The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain. By Simon Baron-Cohen, 2003.
This isn't a real review, since I didn't read the whole book. Not that I could have; my library copy has a weird printing error with repeating pages and missing pages. It's fine from 1-144, and then repeats 83-114, before picking up again with page 179. So this copy is missing pages 145-178, and I could review around those, since I would have skimmed that section anyway. But really, there's no need. What makes this book interesting is the main theory, which is introduced right at the start, then argued at great length, and varying degrees of persuasiveness, through the remainder of the book. Here's the theory, which the author states right at the start of chapter one:
The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding the building systems.
I hope to persuade you in the rest of this book that this theory has growing support.
So, does he? More or less. He presents plenty of examples and test results and survey reports, all of which go towards building his case, and the logic of it seems sound. The problem, if you want to nitpick, is that there are plenty of exceptions to the rules, and everyone in real life fits somewhere on a sliding scale from male-to-female brain, with no way to know where they fit short of extensive testing, or long personal acquaintance. The concept seems to be empirically sound, but so what? What do we do with it? Nothing, really, since everyone is different. There are females with "male brains" and males with "female brains," and there's no telling why some people live up, or down, to their gender expectations, while others confound them.
Still, the author makes some good observations, and I'll quote a few and detail his theory a bit more thoroughly.
The background story to this concept is an interesting story in of itself. Unfortunately, it's not one I can tell, since I only know it indirectly. The idea that men and women had very different minds was accepted scientific knowledge for centuries. It was bullshit, of course, but accepted bullshit. Also known was the fact that blacks and other ethnic races had much smaller brains than whites, a lower capacity for logic and reason, and an inability to invent or create new products or devices; defects only partially offset by their natural aptitude at singing, dancing, and being shiftless.
Those beliefs were largely overturned in the 1960s and 70s, when some women started to penetrate into academia, and the consciousness-raising of feminism began to make the ridiculousness of such hoary theories all too clear. For some time then, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, the nature pendulum swung entirely to nurture, and argued theory stated that no man or woman, white or black, had any inherent traits, skills, inclinations, or abilities. Everything was culturally-induced, consciously or unconsciously, and the day of "you can be anything you set your mind to, if you're not raised with pre-conceptions and cultural limitations" was in high gear. At least among psychological theorists.
This utopia was short-lived, and it's now pretty much been overturned, by books such as this one. It's a tricky transition though, since the research and conclusions of authors like Baron-Cohen (no, not
the guy who did Borat), have pointed out what seems obvious in hindsight. Of course men and women are different in the brain as well as body. How could we be otherwise after millions of years of evolution taking us down different, if essentially parallel, paths? The quarrels come in when people who embraced a uniform vision of humanity feel they need to defending it to avoid a return to old-fashioned notions of men being smarter, more logical, more capable, etc. And they're morally right to oppose that, but perhaps not technically correct in their opposition.
The real point is not if we're different or not (we clearly are). The point is what are the differences, which are beneficial for which purpose, how can we build on our strengths and overcome our weaknesses, etc. And this book goes into a fair amount of detail on those issues, while also working to make the case for the differences that are still denied, by some.
Baron-Cohen's theory, as presented in this book, goes to the root of the differences between the typical male and female brain. He acknowledges more superficial differences; women are more caring and better at language skills, men have better spatial ability and tend to organize things. These are not defining traits though, since in his view, they're just outward attributes of the deeper brain structure.
Let's be clear what sort of behaviors we're talking about, first.
Chapter two profiles two children, a brother and sister, and details the brain-type differences revealed by their childhood behavior. Alex is a few years older, and is very male-brained, relentlessly systemizing everything in his childhood hobbies. As a young child he collects toy cars and sorts them by color, type, and make. When he gets tired of the cars he moves onto soccer, and memorizes the names and numbers and stats for the players in the league, pouring over the stats in the newspaper. In his teens he discovers music and attacks the singles charts with much the same ferocity. He knows every song's length, chart position, artist, writer, and makes his own weekly top 40 lists and compilation tapes. None of this is forced on him, and in fact much of it perplexes his parents. It's just his own nature.
Hannah came along a few years later, and is very female-brained. She was interested in people almost from the beginning, and much more verbal than her brother was. She spoke earlier, and in a different way; while Alex would name things, Hannah created little phrases, and spoke to get a reaction from people, or to interact with them. She was playful and teasing and loved to play with her parents or their house guests. For toys, she ignored all of her brother's old trucks and cars and trains, and instead preferred dolls and teddy bears and other representations of living things, all of which she named, constructed personalities for, and often set up in chairs to host them in tea parties. When she got into pop music, she cared nothing for chart positions or song lengths; she just liked to dance to the music in her room with her girlfriends.
Typical children, the boy doing boy things, the girl doing girl things. But why? What's different in their brains that creates their varying interests? Both were displaying very different preferences by the time they were eighteen months old. The parents didn't force them into their roles; Alex ignored dolls and stuffies for toy vehicles, and Hannah ignored Alex's toys and focused immediately on dolls and other things she could impart personalities to.
Empathy. The chief component of the female brain type is empathy. Baron-Cohen divides the concept into two facets. First is
cognitive empathy, which is an intellectual understanding of other's feelings and an ability to take their perspective. Second is the affective component of empathy; the "appropriate emotional response to another person's emotional state." More on that later, but I want to talk about the cognitive aspect first, since it's a skill I've long worked to improve at, since it makes life more interesting and it's useful for my writing. To understand someone else's psychology you've got to see things through their eyes, at least partially. Especially if the other person is very different than yourself.
One of my mottos is that "everyone's the hero of their own story," and while that's not entirely true, it's a good starting point for figuring out why and what they're doing. "Bad guys" aren't just there to oppose the hero, at least not in a good story. (Or in real life.) People who are lazy, or unempathic, or are simply doing it for political or propagandistic motives, tend to demonize and absolutize their opposition. How many times did we hear Saddam Hussein called a "mad man" or a "butcher" when the Bush administration and their stenographers in the media were selling the Iraq Attack? Attempting to consider things from Saddam's POV, or thinking that what America wanted wasn't the best for everyone, was never considered in our national discourse, and to this day it's a taboo subject, even with public opinion turned against the ongoing occupation.
Needless (I hope) to say, cognitive empathy does not equal acceptance, or approval. You can understand 100% why someone is trying to kill you, but that doesn't mean you want them to succeed at it. By the same token, you can understand completely why someone wants to love you, or be with you, but that doesn't mean you want them to succeed at their goal. This translates into fiction as well, even though most authors don't do it very well, if at all.
For instance, take the little-known fantasy tale,
Lord of the Rings. In it the chief villain, Sauron, is entirely one-dimensional. He/it is a disembodied evil force, a great glowing eye in the movie adaptation, without any emotions or depth. Sauron is nothing but pure evil, and he exists solely to destroy. Furthermore, most of his destruction is carried out by minions who have no personalities or minds of their own. There are more interesting characters; Saruman the White Wizard is somewhat ambiguous; doing evil things, but with a human element. We don't see much of that, since Saruman is seen only through the eyes of the "good guys" who revile him. There's no chapter in LotR from Saruman's POV, where he lists his grievances, or explains why the men deserve to be destroyed, or shows regret for having to do what he's painfully come to believe must be done. I'll avoid going too deeply into a literary analysis of LotR, but the "good guys" are much the same; one note, unchanging, heroic or stolid or wise or inspiring. Tolkien was many things, but a crafter of detailed, emotionally-resonanting, complicated characters was not one of them. (There are some exceptions; Gollum, for instance.)
Compare Tolkien's work to the novels in George RR Martin's ongoing fantasy saga,
A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't know how empathic Martin is in real life, but through four books he's done an amazing job of putting the reader inside the mind of nearly every character in the book, showing that even the most seemingly-evil individuals are real people with their own aspirations and ideals. It makes for a far more interesting and textured story, at least in my experience.
"But," you object, "LotR was a masterpiece!" True enough, and in fact that's why I chose it for this example (that and I figure everyone's seen the movies, if not necessarily read the books, so you all would get the analogy). As Tolkien shows, depth in character and empathy demonstrated by the author is not necessary to craft a wonderful piece of fiction. Extending the example, Tolkien seems a good candidate for the male mind type, since he had to create an incredible amount of fiction and background material to populate his world, and he systemized it all beautifully. At the same time, he was clearly uncomfortable with depicting human interaction, he had no understanding of the female mind, and quite possibly no interest in gaining that understanding.
For my part, I am very interested in knowing more about the human mind, male and female, both for my fiction and for life in general. Which is why I found this book interesting, and was writing about it before going off on a largely-inconclusive tangent about realistic character depiction in
Lord of the Rings.
After laying out his basic theory, giving some of the history of the study of brain differences, and providing case study examples of male and female brains, Sasha-Cohen moves into meatier arguments. Chapter four is all about the evidence for "The Female Brain as Empathizer." Chapter Five returns the favor, discussing "The Male Brain as Systemizer." The content of these chapters is varied, but does pretty well to advance the author's thesis, though I'd have liked a few more explanations as to why these differences exist.
Even without explanations, or hypotheses about why boys tend to roughhouse and girls cooperate, the data is compelling. Studies show that girls are generally more empathic, better at reading emotions, base their jealousies on emotional issues rather than physical actions, are much less likely to engage in acts of aggression or murder, form intimate emotional relationships rather than interacting in larger groups, etc. None of this is to say that girls are nicer; they compete and fight and can be much nastier than boys in their own way. The point is that there are generally quite clear, observable, predictable differences between how girls and boys behave, even from the youngest age, and this is essentially all the author is postulating. He's not trying to explain or understand everything, just make a case for the difference being real and measurable.
Well, he does go into explanations later. Chapter 7 is about cultural differences that might cause, or at least reinforce, these differences, and Chapter 8 is about biological ones.
Cultural ones include things like peer pressure, and parental behaviors and expectations. Parents give boys trucks and girls dolls. Parents reinforce rough play from boys and cooperation and kindness from girls. "Don't be a baby. Big boys don't dry." Sasha-Cohen clearly doesn't put too much credence on these theories, and he points out that children show preferences for different types of toys long before other children can begin to influence them. The whole chapter's only 9 pages long, so clearly it isn't the author's area of interest.
Biological factors are covered in the next chapter, and they're 20 pages of space, and a much more thorough discussion. Comparisons of the behavior of human children to children of various types of higher primates are illustrative. Boy and girl gorillas and chimps are much the same as humans, in their gender behaviors. There's also some interesting info about testosterone levels in baby boys. This can be checked in even the earliest amniotic fluid samples, and the author conducted a study in which they found a bunch of boys who had very low levels of testosterone. They conducted follow up interviews with the babies and their mothers at ages 1, 2, and 4, and found that these boys had more female-tendencies. They made more eye contact, they were more engaged with other people and less solitary and systemizing in their play, etc. It doesn't seem to have been a proper controlled, double-blind study, just anecdote from the author who might have seen what he wanted to see in his study results, but it's an interesting concept.
Animals studies have shown some other amazing effects of testosterone. When male rats are castrated at birth, their brains develop physical differences, lacking the typical male thickness between the left and right hemisphere. When female rats are given testosterone injections from birth, they're better at maze navigation and other pattern solving problems than most female rats. The problem I have with this one is, why? I can envision biological reasons for male humans to be better at maze solving, since it was usually males who were out hunting and gathering, while female were doing more baby-raising and cave tending. But what's that got to do with rats? Male rats don't bring home food for the family. If anything, shouldn't female rats be better at maze solving, since they need to find food quickly and return to their hidden babies?
The rest of the book covers extreme examples; super systemizing brains (autistic males, for the most part), and extreme female brains as well. Unfortunately most of those chapters are missing thanks to the printing error in my copy. The ending of the book is also cool, with various mind type tests in the appendix. One is a "reading the mind in the eyes" test which has photos of men and women, cropped to show only slightly more than you can see of a person wearing a burka. The task is to figure out their emotion, from just that much of the face. A typical picture will have options such as, playful, comforting, irritated, and bored. You've got to pick one.
At first I thought it was impossible, but as I looked through more of them, I started to see it. It was an odd feeling for me, almost like I had to open up my mind to think about it in a way I wouldn’t normally, and I found my mind filling in an image of what the rest of the person's face might look like, as I tried to decide between 2 or 3 of the choices. (I usually narrowed it down to 2 almost immediately, but almost never felt certain of my choice at a glance.)
Unfortunately again, some fucker who had the book before me went through and circled their choices for every photo, and that hopelessly corrupted my viewing process, since I naturally focused on the choice the other person had made, and then accepted (usually) or rejected (sometimes) it. Checking the answers as I went through, I got about 50% of the faces right in the first 10 or 12, and then got about 80% the rest of the way, as I gave tem more thought and used a part of my brain I don't often consult. (I don't much look into the faces of strangers, and I really don't or care to try to read their emotions.)
The answer key is useless too: there are 36 faces, and they say the average score is 22-30. Above that you're very accurate at it. Below that, "this indicates that you find this task quite difficult." Wow, thanks for that analytical insight, doc. I suppose the theory is that people with female brains are very good at reading emotions and expressions, but it's not explaine din the book. I do know, from this book and elsewhere, that the extreme male brain, the autistic, is usually completely devoid of empathy and utterly unable to read the emotions of others. Why, though? I don't think it's capability as much as inclination. After all, why couldn't an autistic, or other highly male-brained individual turn this into a type of systemizing? Squinted eyes = emotion X, wider eyes = emotion Y, etc.
Is it impossible? Are people too unpredictable? Are there too many gray areas in judging emotions, vs. something with absolute numbers and values like a train schedules or a page of sports statistics? I dunno. I don't think there's any suggestion that people with female brains have a special ability to read emotions; they just have a life time of interest in it thanks to their higher levels of empathy.
The second, third, and fourth appendices has various personality tests, and like all such tests, I want to argue with the questions. Which probably indicates something about me that's more conclusive than any test results would. That aside, here's a typical question from the Autism Quotient test. "I find it very easy to play games with children that involve pretending."
I have very little time spent around children in my life (since I was a child, and somewhat including the time when I was a child), but on the occasions I've been around kids and had to play with them, I've been able to do so pretty well. It's not something I especially enjoy or want to do, but I can do it. So I guess I "slightly disagree" with the question, picking the most appropriate of the four answers. But my objection is, "I can do it. I just don't much want to." (You get an autism point for answering either "disagree" on this one.)
I have the same reaction to this sort of question on those extrovert/introvert tests. They always ask things like, "You can mingle with strangers at a party and find common ground in your discussions." And yes, I can, but 1) I don't go to parties, and 2) I don't necessarily want to find common ground in discussions with strangers. What fun is that? Most people bloviate on about their private obsession, usually without any critical insight or analysis to make it interesting. Anyone can stand and listen to them, or ask them questions to lead them into further pointless lecturing, but how does that sort of enabling, or being the bloviator yourself, make you an extrovert? It makes you an easily-amused bore. I enjoy listening to someone's self-aggrandizing soliloquy, and then asking pointed questions about it, to get them to analyze their own thoughts or actions, or to get at what they really mean or feel. Which doesn't fit on the available answers for that sort of question, and leaves me unsure how to answer it. These kinds of personality tests usually ask about ability, rather than attitude or inclination or motivation, which is where I think the real insight into a personality lies.
A question from the EQ (Emotional Quotient) test. "I try to keep up with current trends and fashions." I definitely keep up with these, and usually hate on them and ridicule the people who follow them. I consciously choose not do so myself, and often change things I've been doing if/when they become trendy. So how do I answer? Strongly agree? Strongly disagree? The question needs more detail. Are they asking if I'm culturally unaware because I'm absorbed in something personal (like an autistic), or if I'm a social mayfly and eager to fit in and be part of something? But I'm neither, and for opposite reasons.
Another AQ test question. "I am not very good at remembering people's dates of birth." I'd have to strongly agree on that one, but here's the problem. I don't care about other people's dates of birth. I don't care about my own either, except to wish I'd lived through fewer anniversaries of that date. You get an AQ point for disagree, since autistic people tend to naturally memorize dates and numbers. I don't and can't do that; the numbers don't stick in my brain, but one could just as easily argue that my antisocial not caring about others is a clear sign of a lack of empathy, and is more a sign of extreme male brain (autism) than knowing the numbers?
I digress, again, but on the whole it's a decent book, if rather simplistic and self-evident (IMHO) in theory, and lacking in detailed, insightful analysis or concepts on the causal level.
Labels: book review, psychology
