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.

Today I’m excited to post about women, violence and justice. How do women and men think about systems of justice, and how does this affect how they choose to punish cheaters and defecters? In particular, how do women feel about violent punishments, even if those punishments are merited?

This topic has, in my opinion, broad implications for law, policy, and interpersonal relationships. Understanding how one feels when observing punishment has bearing on how one chooses to punish and what outcomes they deem fair.

The inflicting of punishment is deeply related to our capacity for empathy and our tendency to experience the emotions of an individual we are merely observing. Women, as today’s study reveals, feel empathy in ways that are noticeably different from men, and it appears that these differences have implications for the way that women will regard an individual being punished. This finding may inform our notions of the female punisher, suggesting that women will either choose less severe punishments or, perhaps more likely, non violent forms of punishment.

The article, published in Nature in 2006, employs fMRI techniques to scan the brains of women and men as they watch other people play an economic game, the prisoner’s dilemma. After the players in the game make their decisions, the subjects watched either fair or unfair players receive an electric shock to their hand.

The researchers were hoping to observe the differences in brain activation as a response to fair and unfair punishment. The researchers were paying special attention to the fronto-insular cortex (FI), a part of the brain implicated in empathetic responses. The researchers hypothesized that activation in this area would be reduced when subjects observed a fair -- as opposed to an unfair -- punishment, feeling less empathy for those who are in pain if they deserve it.

The researchers were surprised to find a significant difference in empathy responses along these unfair/fair dimensions between men and women: “This analysis revealed that less empathic activity was elicited by the knowledge that an unfair player was in pain. However, there was also a marked difference between the sexes. In women this reduction in activity was very small, whereas in men the knowledge
that an unfair player was in receipt of pain elicited no increase in empathic activity in FI.” Whether or not the player deserved the punishment, women felt significant levels of empathy.

The authors suggest, in a way that I find compelling, that it is the nature of the punishment that is responsible at least in part for this difference between the sexes: “It is possible that our experimental design favoured men because the modality of punishment was related to physical threat, as opposed to psychological or financial threat. Alternatively, these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in humans.”

Whatever the empirically correct conclusion to be drawn from this study, it is a finding that is worth noting. Its my personal hypothesis that men think abstractly about upholding justice whereas women focus in on the state of the individuals involved. In terms of the alternative that it is merely the unique nature of the punishment as a violent punishment, I thought I’d include an relevant article from yesterday’s New York Times about women and violence as depicted in art.

I would be unsurprised if further studies corroborated the idea that women think differently about abstract justice enforcement in addition to violent forms of punishment. If so, we must begin to think about how females judge and enact fairness.

Belief; A Complication

In what ways are our notions about people (and in particular, categories of people) so deeply engrained that the associations become unlearnable? As applied to women and sexism, race and racism, it is surely true that people absorb the stereotypes and value system of the prevailing culture. I write today about belief, drawing mostly from the realm of philosophy. In particular, I explore the different types of beliefs that exist within society, with special attention to how implicit, semiconscious versions of belief are at the root of our ideas about race and sex, culturally learned values and societal norms. Examination of the systems of beliefs that operate within us to make stereotyping habits of thought resistant to rewiring is relevant to any efforts to overcome these stereotypes.

Tamar Gendler, of the philosophy department here at Yale and a long time personal hero of mine, has championed a theory that disentangles two types of belief, what she calls “alief” and “belief.” To make a complicated story short, an alief can be thought about as an unconscious, associational, and automatic belief based on habits and perhaps, in part, imagination.

To define this concept by example, think about a horror movie goer who is terrified when a killer comes on screen. The viewer both “knows” that the killer is merely on screen and thus is harmless (a “belief”) but acts as though she is in some sort of danger (based on an alief), as shown by her terrified response. The details are less important here and in fear of misrepresenting the theory I’ll leave it at this. People can “believe” things at multiple levels, and implicit, unconscious visceral beliefs can operate to affect behavior (aka: acting fearful at the theater). The implicit belief, the alief, can be seen in countless examples (see Gendler) in our behavior.

Let’s turn to the topic at hand. People may cognitively believe that, lets say, women are just as capable as men, but implicitly and unconsciously “alieve” traditional stereotypes about the groups. Just to clarify, the individual may not (and it seems usually does not) have conscious control over the functioning of the “alief.” As much as I want to act in accordance with my higher level cognitive belief that the differences between the sexes are unimportant in most contexts, my “aliefs” formed by culture or personal experience may lead to an implicit belief at a lower level to which I do not ascribe consciously.

Gendler’s theory of “alief” helps to explain the effects we see on the Implicit Association Test. People’s implicit biases against groups become clear on associative tasks such as this, indicating that people do have beliefs about racial groups that they do not promote deliberately.

The idea that our unconscious belief (alief) can ascribe to views we do not promote consciously is certainly interesting in and of itself. Gendler’s work is also exciting in that it merges philosophical rumination on the meaning of the concept “belief” with experimental psychological evidence about how people truly behave. Lastly, her ideas have implications for stereotyping. We can change beliefs without changing aliefs, leaving the portions of our behavior that are governed by implicit processors problematic.

The Gambler's Mind

In an exciting new find of the day, I present here a study that investigates both behavioral and neurological differences between men and women as they tackle a well-known cognitive challenge. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that women and men perform differently, and that the subtle though significant behavioral differences are manifested in noticeable differences in their brain activation patterns. I’m as wary of the usefulness of brain imaging technology as the next cognitive science major, but no matter what we can actually conclude from the neurological results, I like this study for trying.


The Iowa Gambling Task is a paradigm that tests our ability to pick up on expected probabilities. Essentially, the game consists of choosing between different decks, some of which yield big losses and big gains and some of which yield smaller losses and gains. In the classic design, the low risk decks typically yield a higher expected value. To do well in this game, a subject must eventually begin to choose the decks that have the higher expected value (the lower risk decks). Typically, it takes normal subjects about 40 or 50 trials before they begin to catch on.

I first thought to look into gender differences with regard to the Iowa Gambling task when writing about the relationship between emotional responses and our judgments of value and probability. Is there useful information within our emotions, or are those emotions only distractions from or distorters of more useful cognitive information? Should we judge the future value of a good in part based on visceral emotional intuitions to it? In the age of reason, with the fading Romantic conception of the noble emotion, we more often seek to override emotions in the name of data-driven decision making. Researchers have used the Iowa Gambling Task to suggest that in certain contexts, our emotional processors provide relevant information that our cognitive centers overlook.

The Iowa Gambling Task is significant in the context of emotions and information in that it is often the case that subjects will start to choose the favorable decks even before the higher expected value is registered consciously. Subjects start to feel emotions when they are choosing the high risk decks, and so they choose the advantageous strategy due only to their emotional response.

This finding is old news. I bring up the task here because men and women think and decide differently in this game. For all the times I’ve read about the paradigm, however, I’ve never seen mention of the incredibly noticeable differences between men and women’s performance. Men, to cut to the chase, typically do markedly better in terms of choosing the advantageous strategy.

That being said, It’s not an empirical mystery any more whether women and men (sometimes) perform differently on cognitive tasks. We also know that women and men process risk differently (see my earlier post!).

What I like about this study is its emphasis on the brain. I want to know exactly how male and female cognitive processors differ on task such as this one and brain imaging is a step, albeit a small step, given the state of our actual knowledge about the brain, toward a greater understanding of how and why men and women think (and not just feel) differently. If we can track entirely different brain activation in women and men, the differences between the cognitive functioning of the sexes becomes a biological (and thus more clearly a fundamental) truth.

Today’s blog entry is a metaentry. I feel like the time is ripe to take

a look at why and if gender-specific research (and thus blogging about

gender specific research) is even necessary. Do the obvious biological

differences between men and women give rise to psychologies that are

different enough to merit independent study? In certain domains, such as

child-rearing, it strikes me as intuitive that biological differences

(breasts vs. no breasts, etc.) will manifest themselves in different

parental investment and thus different attitudes.



Let’s look at less biologically-dependent spheres of life. Do biological

differences lead to different attitudes in the workplace? In the

kitchen? In science departments? Where do human universals override

gender distinctions? Big topics. To start to tackle this question in

terms of happiness, I present a recently published book, “Bluebird:

Women and the New Psychology of Happiness.”



Written by Ariel Gore, this new work takes a look at existing research

and the noticeable gaps in the research around women’s happiness. She

provides anecdotes that point to the need for a more extensive

literature on women’s happiness in particular. Women, for instance, claim

that children are the most joyful part of their lives, but when asked to

recall the most joyous moments of their day, they rarely include encounters

with their children. This paradox, Gore believes, is one example of

where positive psychology research fails to explain the female psyche.



Given the nature of this blog, it’s clear that I believe that positive

psychology can be most effective if broken down by across gender

divisions. Both layman intuitions and empirical studies show that women

are made happy by different things in different ways than are men. I wonder

whether this assertion holds implications for other subgroups of the

population that have different biologies. Should we divide psychology

research along races, as well, since we know that there are biological

differences there? What aspects of our biological systems are

relevant to psychology and how should we adjust our research

methodology accordingly?

Looking forward to Valentine's Day? Research shows that there’s more than one reason to celebrate the holiday enthusiastically this year. Those V-day themed clothes may spice up your love life all by themselves.

Red has historically been a powerful symbolic color. It’s the color of blood, violence, power, love, and the lights that demarcate prostitution districts. Whatever the factors in our ancestor’s distant past, it appears that we have evolved strong feelings for the color. Besides its symbolic power, however, it seems to affect low-level perception in a measureable way. In its most important application in light of the approaching holiday, there is evidence to believe that red makes the wearer appear more attractive. As long as the wearer is female, that is.

In research published last year, perhaps to little surprise, researchers at the University of Rochester have tested men’s perceptions of female’s photographs. The study manipulated the color of the picture frame or the color of the female’s sweater and then asked for reports from the men on their impression of the women in the picture along a variety of dimensions, attractiveness and intelligence among them.

“Under all of the conditions, the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors.” Men’s ratings on likeability or intelligence did not change as a function of the color worn in the photographs.

This research has generated questions as to whether red’s particular cognitive potency is due to cultural conditioning or innate biological roots. In terms of the latter hypothesis, for instance, is red just more likely to be associated with fertile females? Monkeys, I should mention, similarly find red to be an attractive color. Regardless of the mechanism behind the phenomenon, it won't do bad things for you to deck out in rosy hues on Sunday. Or on any other day…

Recession-Proof Happiness?

Is women's sense of wellbeing immune to fluctuations in the economy?

Research into the factors that make women and men happy implies that there exist systematic differences in the ways that men and women cope with plunging stocks. Last May, the Nielson Company ran a global survey, entitled, transparently, the Nielson Happiness Study. It was designed to gauge the relative happiness levels of men and women across 51 countries. The results, they claim, have implications for how men and women value different things.

The survey, polling just under 30,000 individuals, found that women are happier than men within countries nearly across the board. Women in the United States, for example, are happier than men in the United States. Men’s self-reports of wellbeing exceed those of women only in Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam.

Besides measuring relative happiness levels, the survey also delved into the factors that make individuals happy, revealing that men and women diverge on this issue. The study has been read through the lens of the recession in that it seems to indicate that women more readily list non-economic factors, such as their relationships, as the determining factors for their happiness, while men will more often list their financial security.

I wonder, however, if the fact that women are still less financially stable, or are earning, overall, less pay, that has caused them to rate other things as the sources of their happiness. If women in general are expecting to earn less money, then is it surprising that they list non-economic outlets as more significant sources for their happiness? I wonder if it is because women are less financially stable-- or generally earn less pay, causes, or is caused by, the importance of money to their happiness.

The Nielson Survey is an interesting extension on one of my earlier posts covering the happiness research of Easterlin, who found that men grow happier than women by late middle age. The results are not necessarily contradictory, but I’d say that the Easterlin study was more informative to me as an individual existing in only one culture, as it examines happiness over time as opposed to across nations.

Though I wouldn’t have necessarily have predicted such consistent differences between the responses of men and women, inherent differences in male and female communication style or differing response biases may be behind the results. As with any self-reported measures, it’s hard to pin down what we are really measuring. Nonetheless, the sheer size of this survey and its cross-cultural elements make it an important contribution to the field.

The 51-country Nielsen Happiness Study, which polled 28,153 respondents online in May 2008, found that globally, women are happier than men in 48 of the 51 countries surveyed, and only in Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam were men found to be happier than women. Women are also more optimistic about the future, scoring higher than men on predictions of their happiness in the next six months.

Motivations for Mammography

This week I’d like to switch gears to look at a topic in Women’s health. Breast cancer screenings have become a hot topic in the past few months due to the release of revised mammography recommendations from the United States Preventative Services Health Care. Though the new set of recommendations have generated both buzz and confusion, the crux of the debate lies in the elimination of mandatory mammography services for women after the age of 40, moving this age to 50 instead.
A misreading of this change in policy has led many to believe that this will mean the elimination for mammography services for women between the age of 40 and 50. In fact, however, women in this age bracket are now simply left to elect individually whether they would like to receive the service. In light of this change the circumstances under which women are likely to choose to get the screening are worth investigating. It turns out that there is research on what demographic features and personal traits are correlated with the greatest likelihood of women seeking out a mammography. This type of research can help policy makers, health care providers, and friends and family alike encourage women to take preventative measures into their own hands.

Here is an article that looks at the personal characteristics that are most deterministic of whether a woman will seek out a mammography:

The authors find, interestingly, that self-efficacy, the belief or confidence that one has the power to take events into one’s own hands, is the number one determining factor of going through with a mammogram. In some ways, it seems that self-efficacy is linked to traditional education in preventative measures. The more you know about these types of services, the better equipped you are to make them happen. On the other hand, self-efficacy captures a less intuitive factor- the notion of agency. Women who believe in the strength and potency of their will are more likely to seek the services. It appears that increasing women’s self-sufficiency and confidence will have positive implications for their receiving a mammogram.

This kind of research into how a change in motivations can promote early detection also has some cost cutting implications. The more a woman becomes accountable for and knowledgeable about her own health, the easier the health care provider must share. Discovering techniques to help women help themselves in terms of these measures is interesting from a psychological perspective, informative from a policy perspective, and meaningful from a health perspective.

Is women's stereotypical timidity damaging their financial and career prospects?

An often expressed layman intuition is that women exhibit less risk-taking behavior than men. Statistics consistently show that men will more often engage in “risky” behaviors (including criminal activity, for example). Indeed, there is an extensive collection of literature on the topic of risk-assessment processes in men versus women.


Here’s an overview of the research in this topic:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P5N-4SYS65G-4G/2/982a686c9779d5fde2be323032f480e6

I’d like to point out in particular one of the studies covered in this overview:


Gysler, M., Kruse, J.B., Schubert, R. (2002). “Ambiguity and Gender Differences in Financial Decision-Making: An Experimental Examination of Competence and Confidence Effects”.

Here is the full article if you’re interested:
http://www.peel.pitt.edu/esa2003/papers/schubert_ambiguitygender.pdf)

The authors suggest that “women's risk-aversion diminishes as their expertise increases. The interactions have just the opposite effect for men, with risk aversion increasing with expertise and confidence.” Women become more risk-taking when they are making decisions in a domain in which they are expert, while in men we see an opposite trend. Why is it the case that women become more risk-prone as they become more financially savvy, or equally curiously, why should it differ between men and women?

Whatever the mechanism, these studies in risk-taking behavior hold relevant implications for women as consumers, investors and entrepreneurs. Is risk aversion in part responsible for the discrepencies we see between the number of male and female entrepreneurs?

Sure, it’s possible. The Wall Street Journal blogged about something to this effect last year:
(http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/09/02/does-an-aversion-to-risk-taking-hold-back-women-entrepreneurs/tab/article/).

I have doubts as to the hypothesizing around the factors that are holding back female entrepreneurs, however. Is risk-taking itself a prerequisite to entrepreneurial success, or is it merely necessary to secure the money from male-oriented venture capitalists and clients? Is risk-taking, in itself, what entrepreneurs need to launch a successful venture, or does it only seem this way because men, who are so often in control of capital, perceive risk-proneness as a desirable personal quality?

If the features of maleness are over time associated with entrepreneurial prowress, how we can disentangle the confoudning factors? I argue that we cannot know if risk taking is a desireable quality in entrepreneurs.

Can insight into the female psyche make corporations millions?

While women wear many hats in the modern world, be it friend, mother, or professional, the female as a consumer has caught the attention of market watchers recently.

Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre have published “Women Want More,” a book exploring what the female market looks like today and how to best capture it.

Follow this link for a cover of this research in the Harvard Business Review: https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=532&i=534&cs=891f1a6dac549701466611bdc4ce5f29

More women are working and the income gap between men and women is closing. Women, it appears, are enjoying more discretionary income and are willing to spend it. With women working full time more often, both at work and at home, Silverstein and Sayre think that services that cater to the modern women’s busy schedule will generate the biggest profits of the future.

In my opinion, in catering to the female populace it is hard to achieve a balance between realistically meeting the true needs of the average female and falling back on stereotypes. The only way to do this, I think, is to be fastidious about surveying to understand the true nature of demand. When Dell offered a laptop in pink, hoping to capture the fastest growing segment, the campaign crashed when female outcry condemned the campaign as condescending and ill-matched to their actual needs.

Consider financial services. It may be the empirical truth that women are less financially literate than men. If so, and if women really do need good advice, will such programs help to address the problem without doing more harm in terms of reinforcing stereotypes and offending the very demographic targeted?

Fitness, the author’s claim, is an area in which industry has done better for women. Recognizing that women prefer cardio to body building, chains such as Curves have stepped up to provide quick, easy, low cost alternatives to the fitness center chains primarily targeted toward men.

Overall, the economy is paying attention to the unmet needs of women, and this can’t be a bad thing. Products and services specialized for women, especially for modern working women, are designed to recognize the fact that businesses are coming to terms with the fact the females and men are essentially different types of consumers. Different biological systems produce different psychologies, which lead to different characteristic patterns of consumer behavior between women and men. I think it is more important to recognize this fact than to avoid speaking about women in broad strokes. Overall, I am excited to see this women specific research take flight, even if it is in the pursuit of capturing as much of our money as possible.

Knowing What to Want

Straight from the psychological powerhouse that is Yale and indeed from our very own Peter Salovey, today’s study explores the relationship between emotional intelligence and the accuracy with which we predict our responses (in moods and emotions) to future events. We call this ability “affective forecasting.”

Here is the link to the article, entitled “On Emotionally Intelligent Time Travel: Individual Differences in Affective Forecasting Ability"

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/33/1/85 (hit the download button if it does not pop up immediately).

Most people are miserable predictors of how happy or sad a future event will make them, overlooking the strength and versatility of what some call our “psychological immune system.” We end up overestimating the duration and intensity of our emotional reactions to events.

The idea of affective forecasting, and the fact that we are bad at it, is hardly news. I open the topic today to suggest the possibility that not all affective forecasters are equally impaired. This study compellingly presents a case for emotional intelligence as a significant predictor of how accurately an individual can forecast his or her future emotional state. The better we are at a certain facet of emotional intelligence -- emotional management -- the better forecasters we are.
Though I suppose any empirical research is never conclusive, it is approaching consensus that women exhibit, in more studies than not, higher emotional intelligence than men. If so, does that mean that women are better affective forecasters?

The authors investigate the role of gender here, and find that it is the increased emotional intelligence, not gender itself, that is playing the greatest role in the effect. Nevertheless, women score higher on emotional intelligence, so the link still holds.

Researchers Gilbert and Wilson in an earlier affective forecasting study subtitle their paper as “Knowing What to Want.” If we are dismal predictors of how happy we will be after attaining our goals, can we really trust ourselves to be the enablers of our future wellbeing? “Knowing oneself,” may be the key to acting today in the best interest of each or our future selves.

Happiness over Time

Today I’d like to cover what I believe to be one of the most, and maybe the only, important research topic- happiness research. If all other human drive-, the pursuit of influence, fortune, and deep interpersonal connections- are pursued in the service of the ultimate end of happiness, then it makes sense to investigate the relationship between the intermediate goals of wealth and love to the umbrella goal of wellbeing. In the article I have chosen today, two economists investigate changing average happiness levels for men and women over time in America. How does our life satisfaction change as we age? What changes in the lives of men and women are responsible for the trends that emerge?

The article I have chosen is entitled “Aspirations, attainments, and satisfaction: Life cycle differences between American women and men,” and was published in December 2008 in the Journal of Happiness Studies. It’s not too long, doesn’t bore with the nitty gritty of method, and is very accessible.

Here is the original article:
http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf

Here is a good summary from when the article was covered by Business Week last summer:
www.businessweek.com/careers/workingparents/blog/archives/2008/07/the_happiness_g.html

The economist Easterlin is also known for his research connecting income levels within and between countries to life satisfaction levels, in an article that is cited all the time in the continuing work on money’s exact relationship to well-being. Anke Plagnol has a background in economics and sociology and explores subjective well-being and gender equality.

Essentially, the findings of their study suggest that women in early life are happier than men, but that this pattern is reversed by the time adults reach the age of 50. The authors point to age 48 as the time at which average male life satisfaction exceeds that of females. Easterlin and Plagnol point to differences between marriage rates and financial satisfaction as the factors behind this result.
And now for the briefest of explorations into the methods of the experiment. The authors were hoping to tease out the gap between the aspirations and the attainments of their subjects, Discrepancies between what people consider part of a “good” life (aspirations), and what they consider themselves have now (attainments) should point to the missing components of one’s life that lead to imperfect happiness (unattained aspirations). The happiness and satisfaction data the authors use spans roughly from 1972-1993 and then biannually after ’94.
The authors analyzed aspirations and attainments over time across men and women. The pattern that emerges for marriage aspirations I thought was particularly interesting. In early adulthood, we see a large proportion of both genders seeking a happy marriage (approximately 9/10 individuals). What’s interesting is that the authors find that for both genders happy marriage ambitions decline over time, but that they decline at a faster rate for women. After the early 40’s, less women desire a happy marriage than men. The authors also find that in early adulthood women are more likely to have a happy marriage than men, while after middle age the opposite is true. Women want marriage less as they get older, but also have a happy marriage less often.
A somewhat similar trend emerges over time for women and men on the aspiration of possession of valuable (“big ticket”) consumer goods. In early adulthood, men report a larger gap between their aspirations and their attainments, reflecting a larger dissatisfaction with their finances overall. Women in later life are less satisfied with their finances, and indeed on averaged women own fewer valuable goods than men overall. In terms of differences in aspirations for material goods, the authors suggest that men and women do not significantly diverge on their desires, with the exception of clothing, which women desire significantly more. I wasn’t shocked by that finding, though I know a fair amount of male prepsters who are attached to a hefty wardrobe.
Unattained aspirations of lasting marriage and material satisfaction appear to produce the conclusions reported by Easterlin and Plagnol. A fulfilling family life (marriage) and financial well being are significant determinants of personal happiness. As I mentioned above, some of Easterlin’s studies seem to suggest that income does not predict happiness to as great an extent as we might have once thought. In the Easterlin and Plagnol study, however, we are looking at personal aspirations against personal attainments, essentially examining within subjects the unfulfilled goals on these fronts. In this way the two studies differ and so do not necessarily present contradictory findings.
What’s important about this study is not only what it says about the factors that prove important to the relative happiness levels of men and women, but also that legitimate differences in the patterns of well being for men and women at different stages in their lives exist at all. Of course individual happiness varies across demographic features (which were controlled for in this study), but it is, in my opinion, not intuitive that there would be a happiness gap between men and women at any age. Gender is a variable that is a significant predictor of well being. It’s important to look at how and why women and men experience different average happiness levels overtime- perhaps there are institutional solutions that can help to alleviate some of the factors that emerge later in life to decrease average happiness of women.

What is a Women's Decision Making Blog?

Rooted in the tradition of psychology and expanded by developments in neuroimaging technology, the field of decision making in cognitive science has emerged relatively recently. Its fascinating and shows up all over the place (I see that often findings from related fields pop up in the New York Times TierneyLab blog.)
Inspired by my courses I found the material that we covered to be entirely relevant to so many of my everyday conversations. I began e-mailing around the interesting articles I was reading in class or in journals, feeling strongly that those around me were debating topics that we have empirical research to address. In this blog I hope to centralize the research that I’ve studied or come across on my own in a location for the Yale (and greater) community to access. More than any other academic discipline I have yet studied, the results coming out of these departments are immediately applicable to day-to-day living, and I believe that an appreciation of this research’s relevance can and will lead to increased understanding of the components of wellbeing.
That being said, lets get down to the actual substance of this blog, which I hope to organize roughly with a new topic each week. I hope to cover a broad array, drawing from the disciplines of philosophy, organizational behavior, behavioral finance, social psychology and others. Though the content I hope to cover is subject to change over the course of the term, some of the topics I’m most excited about are women and risk-taking, overconfidence and metaknowledge, incentive structures and the female professional, women’s decisions about healthcare, women and vision-oriented leadership, personal relationships and relationship satisfaction over time, etc.
I hope that the blog becomes a conversation about the applicability of empirical research to daily wellbeing, but at the very least, I just hope to expose others to what kind of work this field is generating.
And now, as should be clear from the title of this blog, I hope to give this blog a feminine spin- paying particular attention to work that has yielded gender-specific results.

My first article will be listed this week! Stay tuned!