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.