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.