Males and Females and Philosophical Puzzles

I was startled to discover the findings I present today, both because
the results are meaningful, and because I’d never heard of them before.
Perhaps it's only because I'm a philosophically inclined cognitive
science major that these findings seem so significant, but this study
seems to suggest that males and females approach large
philosophical questions differently.

There is a persistently slow growth rate for the number of women in the
profession of philosophy. Whereas traditional forms of sex
discrimination might have prevented women historically from entering
previously male dominated field, philosophy remains in a subclass of
professions that is particularly resistant to the reaching of equal
representation. Though the growth rate is steady, over the past forty
years we have seen only a modest increase in the representation of women in professional philosophy, where currently there is a 16.2% representation of females nationally, according to a 2006 survey.

Christina Starman, while a psychology graduate student here at Yale,
investigated how people approach the most major philosophical thought
experiments. Philosophers use intuitions as evidence for philosophical
theories or explanations. The way that people react to what they call
“thought experiments” provides insight into how people think about such
issues as personal identity or tricky moral dilemmas, hopefully
elucidating the underlying principles that guide our notions about the
topic.

Starman's study is unique in that it tracked answers to this question
along the dimension of gender. The outcome of her work would become a
hypothesis as to why we are seeing this relatively uniquely persistent
gender disparity in professional philosophy.

The most famous thought experiments were proposed by a philosopher named
Gettier, and have since then become known as Gettier cases. Here’s an
example:

"Farmer Franco is concerned about his prize cow, Daisy. In fact, he is
so concerned that when his dairyman tells him that Daisy is in the
field, happily grazing, he says he needs to know for certain. He doesn't
want merely to have a 99 percent probability that Daisy is safe, he
wants to be able to say that he knows Daisy is safe.

Farmer Franco goes out to the field and, standing by the gate, sees in the
distance, behind some trees, a white and black shape that he recognizes
as his favorite cow. He goes back to the dairy and tells his friend that
he knows Daisy is in the field.

The dairyman says he will check too, and goes to the field. There he
finds Daisy, having a nap in a hollow, behind a bush, well out of sight
of the gate. He also spots a large piece of black and white paper that
had become caught in a tree, which Farmer Franco mistook for Daisy.

Daisy is in the field, as Farmer Franco thought.

But was he right to say that he knew she was?"

This example is a powerful thought experiment in that it is designed to
tease out what it means to "know" a fact.

Starman, like academics for years, distributed this thought experiment
and surveyed people for their intuitions as to whether the answer was yes or no. She analyzed the results along the dimension of gender and arrived at some startling results.

Women are much more likely to answer this question with “yes” than men.
Women say that farmer franco had knowledge, where men say that he had only a belief. Women and men provide different intuitions on other famous thought experiments as well.

This is important for what it says about female and male brains in that
there appears a distinct gender divide between men and women in terms of how they approach the larger questions of the ordering of and purpose in the universe. It is more tangibly important, as well, for what it may suggest about the lag in the number of female professional philosophers. Steven Stich of Rutgers suggests that the philosophical intuitions of an individual match, in successful cases, the intuitions of the field or department that you enter. He claims that even atthe earliest stages, if professional male philosophers are propounding theories that do not align with the way that females approach these questions, women will become uninterested.

Overconfidence; a guest (male!) chimes in

Who make better investors, men or women?

Okay, before we go any farther, disclaimer: I am a man. And yes, that means I am not Steph Marton. However, I’m today’s guest blogger on this forum on one of the hottest fields in Cognitive Science today—decision-making.

We all know that men and women differ in a range of ways—from the number of sexual partners they desire to susceptibility to mental disorders. Recent research has brought to light another interesting difference—men are more overconfident investors.

Overconfidence arises from a variety of decision-making biases. Its consequence is trade-happy investors. In recent studies by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean described by the New York Times, men are far more likely to trade early and often, incurring more fees, and, in bear markets, more losses. The studies explain that men are more confident in their investing skills—confidence, it turns out, that is misguided.

Studies have shown that people—both men and women—tend to overestimate their own skills in just about everything, from driving to leadership. Several classic surveys showed that just about everybody thinks they are above average. In many circumstances, this belief is harmless. In the financial sector, however, overestimating your own abilities can hurt your bank account. And it turns out that men are far more likely, on average, to make these mistakes than women.

Male overconfidence, of course, is not restricted to playing the market. Other studies have shown that men simply are more confident in their own abilities. In this fascinating article from 2008, Newsweek covers the findings of researchers who found that men routinely overestimate their IQ, while women actually underestimate it.

Is male overconfidence learned or innate? Is it nature or nurture? Economist Alexandra Bernasek at Colorado State University conjectures it’s built in, hypothesizing that “aggressive risk-taking” fueled by overconfidence might have been an advantage in finding a mate through the ages. On the other hand, our culture tends to lend us the ideas that men are the intellectual superiors. One of the studies surveyed by Newsweek found people tend to rank their grandfathers smarter than their grandmothers and sons smarter than daughters.

The answer is probably some combination of both nature and nurture. Regardless of the cause, men are more confident in general, and specifically more overconfident in investing. Women, because they don’t overestimate their abilities, are smarter investors. But this more realistic view has its downsides. Confidence in one’s own abilities can make you an attractive job candidate and make people want to follow you. Being positive, even mistakenly, can be taken as an asset instead of a liability. So while women seem to make smarter decisions than men in investing, they are not necessarily rewarded.
In any case, I am confident this has been a damn good blog post.

Tune in soon for more from Steph Marton!

Angry Women and What not to Read

This week was my blog’s on-campus event, and we choose a perfect speaker for it. Tori Brescoll, a pioneer in the field of female specific research, is my personal hero, and her research in part inspired this blog.


Tori’s background is in social psychology, but she is currently an assistant professor at the School of Management. She is best known for her research on the role of stereotyping in the workplace and the ways that defying gender stereotypes in particular is detrimental to women's progress within organizations. Her main finding, and the one she is most well known for, focuses on anger expression in women. Women, she finds, are penalized for expressions of anger- more expressions of anger are correlated to less favorable evaluations of leadership and job competency. Men, on the other hand, experience the opposite: angry outbreaks are correlated with positive evaluations of their competency.


Tori covered the specific findings of her research, but more generally warned against the recommendations presented in popular literature pertaining to optimizing behavior in the workplace. She advises us to be wary in reading texts that promote the adoption of traditionally masculine behaviors in leadership roles. Tori’s favorite example is self-promotion. Men benefit when they self-promote directly, whereas women are more likely to be rated as less competent following direct verbal self-promotion. Tori pointed to “Nice Girls Don’t get the Corner Office” as an example of a best seller that promotes lay theories of useful strategies for women that aren’t necessarily corroborated by any of the evidence.


Tori’s actionable recommendations are to adopt the strategies that research suggests are rewarded by colleagues and evaluators. So far, she says, we know that demonstrating warmth, even before job competency, results in favorable viewings by coworkers. She predicts that we will find other similar qualities or manners that predict success for women.


The take away point from this blog entry is that women should be wary about the recommendations they consume on this topic. Look to the empirical research on perceptions and stereotypes of women in professional contexts as opposed to popular literature. The empirical research exists- look there first.

Future oriented thinking, planning, and delayed gratification are favorite topics in decision-making. How much, if any, people should discount rewards in the future as compared to rewards in the present is perfect debating-ground for libertarian paternalist discussions. For example, it seems like a non-controversial societal initiative would be to help people plan and save for retirement by setting default options on pension plans that nudge people to the forward looking options. Studies have shown that men and women think about themselves in the future in different ways. Since such things as retirement intervention programs are hot topics right now, planning and temporal discounting might become the focus of research programs that generate some gender-specific attention.

Researchers test what they consider to be forward-looking planning along a personal characteristic that’s called “future time perspective.” How an individual scores on a test of future time perspective is used as a proxy for their temporal horizon, the distance into the future an individual characteristically looks when making a decision about the present that has tradeoffs for the self at a later time.

Work by Jacob and Lawson was subsequently corroborated by Jones et al. in their studies of the future term perspectives of men versus women. To test this hypothesis, the authors asked subjects to imagine major life events in the future, e.g. a raise or the purchase of a house, and to provide a predicted time frame in which such a positive major life event would occur. Women’s temporal horizon was shown to be shorter (nearer to the present) than men’s. The authors interpret this study as confirming evidence for Jacob and Lawson’s results, that women typically plan less far into the future than men.

I found these results, or this interpretation or the results, surprising, given what we know about delayed rewards and discounting. Men, at least some studies have shown, are more prone to impulsive decision making. It’s counterintuitive to think that planning for the future is a relative strength of men, if we see that self-control and delayed gratification are typically stronger female strengths. My thought is that the FTP measure is getting at something other than the propensity to think in long term horizons.

Nonetheless, more research on topics of this nature can have significant policy implications. As the government is already taking steps to guide people toward delaying rewards, gender differences in foresight are highly relevant to policy interventions.

Bored, Again

The more research I do on boredom, the more I find that the literature points to boredom's correlation to all sorts of negative consequences. Whether boredom causes depression or depression causes boredom isn't too interesting to think about, given the dirth of research that can answer that question. We can say, however, that healthy and happy individuals who happen to be more prone to boredom are more likely to experience a host of mental issues. Personal characteristics such as narcissism and impulsivity are even linked to boredom-proneness.

There is some research as to how boredom affects college age individuals. The development and maturation of college age students, often called "psychosocial development," falls into seven broad categories: developing competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy toward interdependence, developing mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose, and developing integrity. With vague labels such as "developing integrity," it’s hard to be sure exactly what kind of behavior would qualify as progress in any one domain. I bring up these categories and the concept of pyschosocial development because researchers have studied boredom-proneness's effects on pyschosocial development, and there seems to be an interesting break-down by gender. More boredom-prone individuals display slower psychosocial development, and women, globally, and in what appears to be a robust effect, seem to exhibit less boredom-proneness than men, at least on the scales that are used most frequently.

I thought this finding was an interesting follow-up to my last blog entry, that touches on the role of women and the domestic sphere in the development of the concept of boredom. One study explains this result by suggesting that men need more external stimulation, but I don't think that this explains anything. My intuition, though I haven't found research on this, is that feeling bored often is related to poor introspection skills, which I believe is a relative female strength. I wonder how lifestyle differences and relative baseline levels of physical activity for males and women might affect the relative coping mechanisms for boredom that women and men develop.

Recently I’ve become very interested in boredom. It’s too large a topic to overlook here, given that wellbeing is my focus, and several thinkers, from psychology to literature to management, think that the confrontation of boredom is the key to sustained happiness. The modern author David Foster Wallace became fascinated with the idea of boredom at work, centering his last work “The Pale King” around themes or boredom and human nature. A positive psychology professor Csikszentmihalyi made millions off his “revolutionary” psychological idea that people are the most happy when they are productive, and are most productive when they are in “flow,” a mental state suspended somewhere in between over challenged and under stimulated.

Meditation, when the lack of any external stimulation becomes a state of heightened attention, is essentially the mastery of boredom. If control of internal mental states regardless of events in the external environment is the end of meditation and a stepping stone toward enlightenment, or in our terms, an escape from the hedonic treadmill, then an embracing of boredom becomes the only thing thats important. If you don’t need anything external to stimulate positive feelings (or ward off negative feelings), then your life can be empty while your state of mind perfect.

Schopenhauer writes that discontent is inevitable if we become habituated to whatever good things happen to us. We become bored with new possessions and the thrill of accomplishments wear off. If this type of deep seated boredom is no longer seen as undesireable, then achievement is no longer an end.

I bring up the topic of boredom not to rehash the therapeutic recommendations of philosophy but to present the idea that women and men confront boredom in different ways. If understanding boredom is a key to improving wellbeing, then these differences will give us a different picture of what the road to female and male happiness should look like.

Boredom, which was first coined in the Dicken’s novel “Bleak House,” is the sole subject of Patricia Meyers Spacks’ novel, aptly titled “Boredom.” An English professor at UVA, she spent five years researching the evolution of boredom. The relevant part of her book explores the way that women historically have employed tools to channel attention and to overcome domestic boredom. For example, she mentions that the “invention of boredom as a concept and of the novel as a genre” emerged at the same historical moment, and as women became the primary writers and consumers of the novel, the genre can be seen as a response to the differing circumstances of women at the time.

Spacks thinks that the modern preoccupation with boredom is related to the historical expectations with regard to the behavior of women. If women were morally bound to seek less external stimulation (that is, work or outdoor activity), it may be natural that they were the sex to more often feel and respond to long lasting boredom. Her point is interesting, though the implications for the modern women I'm still mulling over.

In general, I wonder, whether the type of boredom that is most closely linked to wellbeing is the type that Spacks is getting at here. Heidegger, in his “What is Metaphysics,” proposes that there are three distinct types of the boredom. The third, profound boredom, is the feeling of existential crisis in which we ask ourselves such as questions “is there something coming next that should compel me to live on?” This type of boredom is not caring because you are so uninterested with life that your mind tends to wander to the greater questions, which leads to more significant feelings of meaninglessness.

My question is this: is feeling bored in a domestic setting and turning to a good read describing a different type of boredom from the one we associate with depressive or deep unhappiness? Is everyday boredom just a less intense or shorter version of existential boredom? Sparks gender-breakdown hypothesis about females experiencing boredom differently is the most important to us only if the day-to-day boredom is related to Heidegger’s third type.

Despite the fact that this blog is only legitimate in so far as men and women make decisions in different ways, lets reopen this discourse with a consideration of the opposite perspective. Jonah Leher presents a brief overview of gender differences in decision making work thus far.

He argues that decision-making research thus far has not revealed too many significant divergences in decision making habits between males and females. It seems to me that his opinion is primarily given as a response to stereotypes about the kinds of differences we might expect. He cites the well-known assumption that women possess a relative tendency toward all things emotional or intuitive. This notion would predict that women are more likely to rely on emotion-based reasoning non reflective processes. Leher states that this gender distinction is not seen in the data, that women are not worse or better at reason-based decision making.

It may be face-losing and fruitless to argue that the stereotypes we consider debasing are correct. Nonetheless, I’m unsure whether Leher would have been more convincing if he had addressed the legitimate findings that women perform worse on some tasks that seem to get at these intuition-based decision making ideas. Shane Frederick, the father of the cognitive reflection task, mentioned in a previous blog entry, finds in his 2005 studies that women are more likely to settle for non-reflective answers. This implies that women are less likely to resist impulsive actions. What’s going on there? Are we being too quick to interpret decision making research in non-stereotype confirming ways? Science, or the interpretation of science, should not begin with an agenda to reverse stereotyping.