veryrare
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'Women have more empathy than men' is simplistic.
TL;DR: The "women are more empathic" meta-analysis is statistical garbage because they mixed male and female targets. Women show high empathy for women. Men show high empathy for women and decreasing empathy for other men. The overall female advantage is driven primarily by men's low empathy for male targets.
As I was reading this Wikipedia article, I encountered a seemingly settled conclusion:
I dug into all the studies in that specific section called "Empathy in different genders"
The empathy gap, it turns out, depends critically on one question that massive, headline-grabbing meta-analyses conveniently collapse across:
Who is the target?
For example, the article references a massive 57-country study using the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test to claim a universal female empathy superiority. Yet, this specific study like all except one (which we will get to) collapsed its scores across ALL 36 faces, mixing male and female. It cannot tell us if the female "empathy advantage" is uniform or driven by a specific gender.
Only one study mentioned in the article empirically differentiated the sex of the target: Klein & Hodges (2001)
The key feature of this study that participants infer thoughts & feelings of REAL targets discussing real experiences. Basically no acting & no hypothetical scenarios. Real people, real emotions & real time tracking.
The female empathy only appeared when women inferred the thoughts of OTHER WOMEN. For men, the gender difference vanished. The authors themselves note:
Oh wait, there's more! Two preliminary studies "mentioned within" that Klein & Hodges paper (which is not referenced in that Wikipedia article) replicated this exact effect! The female "empathy advantage" was contingent, not universal!
Let's take a look at: Bryant, 1982 and Olweus & Endresen, 1998 and later Klein & Hodges again.
Sample: 56 first graders, 115 fourth graders, and 87 seventh graders. 258 children across the critical developmental window from age 6 to 13.
The study reports a three-way interaction (Grade × Sex of Respondent × Sex of Stimulus) that reveals the critical pattern:
Basically, if you average the scores across all ages, Boys didn't show a clear preference for one gender over the other. Girls, on the other hand, consistently favored their own gender at every age.
Bryant asked the seventh-grade boys why they showed this pattern:
Yes, the overall scores showed girls scoring higher than boys. But that's only because those scores lumped all the targets together. Once you split things up by whether the target was a boy or a girl, the real pattern jumped out. The boys themselves admitted that they learn to hide caring feelings. While girls grow more open about caring for each other as they age.
By 7th grade, Girls actually showed more concern for boys than boys showed for each other. That wasn't true in 1st or 4th grade. Because boys are suppressing their empathy toward other males.
Let's move onto...
Now from the study the results as described by the authors, revealed four developmental trajectories:
Girls → Girl Stimuli: Linear increase with age (trend analysis: F = 2.48, df = 3,1089; p = .06, borderline significant)
Girls → Boy Stimuli: Linear increase with age (F = 11.68, df = 3,1085; p < .001)
Boys → Girl Stimuli: Linear increase with age (F = 6.31, df = 3,1185; p < .005)
Boys → Boy Stimuli: Linear decrease with age (F = 5.41, df = 3,1179; p < .005)
The authors summarize:
In plain English, Younger boys care most about other boys. Somewhere around ages 10 to 13, that flips: older teen boys care most about girls.
Approximately 95% of individuals at the low end of the empathy distribution are male. If combined within the context of men's low empathy toward other men, We can note that the "female advantage" is not driven by women's high empathy.
Could people just be lying on surveys? The researchers say that might explain a piece of the puzzle but it completely fails to explain the complex pattern. like boys suddenly caring more about girls while caring less about guys as they age. A lie wouldn't zigzag like that.
A Cohen's d of 1.00 is considered huge, But also, the grade differences were negligible:
Now let's seal the deal on...
Study 1 found that women seemed better than men at reading other people's emotions, BUT only if they filled out a sympathy survey first (Telling people the task was about 'empathy' versus 'cognitive ability' pointed in the same direction, but the effect wasn't strong enough to be conclusive). If they filled it out after, the difference disappeared.
Study 2 found that women outperformed men when there was no reward. But when people were offered small cash payments for getting the answers right, men caught up and the gender gap vanished. Both men and women did better with the money, meaning the incentive motivated everyone, but it helped men especially close the gap.
Basically it eviscerates the whole fixed, biological and arguably ideological 'women have more empathy' narrative.
It's true the authors coded the male targets as objectively less 'readable' than the female targets in these specific videos. Even if you account for that, Women were better at reading the female targets, while everyone read the male targets just as well.
That statement is not just simplistic as I said, It's scientifically misleading. It never shows you the thing we just find out after actually looking into the studies. Most of the large-scale studies make it impossible to know if the female "empathy advantage" is uniform or not.
The evidence highlighted in this post ironically posits a more "nuanced" picture as I said in the TL;DR at the top of the post: Women show high empathy for women. Men show high empathy for women and decreasing empathy for other men. The overall female advantage is driven primarily by men's low empathy for male targets.
Tags: @GeckoBus @The Notorious SLAV @Cybersex is our hope @AtrociousCitizen @deleted dude @St3v3Cel @Sergeant Kelly [USER=94356]@cathuluelitist [/USER] @Sir Silentium @RobertGarnicasAPedo @Balding Subhuman @SmhChan @tired as fuck
TL;DR: The "women are more empathic" meta-analysis is statistical garbage because they mixed male and female targets. Women show high empathy for women. Men show high empathy for women and decreasing empathy for other men. The overall female advantage is driven primarily by men's low empathy for male targets.
As I was reading this Wikipedia article, I encountered a seemingly settled conclusion:
"Studies have consistently found that women report higher levels of empathy than men... Females also tend to score higher on 'theory of mind' assessments... From birth, male and female infants respond differently to emotional stimuli... Many studies show that females have an on-average advantage in empathic accuracy skills."
I dug into all the studies in that specific section called "Empathy in different genders"
The empathy gap, it turns out, depends critically on one question that massive, headline-grabbing meta-analyses conveniently collapse across:
Who is the target?
For example, the article references a massive 57-country study using the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test to claim a universal female empathy superiority. Yet, this specific study like all except one (which we will get to) collapsed its scores across ALL 36 faces, mixing male and female. It cannot tell us if the female "empathy advantage" is uniform or driven by a specific gender.
Only one study mentioned in the article empirically differentiated the sex of the target: Klein & Hodges (2001)
The key feature of this study that participants infer thoughts & feelings of REAL targets discussing real experiences. Basically no acting & no hypothetical scenarios. Real people, real emotions & real time tracking.
The female empathy only appeared when women inferred the thoughts of OTHER WOMEN. For men, the gender difference vanished. The authors themselves note:
"Yet we unexpectedly found a strong gender difference; women who inferred the thoughts and feelings of another woman were significantly more accurate in their empathic inferences than men. Interestingly, this effect held only for the female target; empathic accuracy toward a male target was lower overall but produced no gender difference. "
"To confirm the results of this study, we conducted a follow-up study (Klein & Hodges, 1999) employing the same methodology but using two different targets. We replicated the results of the first study, finding a gender difference in empathic accuracy toward the female target. "
Oh wait, there's more! Two preliminary studies "mentioned within" that Klein & Hodges paper (which is not referenced in that Wikipedia article) replicated this exact effect! The female "empathy advantage" was contingent, not universal!
Let's take a look at: Bryant, 1982 and Olweus & Endresen, 1998 and later Klein & Hodges again.
Bryant (1982)
Bryant developed an Index of Empathy for children & adolescents with a clever design. Four pairs of items used identical wording, differing only in whether the target was a "boy" or a "girl." For example: "It makes me sad to see a girl/boy who can't find anyone to play with." This makes it possible to directly compare empathy toward men vs women across development.Sample: 56 first graders, 115 fourth graders, and 87 seventh graders. 258 children across the critical developmental window from age 6 to 13.
The study reports a three-way interaction (Grade × Sex of Respondent × Sex of Stimulus) that reveals the critical pattern:
"The significant sex of stimulus × grade interaction can be attributed to the fact that, averaging across males and females, the same-sex scores are equal across the three grades, but the cross-sex scores show... fourth-grade scores are lower than the first-grade scores, and the cross-sex scores of the seventh graders are higher than those of both the fourth graders and first graders."
"The significant sex of respondent × sex of stimulus interaction can be attributed to the fact that, averaging across grades, males showed no significant differences between same- versus cross-sex stimuli scores, while females showed higher same-sex scores than cross-sex scores. "
"Finally, the significant three-way interaction can be attributed entirely to the fact that while both male and female cross-sex scores showed the same curvilinear U-shaped pattern across grades, the same-sex scores of the females were higher for the seventh graders as compared with first graders, while the same-sex scores [of males] were lower for the seventh graders as compared with the first graders. "
Basically, if you average the scores across all ages, Boys didn't show a clear preference for one gender over the other. Girls, on the other hand, consistently favored their own gender at every age.
Bryant asked the seventh-grade boys why they showed this pattern:
"In each of three seventh-grade classrooms included in this study, where the findings of this study were presented, several males indicated that empathic responsiveness to other males was a sign of homosexual tendencies and foreboded social ostracism. It appears, then, that males in their early adolescence tend to deny the legitimacy of sharing male affective experiences and that the basis of this affective taboo is fear regarding sexual identity and social rejection."
"That, with age, females apparently significantly increased their empathic responsiveness to their same sex, while males decreased their empathic responsiveness or comfort in reporting such responsiveness to their same sex, suggests a developmental inhibition about acknowledging emotional responsiveness to the affective experiences of males."
Yes, the overall scores showed girls scoring higher than boys. But that's only because those scores lumped all the targets together. Once you split things up by whether the target was a boy or a girl, the real pattern jumped out. The boys themselves admitted that they learn to hide caring feelings. While girls grow more open about caring for each other as they age.
"Note that seventh-grade females expressed more empathy for male stimuli than did seventh-grade males. This comparison did not hold for first or fourth graders."
By 7th grade, Girls actually showed more concern for boys than boys showed for each other. That wasn't true in 1st or 4th grade. Because boys are suppressing their empathy toward other males.
Let's move onto...
Olweus & Endresen (1998):
This one has a massive sample of 2,286 Norwegian students aged 13 to 16 (1193 boys, 1093 girls). with a similar design aka parallel items with identical wording, differing only in whether the target was a boy or a girl, etc.Now from the study the results as described by the authors, revealed four developmental trajectories:
Girls → Girl Stimuli: Linear increase with age (trend analysis: F = 2.48, df = 3,1089; p = .06, borderline significant)
Girls → Boy Stimuli: Linear increase with age (F = 11.68, df = 3,1085; p < .001)
Boys → Girl Stimuli: Linear increase with age (F = 6.31, df = 3,1185; p < .005)
Boys → Boy Stimuli: Linear decrease with age (F = 5.41, df = 3,1179; p < .005)
The authors summarize:
"The girls showed the most straightforward development, with an increase in empathic concern towards both girl and boy stimuli. The boys evinced a similar developmental pattern with regard to girls as stimuli but showed a clearly deviating, decreasing trend in empathic concern for other boys in distress. "
"It is worth emphasizing that the basic trend pattern identified for the two scales of empathic concern also was found for each of the individual items making up the scales. "
"Both girls and boys responded with more empathy towards a girl than towards a boy in distress. It is worth noting that these results represented opposite tendencies for boys and girls with regard to the sex of subjects with whom they empathized most: Girls were most empathic with stimuli of their own sex, whereas boys showed most empathy towards the opposite sex. "
The "Cootie Effect" and the Reversal
This one is a bit funny but both studies identify something called the "cootie effect". a dip in cross-sex empathy around 4th grade (age 10). But you have to look at this with context:"It appears that, for boys, there occurs a reversal in (average) degree of empathic concern for own-sex as contrasted with cross-sex stimulus objects some time between ages 10 and 13; from age 13 (or possibly somewhat earlier) and upwards, boys tend to express more empathic concern for girls than for boys in distress. "
"For girls, on the other hand, there are no indications of such reversals and, on average, they empathize most with other girls across the whole age span considered."
In plain English, Younger boys care most about other boys. Somewhere around ages 10 to 13, that flips: older teen boys care most about girls.
Sex Difference at the Extremes
Olweus & Endresen also calculated the proportions of boys and girls at the extreme ends of the empathy distribution:"For the whole sample, almost 95 percent of the subjects in the lowest part of the distribution (low in empathy) were boys, whereas 88 percent in the highest part were girls. For the higher grades, the differences were even more pronounced, with 97 percent boys at the low-empathy end and 95 percent girls in the high-empathy part of the distribution."
"These results thus imply relative constancy across grades of the proportions of boys and girls at the low-empathy end of the distribution—with a marked predominance of low-empathic boys—whereas the portion of highly empathic boys actually decreased with increasing age. "
Approximately 95% of individuals at the low end of the empathy distribution are male. If combined within the context of men's low empathy toward other men, We can note that the "female advantage" is not driven by women's high empathy.
Social Desirability?
"Although the main differences reported in this study seem, by and large, to reflect real differences in empathic responsiveness... it is highly likely that a social desirability explanation, which is typically fairly general in nature, would be of only limited help in explaining the more complex, but quite distinct trend patterns identified in the present study."
Could people just be lying on surveys? The researchers say that might explain a piece of the puzzle but it completely fails to explain the complex pattern. like boys suddenly caring more about girls while caring less about guys as they age. A lie wouldn't zigzag like that.
The Effect Sizes
"The effect size in the total sample was 1.00, which may be regarded as a quite large effect (above .8, see Cohen, 1977). When calculating effect sizes for the higher (Grades 8 and 9 combined) and the lower grades (Grades 6 and 7 combined) separately, the effect size values were 1.17 and .83, respectively."
A Cohen's d of 1.00 is considered huge, But also, the grade differences were negligible:
"For the lower versus higher grades (Grades 6 and 7 combined versus Grades 8 and 9 combined), the effect sizes for the Total Scale of Empathic Responsiveness were only .07 for boys and .22 for girls."
Now let's seal the deal on...
Klein & Hodges (2001)
Returning to Klein & Hodges, Another interesting finding is that the female "empathy advantage" is not just gender-specific, it is also motivation-dependent.Study 1 found that women seemed better than men at reading other people's emotions, BUT only if they filled out a sympathy survey first (Telling people the task was about 'empathy' versus 'cognitive ability' pointed in the same direction, but the effect wasn't strong enough to be conclusive). If they filled it out after, the difference disappeared.
"We hypothesized that women's advantage in empathic accuracy would hold only when they completed the sympathy questionnaire prior to the empathic accuracy task, and that when the sympathy questionnaire was completed afterward, women's accuracy would not differ from men's."
"As predicted, when completing the sympathy questionnaire after empathic accuracy was assessed, women (M = .45) and men (M = .42) did not differ in empathic accuracy... However, when sympathy was measured before empathic accuracy, there was a significant difference between men's (M = .40) and women's (M = .53) accuracy."
Study 2 found that women outperformed men when there was no reward. But when people were offered small cash payments for getting the answers right, men caught up and the gender gap vanished. Both men and women did better with the money, meaning the incentive motivated everyone, but it helped men especially close the gap.
"As predicted, women (M = .42) were more accurate than men (M = .28) in the control condition, d = .98... whereas no significant gender differences were found in the money condition."
"When provided monetary compensation for accurate inferences, both men and women demonstrated greater empathic accuracy than their counterparts who were not provided with this extrinsic motivator."
Basically it eviscerates the whole fixed, biological and arguably ideological 'women have more empathy' narrative.
Male Readability
A critic might say: "Maybe men aren't less empathically accurate toward men; maybe men just express their emotions less clearly!"It's true the authors coded the male targets as objectively less 'readable' than the female targets in these specific videos. Even if you account for that, Women were better at reading the female targets, while everyone read the male targets just as well.
Conclusion
The Wikipedia article presents a clean, simple story: "Women are more empathic than men. Studies consistently show this. It's evident from birth."That statement is not just simplistic as I said, It's scientifically misleading. It never shows you the thing we just find out after actually looking into the studies. Most of the large-scale studies make it impossible to know if the female "empathy advantage" is uniform or not.
The evidence highlighted in this post ironically posits a more "nuanced" picture as I said in the TL;DR at the top of the post: Women show high empathy for women. Men show high empathy for women and decreasing empathy for other men. The overall female advantage is driven primarily by men's low empathy for male targets.
Tags: @GeckoBus @The Notorious SLAV @Cybersex is our hope @AtrociousCitizen @deleted dude @St3v3Cel @Sergeant Kelly [USER=94356]@cathuluelitist [/USER] @Sir Silentium @RobertGarnicasAPedo @Balding Subhuman @SmhChan @tired as fuck
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