the study of gender differences.  A field named like that could be (just could be!) especially tuned towards seeking for differences.

As there is no field of gender similarities, what happens to those studies which don't find a gender difference, after looking for it?

My guess is that they are often recast to be about something else than gender, something which can be viewed as a positive finding.  If that is true, then these particular results about gender won't have much impact on our discussions about gender and the brain, say.  In short, my hypothesis is that the field which studies gender differences will under-report gender similarities.  The overall impact of that is to tilt the published research in one direction.  A useful project would be to go through all the brain studies which didn't find a gender difference, despite including gender in the variables studied,  and add those to the existing literature on brain and gender.

Third, those prior beliefs!  The Economist's popularization of the Ingalhalikar et al. study  is probably the worst in this respect.  It begins with a whole paragraph on the author's own prior beliefs:

MEN and women do not think in the same ways. Few would disagree with that. And science has quantified some of those differences. Men, it is pretty well established, have better motor and spatial abilities than women, and more monomaniacal patterns of thought. Women have better memories, are more socially adept, and are better at dealing with several things at once. There is a lot of overlap, obviously. But on average these observations are true.
Suggesting why they are true in evolutionary terms is a game anyone can play. One obvious idea is that because, in the days of hunting and gathering, men spent more time wandering away from camp, their brains needed to be adapted to able to find their way around. They also spent more time tracking, fighting and killing things, be they animals or intrusive neighbours. Women by contrast, politicked among themselves and brought up the children, so they needed to be adapted to enable them to manipulate each other’s and their children’s emotions to succeed in their world.

This is an excellent description of what the person who wrote this particular popularization believes!  But it has very little or nothing to do with the imaging findings of the Ingalhalikar et al. study.***

Prior beliefs matter in this field tremendously, and mostly for gender-political reasons.  This is very clear from the comments threads to the popularizations.

But prior beliefs of the researchers themselves  matter, too****.  Suppose that those with prior beliefs in, say, evolutionary ("hard-wired") gender differences in cognition tend to choose fields such as evolutionary psychology or the study of gender differences in neuroscience more often than those whose prior beliefs are not so strongly linked to evolutionary explanations or the idea of "hard-wiring".  What effect might this have on the research that is produced?

I'm not sure, because some researchers are able to ignore their own prior beliefs in their work.  But I think this could introduce a subtle bias.   To flip that around, those whose prior beliefs about gender differences privilege cultural and environmental explanations might be more likely to enter fields such as feminist studies.  In both cases the prior beliefs could influence how research topics are picked (and what is not studied) and how the results are interpreted.*****

Is that important to keep in mind when writing (or reading) popularizations?  I believe it is. 

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*One example of this process is discussed (contents: race and intelligence) here (pdf).

**It's somewhat ironic that the popularization the Economist has published on the Ingalhalikar et al. study is pretty weak on the very aspects that the earlier Economist article critiques.

***I love to read that description of how the author believes our prehistoric ancestors lived!  It assumes that women seldom left "the camp" (given that most evolutionary psychologists assume that the prehistoric people they theorize about were small nomadic tribes, the concept of "a camp" is debatable), that gatherers didn't have to learn how to find their way around at all, that "politicking" is something men clearly haven't evolved to do (which rather contradicts current political arenas almost everywhere), that women and men hardly interacted so women only had to "manipulate" the emotions of other women and children and men didn't have to learn to "manipulate" anyone's emotions, not to mention the fact that "manipulation of emotions" isn't something the Ingalhalikar et al. study (or any study?) has studied as an evolutionary adaptation.

All that is fun, of course, and as I stated, it tells much about the person who wrote this particular popularization.  But sadly, we cannot go back in time to collect information about gender roles at various points of time, including the hypothetical time period in Pleistocene when the evolutionary psychologists assume that various adaptations "stuck" to us.  That means that stories of this kind really are JustSo stories.  Or rather, they are stories to "explain" differences observed today as evolutionary adaptations, and the differences observed today depend on one's own framework.  Thus, this author seems to think that women are emotionally manipulative and then goes backwards to find an explanation for it.

****A neurogeneticist, say, who advocates Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference, as good reading in the field of differences between the sexes certainly comes across as biased to me, because I have read the book.  Baron-Cohen argues that there is a male brain which is wired for building and understanding systems and a female brain which is wired for empathy!

He created a test for measuring such important differences.  The test contains many biased questions (many more than that short post covers) which steer answers in a certain direction by using male hobbies as examples in the systematizing questions and by not using female hobbies as such examples.

It even included a question about being able to understand the electrical wiring in a house.  Given that this can be learned over time, we are not measuring something innate.  Given that taking care of house repairs is coded male in this culture, we are tying the test results to gender roles.  Essentially all the systematizing questions or assertions in the original test with examples picked those examples from male hobbies, thus making it less likely that women would come across as systematizing.

Despite that, the test seems to have trouble  correctly predicting "male" brains and "female" brains by gender, and doesn't seem to have anything to say about the idea that one might score high in both systematizing and empathizing or neither.

*****Or as one commentator jokingly at Mindhacks.com puts it:

I would really like to see a study which examines if the brains of neuroscientists who believe there is a fundamental difference between men and women are wired differently than those of neuroscientists who don’t.

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A postscript, added later:

Yes, I know I said I was finished with the topic (and there might be more if I ever get a response to an e-mail question I sent the study authors), but this piece in the Guardian is worth reading, mostly because it is openly and boldly on the other side of all the other popularizations I have read, and we do need some balance in the coverage.

It gives one of the main reasons why studies of this type should be carefully scrutinized:  The history of the field:

For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes. I am from Mars, apparently, while the ladies in my life are from Venus.
And there are no signs that this flow is drying up, with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains.

The Big Splash in these kinds of studies is to find sex differences, not to find sex similarities, and the differences some study finds are usually sold as the final word in the field.  It's preferable if, indeed, we can state that women and men are so different that they might as well be from different planets

Science and its treatment in the popular media cannot be ultimately understood without understanding the culture in which they happen, and part of that understanding is that the explanations favoring (marriage-based) stereotypes (about how husbands and wives cannot communicate) are privileged, and that those who argue otherwise are labeled as feminazis, non-scientific or simply in denial.

Hence the obligatory warning that none of what I say here implies that I believe in no innate differences in male and female brains.  But I don't think they are as large as most of the armchair speculators assume, and I also believe that the brain changes based on how it is used.  As long as gender roles are operative, the average woman and the average man are likely to have somewhat different use patterns of their brains.

On Nelson Mandela

I have nothing to say that others wouldn't have covered much better on the meaning of Nelson Mandela in the history of South Africa and the world.  But I would like to quote from Adam Serwer's article:

The point of remembering all this is not mere point-scoring. It is to remember that sometimes the radicals are correct, that in the heat of the moment, movements for justice can be easily caricatured by those with authority as threats to public safety, and those seeking basic rights and dignity as monstrous villains. And then after the radicals win, we try to make them safe and useless to future radicals by pretending our beloved secular saints were never radical at all.
It’s tempting to pretend we’ve all always agreed about Mandela, or about racial equality, or about South African apartheid. It would avoid awkwardness or hostility to join together in mutual admiration and mourning for a figure who was indispensible in so many senses of the word, without recalling those who stood against him.
Mandela believed in forgiveness, but he also believed in truth and reconciliation. And the truth is that many self-proclaimed champions of individual freedom in the United States refused to champion the individual freedom of black people in South Africa and at home.

Without intending to draw any comparisons between the South African apartheid and other types of societal ills, I believe that the treatment of past revolutionaries of different types does tend to follow that pattern when the revolutionaries win.  What they accomplished will be absorbed and tamed and it is that version which will be added to the general history of a country.* 

I am not sure if this kind of sanctification of taming isn't just the way human beings digest the changes that take place.  But Serwer has a point in the case of Mandela and also Martin Luther King, because the process of society-wide sanctification has been very rapid for both those men.


*Hence the long struggle of women's suffrage in the US became "women were given the vote" and Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Sojourner Truth are now seen as worthy of statues.

Mother Guilt. How Bad Thought Frames Of Reproductive and Child Health Research Spread it.

You may have noticed a recent trend which picks up findings from epigenetics research (often about rodents) and converts them into direct advice to people, about how to behave or about what to eat.

That advice is pretty gendered, however, because rat studies about the impact of granddad or dad rats' "lifestyle" choices and their potential impact on the grandkid or kid rats doesn't immediately translate into advice to all men.  But anything about grandma rats does tend to elicit those kinds of argument*.

So there's an interesting gendered difference.  Rats teach women important stuff.  Rats are not expected to teach men important stuff.

But then, of course, men don't get pregnant, so anything having to do with what happens in the womb will be firmly on women's shoulders.**  Right?

But that's not the only frame some researchers use, these days.  Rather, anything that parents might do which affects their children's health is put firmly on the shoulders of mothers. A recent study, "Maternal Inactivity: 45-Year Trends in Mothers’ Use of Time"  tells us why parenting research of this type centers on women and not on men:

Contrary to the influence of maternal behaviors on the intrauterine environment, paternal behaviors have no direct influence on the intrauterine environment, but they may play a small role in the development of obesogenic behaviors in later childhood. While fathers report allocating more time to child care over the past few decades,35, 36, 37 it is trivial when compared with mothers’ allocation. As such, the influence of maternal behaviors is paramount from conception through early childhood because, in addition to controlling the intrauterine environment, mothers are the primary caregivers for most children throughout early life. For example, as of 2007, there were more than 5.6 million stay-at-home moms and fewer than 165,000 stay-at-home dads.67, 68

Bolds are mine.  So women get this extra responsibility to behave well (not for their own good but for the good of the future generations!) because they are the ones with wombs but also because they mostly take care of the children!  Here's more:***

There is growing evidence that body composition and energy metabolism are programmed in utero.21, 54, 55, 56 Because PA is a strong determinant of nutrient partitioning (ie, the metabolic fate of consumed nutrient energy to storage or oxidation57, 58, 59, 60, 61), preconception maternal inactivity may be causal to pregravid obesity62, 63 and when combined with prenatal inactivity may alter the programming of fetal body composition and energy metabolism, leading to an increased risk of obesity and chronic NCD. Additionally, there is strong evidence that maternal TV viewing behaviors influence children’s TV viewing behaviors,52 and large-scale epidemiological studies have revealed that one of the strongest determinants of obesity and cardiometabolic risk factors in later life is TV viewing as a young child.64 Given that most pregnant women spend more than 50% of their waking hours in SED and more than 15% of pregnant women report spending more than 5 h/d in screen-based media use,65, 66 it can be posited that, as with the intergenerational transmission of smoking behavior,53 children raised by inactive, sedentary, and therefore unhealthy caregivers may have an increased risk of being inactive, sedentary, and unhealthy as adults.

Bolds are mine.

I get the argument.  But on a different level it's a bizarre one.  It suggests that women's lifestyle choices and bodies indeed require additional societal oversight or at least strong propaganda aimed at women to behave a certain way.   Because of their societal roles and their biological roles.  Men are not required to think of their own nutrition or exercise as benefiting "others,"  because they are not the ones with the wombs or the ones taking care of children!****

If you don't see what's bizarre about all that, let me elaborate:
 
The best way for a woman not to have to feel guilt about how that extra chocolate bar she ate might destroy the health of future generations is by making sure that she doesn't have children, or that if she does have children, by making sure that she is not the primary caregiver for them.   

If those choices are not feasible for a woman, then this new socialized approach to women's behavior might mean that things like the citizen-police which examines whether a visibly pregnant woman has a glass of wine or not could become extended to lots of stuff women with children do.  Not exercising enough?  Evil woman!  Eating too much fat?  Evil woman!

At the same time, human beings are very bad about lifestyle changes, and many women will still fall for that chocolate bar or for lounging in front of the television.  Only now your guilt won't be limited to what you might be doing for your own body but it has become generalized! 

In the past all this focused largely on pregnancy, but the new trend is to expand it both forward and backward in time.  Thus, women with children are seen as modeling the correct eating and exercise patterns for their children, and women who don't have children yet are told that they should eat and exercise properly already, because they might get pregnant.

Add to this the possibility that new research, not yet available, finds different stuff about what you should have eaten or how you should have exercised during the pregnancy or while taking care of children!  Then your guilt will be retrospective. 

All this places different behavioral requirements on women as their role of mothers than it does on the rest of humankind, and those behavioral requirements are not necessarily possible to achieve for any human being.  Hence my argument that this creates unproductive guilt and frustration and possibly more of the kind of "public scrutiny" that pregnant women already face, only now expanded to post-pregnant and even pre-pregnant women.

What about those pre-pregnant or preconception women?  The term "preconception" seems to mean the time a fertile woman is not pregnant.  It's not a limited time period when a couple plans on pregnancy, say, but all of that woman's fertile life.  Here's one example of how "preconception" is defined:

Preconception health is a woman's health before she becomes pregnant. It means knowing how health conditions and risk factors could affect a woman or her unborn baby if she becomes pregnant. For example, some foods, habits, and medicines can harm your baby — even before he or she is conceived. Some health problems, such as diabetes, also can affect pregnancy.
Every woman should be thinking about her health whether or not she is planning pregnancy. One reason is that about half of all pregnancies are not planned.

Bolds are mine.


So being in the state of preconception means all the time from menarche to menopause, except when you are actually pregnant!  Wow.  And you should consider yourself to be in the state of preconception whatever your contraceptive use might be or whether you abstain from intercourse altogether, because half of all pregnancies are not planned.  This often-heard quote equates to women having no agency over their potential pregnancies.

But is this really true?   The Guttmacher Institute seems to be the source for the finding that half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, and this pie graph appears to support it:

But then there is this pie chart, which looks at contraceptive use and unintended pregnancies:

So let's summarize, from that bottom pie graph:  The two-thirds of US women at risk of unintended pregnancy who practice contraception consistently and correctly account for only 5% of unintended pregnancies.

Yet the preconception medical discussions ignore that, and so we get to the idea that women have no agency over whether they might become pregnant or not.

So it goes.  Returning to the most recent study about all those mothers who don't exercise, it tells us that all women in the state of preconception should exercise.

But what about the references to epigenetic rodent research at the beginning of this post?  Some of those studies suggest that what granddad and dad rats do, before mating, could influence their offspring, too.  So why not give men in the state of preconception (potentially a lot longer chunks of their lives, from pre-teen years to death) the same eager advice about the need to exercise and eat correctly?  After all, almost half of all pregnancies are unintended!

I don't think men would accept such meddling in their lives.  But should women?

That's why I'm concerned with this new trend of turning all fertile women into categories on the basis of their in-theory-possible or actual children.  On the other hand, perhaps the trend is beginning to take off about men, too:

Yet recent research has shown that men’s preconception behavior also matters. According to the CDC, tobacco and heavy drinking can damage sperm DNA, and we’re just starting to understand how older men’s sperm may affect their offspring adversely. The only venue where male preconception health gets much attention, the authors point out, is at the sperm bank, where men’s sperm is scrutinized in a way it’s not elsewhere.

To conclude, it's obvious that women's role in affecting the health of future generations is specific during pregnancy.  What is problematic about the current sociological framework in medicine is the implicit assumption that everything about reproduction and child-rearing should be coded female, that women should think about reproduction even when they are not planning to reproduce and that only women should think about their behavior in the context of future generations, because they are the major caregivers of children.****

This assumes that men have very little preconception impact and that men (who, after all, often live in the same households with women and children) provide no role models for their children, so their behavior matters not at all.

All this is, I believe, the fault of the research frames people have inside their heads when it comes to reproduction.  Those research frames seem to have started from pregnancy as the focal point of anything having to do with parental behavior and child health.  This research frame has then stretched and stretched so that it now covers preconception (women's whole fertile lives except when pregnant) and child-rearing.  That men may have an important role to play both before conception and after the child is born becomes invisible because the initial focus began with the part of reproduction which women perform:  gestation.

But the consequences of that frame (less research done on fathers, less research done on men's "preconception" lives, more maternal guilt) are serious, both in their potential impact on how good the research results are (areas people don't research could matter) and on the consequences of how women are viewed more generally.

















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*Rats do not ordinarily develop breast cancer and therefore the rats used in this study had to be treated with a cancer-causing drug.  The rapid shift from a rodent study to advice for human women (and grandma blaming?) is fascinating in some of those popularizations.

I looked for popularizations of the granddad and dad rat studies but didn't find a single one which gave advice to men.  Almost all the popularizations of the breast-cancer-in-rodents study gave direct advice to women.

**The junk-food reference in that article is to a study about rats.

*** I checked out the two references in that quote which relate to "preconception maternal inactivity may be causal to pregravid obesity62, 63".  One of them is a study about people between the ages of 53 and 57.  The other one is about the correlation between physical activity and weight from adolescence to adulthood.  After thinking about this a bit, I think the researchers mean that people get fatter if they don't exercise.   That can make sense, but to call all this "preconception" is a bit silly.

****I believe that argument is seriously flawed.  As long as fathers have any contact with their children, they are modeling behavior, and how fathers act in that context matters, both in good ways and bad ways.  

Just think of what the researchers' argument would imply:  As long as a family uses the gendered division of labor in child-rearing, what the father does Doesn't Matter At All.  So he can live in the same household, spend his time watching television or eating fatty foods, and none of that models anything for the children?  Alcoholism would matter if the mother is an alcoholic but would not matter if the father is an alcoholic?  Beating the children would matter only if the mother did it?

The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze. The Most Outrageous Popularization of the New Gender Brain Study

The competition for the most daringly incorrect popularization of the Ingalhalikar et al. study is still open (send in submissions!), but by the time I'm typing this (ouch, the carpal tunnel syndrome all this gives me), the preliminary winner surely is Geoffrey Mohan at Los Angeles Times ("Brains of women and men show strong hard-wired differences.").

He must have read a whole different study than I did.  Or perhaps he imputed other stuff into it.

But daring he is.  He begins with a study looking at connectivity in the brains of young people which purports to find sex differences and declares:

A map of the human brain may in fact be a two-volume edition, divided by gender, according to a new study that found significant differences between how the male and female brains are hard-wired

He then tells us that those differences exactly match the observed behavioral differences (untrue, as my earlier post shows). 

But wait!  There's more:

The results lend weight to growing evidence that humans have formed strong adaptive complementarity, suggesting that biological evolution predisposes the species to divide gender roles.

So now the Ingalhalikar et al. study is about evolution!  About adaptive complementarity!  It suggests (well, that was a prudent word choice)  that biological evolution predisposes the species to divide gender roles.

The results do none of those things, actually (see my earlier post), because the study is not about evolution, and because of the plasticity of the brain and the impossibility of determining all the possible reasons for the observed path differences (including research mistakes, biological sex differences, differences based on how men's and women's lives make them use their brains differently, i.e. the very gender roles Mohan mentions.)

Then there's the idea of being predisposed to particular gender roles by biological evolution.  Perhaps, or perhaps not.  But if we take the various guesses about the real-world meaning of the Ingalhalikar et al. study findings seriously, we must ask whether the traditional gender roles would be what those guesses immediately suggest.  

For instance, one of the researchers argues that women are better social intelligence.  That's not something the study could actually prove, of course.  But suppose that this is indeed the case.  How could we best use that talent edge women are supposed to have in our societies?  Perhaps only women should be the politicians?  The managers of firms?  Anything where people talents are needed (priests, mullahs, clerics in general)?

Duh.  I obviously don't support such sex segregation.

But I very much doubt that having more female presidents is what Mr. Mohan has in mind there when he talks about how the results supposedly justify evolutionary predispositions towards certain gender roles.

I pull out this particular popularization because it teaches us a lot about what these popularizations do. 

Here's an interesting thing for you to do:  Follow what happens to the Ingalhalikar et al. study over time.  Is it replicated?  Is it not found to be replicated?  Then ask yourself if popularizations would cover both of those outcomes equally noisily.

I'm willing to make a large bet that we will never learn in the popular media if the study is not replicated, partly because they will already cover some other Mars-and-Venus study.
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PS:  All these studies teach us that we should not be lax in the way we look at a study if it supports our own prior beliefs about gender or if it supports the value of research we have been involved in.  I saw such laxity and bias far too often in the field of gender differences, and that's how Echidne The Viper Tongue was born!   I want popularizations to be objective and careful, even when that causes some results I adore to be found limited or false.

What's For Breakfast? Fried Girl and Boy Brainz! How Men's And Women's Brains are Dramatically Different And What It All Means.

(Added later:  The proper way to read this post is to begin with the last footnote which talks about possible methodological problems with the study.  I hadn't had enough coffee when I wrote the post!)


Yesterday was a fantastic day for one group of researchers (Ingalhalikar et al.)* who specialize in looking at sex differences in the brain.  Their paper was popularized the way a cure for cancer would be, and that is because the authors made de-lic-ious comments about their study as proving that the hardwiring differences between male and female brainz had been found, that they are GIGANTIC!!! and  they gave us  all PICTURES which show this so very very clearly.

Then, also, the differences were of the expected type!  Women seem to have brainz built(!)/hardwired(!) for social cognition (which all the nasty commentators in all the comments threads turned into women talking and gossiping so much) and better memory (which those comments argued was all about never forgetting that you, a guy, forgot her birthday), whereas men seem to have brainz  built for clear perception-action patterns and also seem to have better motor skills (which I thought was about stuff like muscle speed but which the popularization believe are about men's superior ability to read maps or the never-dying myth that men are better drivers than women).

On the other hand, menz are completely incapable of multi-tasking!

Now would you like some fries on the side?  The hash I made for you above wasn't made by me.  It was made by one of the researchers of the study, Ragini Verma, in several published interview comments.  She mentioned ideas such as that men might be better map-readers and that women, in turn, might be better listeners or better at multi-tasking!

But the popularizers haven't actually helped!  And John Tierney and David Brooks are probably still feverishly writing away, so we are going to get more fun and games for many, many weeks.   If (or when) the flaws in the current study are revealed and the results changed, not a single popularizer will care to put any corrections on the front page of their newspapers.  For that I'm willing to bet a Ferrari.

Goddess but I love-hate this shit!  Let's step back a bit, to sort a few things out.

First, this particular study is an attempt to map out gender or sex differences in the human brain's structure, not in functionality, by using a fairly recent imaging method.  I'm a babe-in-the-woods when it comes to such complicated research methods, but after spending most of yesterday looking for information, what I think the study tried to measure (and correct me if I'm wrong) is the water-permeability of the white matter in the brain.  The idea might be a bit like finding paths in the woods?  It's not the case that you cannot walk off the path but the paths show where you mostly use to walk.  Or finding rivers and brooks.  Water could travel anywhere but it mostly goes to those furrows in the soil it is used to.  So if these maps of connectivity show a sex difference then it could be that men and women use their brainz in different ways, on average.

Now, as far as I get it, ALL this study could try to establish is whether those paths or rivers look the same in the brainz of men and women or whether they look different.  The comments about how the maps of women's paths prove that women are good in multi-tasking and men not or how the maps of men's paths prove that men are good at driving and map-reading and women are not, all those seem to be assumptions lumped on top of whatever the brain pictures (SOOO pretty) show.  They are added by Ingalhalikar et al. who even conclude like this (from the study itself, behind a pay-wall):

Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

All that looks like making much bigger assertions than the data confirms.  What the pictures (to be talked about later) seem to show is that the male brain (typical male brain?) we are shown appears to have paths which largely go from the back of each brain hemisphere to the front of that hemisphere or the other way, wheres the female brain (typical female brain?) seems to have paths which more often cross from one brain hemisphere into the other.  But WHAT those paths imply about, say, communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes (the stuff which people in many of comments threads interpreted as meaning that men are logical, women emotional) is a whole different kettle of fish.

For instance, one recent study suggests that the left-brain-logical, right-brain-creative thinking we have all had for breakfast for decades might not be that tasty anymore:

The preference to use one brain region more than others for certain functions, which scientists call lateralization, is indeed real, said lead author Dr. Jeff Anderson, director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah. For example, speech emanates from the left side of the brain for most right-handed people. This does not imply, though, that great writers or speakers use their left side of the brain more than the right, or that one side is richer in neurons.
There is a misconception that everything to do with being analytical is confined to one side of the brain, and everything to do with being creative is confined to the opposite side, Anderson said. In fact, it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking.
"It is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right," Anderson told LiveScience. "Also, creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left."

Bolds are mine.  So the point is that researchers can disagree about where those paths go or that perhaps researcher don't necessarily know where those paths go and why.

Second, the whole study and its treatment is a great breakfast barbeque of things designed, constructed, wired, hardwired and hardwired!  Just look at the titles of some of the popularizations:

Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal

The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are 'better at map reading'

Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently

It’s true: male and female brains are wired differently.  Study shows women’s brains are designed for social skills and memory, men’s for perception and co-ordination

The picture that reveals why men and women's brains really ARE different: The connections that mean girls are made for multi-tasking

Men and women's brains are 'wired differently' Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers.

Not all yesterday's  discussions of the study were like that.  This one is critical of the study.  What's the funniest thing on earth, right now, is that the paths one might make in the brain by either inheriting them or by walking a certain way a lot are just assumed to have been inherited.  In reality they might have been there when one was born, but there is lots of evidence telling us that people can make new path-works in their brains and that people can be trained to do that.  The brain, in general, has been found plastic (flexible, capable of learning new pathways).

The fault for concluding something from the study which it cannot actually prove (that the observed differences in brain structure are "hardwired") lies firmly in the researchers' lap.  The study uses the words "designed" and "wired" a lot:

Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

And

Taken together, these results reveal fundamental sex differences in the structural architecture of the human brain. Male brains during development are structured to facilitate within- lobe and within-hemisphere connectivity, with networks that are transitive, modular, and discrete, whereas female brains have greater interhemispheric connectivity and greater cross-hemispheric participation.

Bolds are mine.

This, despite the fact that the study used data from young individuals (between ages eight and twenty-two), divided them into three age groups, to roughly match with childhood, teenage years and early adulthood, and then found the differences develop predominantly only after the age thirteen.

Now, it is quite possible that such a wake-up point could be consistent with a "hard-wired" explanation because puberty could switch on the process.  But note that alternative explanations are possible:  The way boys and girls interact with the world and the way the world interacts with them also changes when they hit puberty.  Thus, to simply rule out anything to do with the way the genders use their brains (the trodden-paths explanation)  looks to me unscientific, even somewhat biased.  This is especially so because the case for innateness in the differences would have been much stronger if they had been visible from age eight onwards.

What did we get here?  The researchers assert that their findings prove to be caused by structural engineering (which women don't now have to be pushed into, as several commentators gleefully asserted in the comments threads because girlz can't do math)  without proving that.  Then the popularizers go with that!  Joy everywhere!  Controversial topic!  Lotsa clicks for advertisers, lotsa readers!  Sex stereotypes are twue, as the study researcher Ragini Verma told in interviews!  And I certainly had trouble understanding her (what with my frilly girl brainz) here:

Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men’s brains apparently wired more for perception and coordinated actions, and women’s for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.
“If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there’s a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better,” she said.
“Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved - they will listen more.”
She added: “I was surprised that it matched a lot of the stereotypes that we think we have in our heads. If I wanted to go to a chef or a hairstylist, they are mainly men.”

Why does she want to go to a chef?  And are hairstylists mainly men?  I doubt that in the US.  But never mind, we are told wonderfully controversial stuff, imputed to a picture of boy and girl brainz where the boys have blue brainz and the girls have orange brainz (which should be pink but the orange works, too).

Third, the whole research is about connectivity between parts of the brain, so it's apt to note that the paper makes poor connections between behavioral data on gender differences and the differences found in the structure of the brains.  I quote from the article itself:

A behavioral study on the entire sample, of which this imaging study is a sub-set, demonstrated pronounced sex differences, with the females outperforming males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests and males performing better on spatial processing and motor and sensorimotor speed (2). These differences were mainly observed in midadolescent age (12–14 y), where males performed significantly faster on motor tasks and more accurately on spatial memory tasks.

So from a larger study (with extra people with no brain scans added?), we learn that the behavioral differences which the imaging study argues it finds in everyone over the age 13 or so, are in reality mainly observed in midadolescent age (12-14 years)???

Cordelia Fine has written about this study today.  I'm going to borrow more from her in my more detailed discussion of the study (see footnote), but she is worth quoting here, too:

 In an larger earlier study (from which the participants of the PNAS study were a subset), the same research team compellingly demonstrated that the sex differences in the psychological skills they measured – executive control, memory, reasoning, spatial processing, sensorimotor skills, and social cognition – are almost all trivially small.

To give a sense of the huge overlap in behaviour between males and females, of the twenty-six possible comparisons, eleven sex differences were either non-existent, or so small that if you were to select a boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex would be superior less than 53% of the time.
Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition, and male advantage in spatial processing, was so modest that a randomly chosen boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition – and the girl would outscore the boy on spatial processing – over 40% of the time. 

As for map-reading and remembering conversations, these weren’t measured at all. 

Yet the authors describe these differences as “pronounced” and as reflecting “behavioural complementarity” – scientific jargon-speak for “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Rather than drawing on their impressively rich data-set to empirically test questions about how brain connectivity characteristics relate to behaviour, the authors instead offer untested stereotype-based speculation. Even though, with such considerable overlap in male/female distributions, biological sex is a dismal guide to psychological ability. 

Also missing from the study is any mention of experience-dependent brain plasticity. Why?

Bolds are mine.

A second cup of bitter coffee, anyone, to go with those fried boy and girl brainz?

Fourth,  it really is necessary to ask when studies of this type are dragged out into the public square and when they are utterly ignored.  I bet you can guess the main reason!

For instance, another very similar study using data on 439 individuals between the ages twelve and thirty,  published last July,  was not popularized because its findings about sex differences were modest.  The researchers of the present study mention that study, but argue that their larger sample size (n=949)  allows them to find statistically significant sex differences when the previous study could not do so (quote from the study);

Insignificant differences between the genders were observed in a recent study on SCs of 439 subjects ranging in age from 12–30 y (38). However, detailed analysis on a very large sample is needed to elucidate sex differences in networks reliably, as is provided in this study.

Dorothy Bishop notes, in her criticisms of the study that:

...if an effect was only evident when N = 900, then it would be a very small effect; in other words, while there may be a mean difference between males and females, the variation within each of those groups would be much larger than any difference between them. This was not conveyed at all in the media coverage.

Indeed, she links to a post where Gerard Ridgway tries to figure** out the effect sizes which the Ingalhalikar et al. study doesn't tell us at all.  Here's his picture  of the effect sizes.  The top graph (on sex differences in height)  is to give you a comparison base for evaluating the effect sizes in the Ingalhalikar et al. study finding:

Hmm.   It doesn't look quite so dramatic as one popularization led us to expect.  The male and female distributions differ much less than they do for human height, even for the largest difference Ingalhalikar et al. found.

The point, my dear readers, is that the study was pushed as one about hard-wiredness, as one which reinforces old gender stereotypes and as one which finds humongous differences.  Then the readers were given a script of interpreting those, not based on the images of the brains themselves but on the researchers' ideas about how men and women differ in behavior.

What really, really helped them to get this study out into the public arena wasn't just that it allowed wonderful comments threads where hundreds (if not thousands) mentioned that they knew all this already, that every man knows women cannot drive, that we should perhaps now let Larry Summers to run the Fed as we have proven that women can't do mathematics and that we should certainly stop pushing women into STEM careers which they don't want and cannot do.

It was also the pictures of the brainz.  Bishop writes about another study:

How is it that this paper has been so influential? I suggest that it is largely because of the image below, summarising results from the study. This was reproduced in a review paper by the senior author that appeared in Science in 2009. This has already had 42 citations. The image is so compelling that it’s also been used in promotional material for a commercial training program other than the one that was used in the study. As McCabe and Castel (2008) have noted, a picture of a brain seems to make people suspend normal judgement.

Bolds are mine.  A picture of a brain makes people suspend normal judgement?  I think she's got something there!

Here is the picture most of the popularizations used. It's from the article itself (Figure 2) but looks to me to have been color-enhanced.

The top two views are of a male brain, the bottom two views of a female brain.  Those squiggly blue and orange lines are the increased connectivity paths.  Men are from Mars, after all!

But WHOSE are these brains?  Are these some kind of averages, constructed over the whole sample of 949 individuals?  Or are they actual brains of two individuals?  Neuro-scientists may know all about how such pictures are selected, but, alas and alack, I have no idea.  And the article doesn't tell us.  The answer to this question matters enormously, because it is these pictures readers seem to be reacting to.  So we need to know how they were created and what they mean.

And here's the fun bit about those brain pictures:  They are taken from the same Figure 2 in the article. Figure 2  also contains male and female comparison pictures for the three age groups in the study (children, teens and young adults),  which to me sounds like all of the study, right?  But those figures look a whole lot less dramatic:

Pictures B apply to children, pictures C to teenagers and pictures D to young adults.  I assume that out of each pair of brains the female one is on the right.  But the study doesn't tell us.

I am confused about the Now-Famous Pictures and these poor Cinderella pictures which weren't allowed to go to the public ball.

Nevermind.  Have one more cup of coffee and look at this hilarious spoof version of the Now-Famous Pictures:

 

It's a very nice way of summarizing one of the main reason why this study has gotten so much publicity.  The other reason would be in those fewer popularizations that suggested that men can never learn to multi-task (but see).

Fifth, and finally, a few important warnings: I'm obviously not an expert in neuro-science and what I discuss here is more based on my general knowledge how research should be reported as well as what more knowledgeable people (such as Dorothy Bishop,  Tom Stafford, Cordelia Fine and Sophie Scott) report.  Still, I'm fully responsible for all the things my feeble girl brain got wrong, even though that is sooo unfair.

Neither does anything I say imply that I believe there are no possible innate sex differences in the structure of the brain***.  My point is that reporting inflated findings or links to behavior which the study itself cannot prove is not nice (files nails).  Moreover it's bloody fu..ing deplorable when its consequences might be increased stereotype threats for women (and men), reduced advancement of women in fields where an individual woman is perfectly skilled for the job, but where prejudices about what women can do have been made stronger by bad research (and thus keep her from getting a job she applies for) and a discouraging belief that men simply cannot learn social skills or have good memory and so on.

And if you care to spend few hours tearing out your hair, do go and read what the comments threads to those popularizations talk about!  The vast majority of them are about everybody knowing that women are like that and how the time now is ripe for feminazis to stop pushing women into the STEM fields and how all possible environmental effects on gender differences have now been proven false.  Because of pictures of brainz!  Which are colored blue for boys and orange for girls!

A few words about prior beliefs and prejudices:  It looks to me as if those who commented on the popularizations of the Ingalhalikar et al. study were of three major types, ranked in rapidly reducing group size from the largest to the smallest:  Many men (based on names or context) and a few women who loved the idea that women and men have now presumably been shown to be so fundamentally different that no further conversation can exist on anything having to do with gender differences, people (mostly women, I suspect) who were very angry at the study (and frightened by the way it is already used) and wanted to prove it wrong or have it proven wrong (which, anyway,  is really impossible to achieve the same day a study comes out) and then quite a small group of people who talked about plasticity vs. hard-wiredness and some of whom actually were in neuroscience.

All those people most likely have a prior belief about how much and in which ways women and men might innately differ, and it is those prior beliefs that even researchers have.  In that sense all these discussions will be gender-political, between those who think that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and between those who think that all such prior beliefs are pulled from Uranus.

The gender-political aspect has much to do with power and struggles for higher positions in the society, vs. trying to stay on top of the heap, and it has also much to do with feeling that one deserves, in a natural way, the good things one has or the feeling that others are out to get you either for being the oppressor or by making sure that you remain the oppressed.  It's all very emotional!  In a gender-neutral way, my friends.

These are the reasons why studies on gender differences should measure twice and cut once, as carpenters say.  Researchers' mistakes heap very high social costs on the shoulders of others, much higher than is in general the case with published research.  And that is the reason why I spend so much time on studies of this type and why I always try to bite the butts of bad popularizations.
  

These things matter.

On my own biases:  You can tell what they might be when my first quick reading of the study made me mutter how exaggerated it sounded.  That is a bias, too, of course, with a real world basis:  I don't see the kind of gendered differences in behavior which would suggest large fundamental differences in the architecture of the brain.  I do see differences, sure, but with lots and lots of individual variation and much weaker general differences than the  Ingalhalikar et al. tells us it has established, and I cannot really tell, for most of them, what the environmental effect in them might be.  And they say zero about individual variation, they fail to provide effect sizes.  These are the kinds of things which turn my skepticism engines on.

Whatever that is worth.  You can take any leftovers home with you if so desired.  A few additional criticisms about the study are left in the footnote if you are still peckish.****

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*The paper can be found and purchased here.  Ruben and Raquel Gur, among the authors of the paper, have been studying gender differences for thirty years.  They and Regini Verma wrote the actual paper, which suggests to me that they chose to talk about hard-wiring and so on.

**I have not tried to check any of the calculations, either here or in Ingalhalikar et al..

***In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  As both birds and bats can fly, so it is possible that brainz with quite different paths can solve the same problems and accomplish the same tasks.  For several examples of recent studies which have found sex differences in structural imaging (but not necessarily in the same direction or in the same places) read here, here,  here and here.  

 For some criticisms of this field, check out this.It includes a fascinating quote pertinent to this topic:

Of course, sex differences are also found at cellular and molecular levels of the central nervous system (Cosgrove et al., 2007). But whether it involves gene expression, neuronal signaling, gross structure, or regional blood flow, every brain-related sex difference is not necessarily behaviorally relevant. As Geert De Vries (2004) has shown, sex differences in neural circuitry or neurochemistry often reflect compensation for genetic and hormonal differences and actually end up making male and female behavior more similar than different.

****The two more technical criticisms I have seen have to do with brain size and head motion.  Those might look very weird, for the uninitiated, but they both matter here, because men have, on average, larger brains, than women, and because one study found that the amount of head motion in young male subjects during imaging was clearly somewhat higher than the amount of head motion in young female subjects and it confounded some of the results of the imaging.

On the size of the brain, Fine states:

One important possibility the authors don’t consider is that their results have more to do with brain size than brain sex. Male brains are, on average, larger than females and a large brain is not simply a smaller brain scaled up.
Larger brains create different sorts of engineering problems and so – to minimise energy demands, wiring costs, and communication times – there may physical reasons for different arrangements in differently sized brains. The results may reflect the different wiring solutions of larger versus smaller brains, rather than sex differences per se.

I came across the same suggestion in other literature and also some findings that the imaging results may suffer if there is a consistent brain size difference between groups.  Some conclusions may be caused by that rather than whatever the study tries to analyze.  To test this, one might try to compare large-brained women with smaller-brained men?  I have no idea if that is doable.

On the head motions:  This study (Figure1) shows a sex difference in the amount of head motion during the imaging.  Head motion is greater for males than for females.  Moreover, the effect of greater average head motion was found to be associated with apparent decreased functional connectivity in large-scale networks and apparent increased functional connectivity between the left and right motor regions.  As far as I can figure out, that is exactly what one would expect in the Ingalhalikar et al. study which seems not to have taken head motion into account at all.  At the same time the authors of the article studying the effect of head motion find its impact to fairly small on the results in their study.  On the other hand, they state:

Paradoxically, large data samples may be particularly vulnerable to this kind of confound where small, systematic differences in motion could become the dominant difference as other sources of variation are matched between groups. The rightmost panel of Figure 4 illustrates this point. The panel compares two large samples (each n = 100) that were matched for age and sex but systematically differed in a small degree of motion (0.044 versus 0.048 mm Mean Motion displacement). A between-group effect on functional connectivity of the default network is evident that is most likely entirely driven by head motion. This difference in another context could easily be mistaken for a true neuronal effect.

Given this, the Ingalhalikar et al. study should be re-run reanalyzed with controls for brain size and head motion before its results are discussed.