Psychological differences between men and women

The idea that there are psychological differences between men and women are encoded in our language about sex and gender. Masculine and Feminine. The idea of the opposite sex. The words and phrases we have for people who do not fit into gender roles, like Tom Boy or Sissy.

Since at least the 1960s psychology has been trying to scientifically study these differences, either by using laboratory based experiments or using scientifically designed surveys. It would seem reasonable to suggest that in the 21st century we could point out these differences.

Resources

Many of you will not have access to the journal articles.

Sci hub might be a way to get papers, but beware the publishers of journal articles see using it as piracy.

Some early history

While large scale work on psychological differences between men and women would wait until the 1960s, with the increase in women undergraduate students making it easy for psychologists to include sex/gender as an independent variable there was a little bit of work at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Thorndike in 1914  argued that for intelligence, and other traits men showed greater variability than women, and so there would be more men at the two extremes.

Hollingworth (1914), who was Thorndike's PhD student and prior to that New York City's first civil service psychologist, argued against the male variability idea using data that she collected on a range of measures. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hollingworth/sexdiffs.htm

At this time there were societal changes as women argued that they should be more readily admitted to higher education, and should have the vote.

So what are the differences?

In 2005 Hyde published her article claiming that across thousands of studies in psychology there are only three areas where differences between men and women are large enough to have a real world impact, and are consistent across the lifespan and are consistent over the history of testing.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581

The three areas are, physical aggression, physical tasks involving throwing, and some measures of sexuality (men claim to masturbate more than women, men claim to view pornography more often than women, men claim to want more (hetero)sexual partners than women claim to want.

Now quite what physical tasks involving throwing have got to do with psychology I do not know, I suspect that they got included as dependent variable (thing to measure) back in the 1910s and so psychologists keep measuring it.

Of course any individual paper is open to contest, and the way that science moves forward is by arguing about findings and conclusions, so Hyde's paper is not the last word. However, this is the puzzle.

The puzzle

There are several ways of wording this:

If psychological sex/gender differences across a wide range of domains exist why are psychologists so bad at finding them under (for want of a better term) laboratory conditions?

If psychological sex/gender differences do not exist why do psychologists keep looking for them?

Making psychology studies on sex and gender better

In 1979 Unger published a paper "Toward a redefinition of sex and gender'. In the paper Unger argues that psychologists need to be much more careful in how they do sex and gender work.

Unger noted how inconsistent findings are with regard to psychological sex and gender difference.

As scientists psychologists need to look out for confounding variables. In classic science the psychologist assigns participants to a condition for an experiment, with sex and gender work people come into the study with their gender, there is no assignment. If we lived in a society where there was full gender equality then men and women would have the same experiences, we do not live in such a society. We need to watch out for these confounding variables.


Psychologists need to eliminate expectancy effects. People have an idea of gender differences (probably a stereotypical idea), psychologists need to, at least, not reinforce these, and ideally remove them through a standard script for all participants.

Over time many of these effects have been minimised or eliminated in psychological sex and gender work.

The other thing Unger suggested was that we distinguish between psychological sex differences, which are understood to have a root in biology, and psychological gender differences, with a root in society.

Meta Analysis

From  1974 on psychologists have turned to meta analysis to try to understand the underlying trend behind inconsistent findings with regard to sex and gender. The various meta analyses have suggested that for most areas of psychology differences between men and women are so small as to have no real world effect. However, the number of psychological studies using the difference between men and women as something of interest have multiplied. So what tends to happen now is that people will do a meta analysis of a particular thing (e.g. language use). Hyde's 2005 paper was an attempt to give an overview of all these meta analyses.

Inconclusion

Perhaps at some point we will find sex and gender differences of the scale that stereotypes predict. We are not there at the moment.

Perhaps it is the very act of removing social influence from the laboratory that means we do not detect such differences currently.

Perhaps people (including psychologists) are so convinced that such differences exist that they refuse to acknowledge the evidence.

Reading

Else-Quest, N., Hyde, J., & Linn, M. (2010). Cross-national patterns of gender differences in mathematics: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 103-127. doi:10.1037/a0018053
Hegarty, P., & Buechel, C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004. Review of General Psychology, 10(4), 377-389. 
Hyde, J. S. (2005). The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.377

Marecek, J. (2001). After the facts: Psychology and the study of gender. Canadian Psychology/psychologie Canadienne, 42(4), 254-267. doi:10.1037/h0086894

Petersen, J., & Hyde, J. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993-2007. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 21-38. doi:10.1037/a0017504

Tyson, P. J., Jones, D., & Elcock, J. (2011). Psychology in social context. [electronic resource] : issues and debates. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K: BPS Blackwell (Chapter 5)

Unger, R. (1979). Toward a redefinition of sex and gender. American Psychologist, 34(11), 1085-94. 

 

Blogging Gender and Sexuality

As some of you know I intend this to be my last term working at the University of Gloucestershire before I retire. My favourite bit of teaching is my final year module, currently called Gender and Sexuality, although a very similar module called Sex and Gender preceeded it.


So that the module is not lost forever, and given that I am unlikely to write any more academic texts, I have decided to blog the module. Basically each week once term starts I will write a blog post about that teaching session.

In this post I am going to write about the major themes of the module.

The module is over 20 years old, starting its life as the Psychology of Sex and Gender, over that time most of material taught has changed although it has always had a similar structure, a few weeks of more theoretical material, followed by looking at some of the applied areas, a mixture of psychology professions and other concerns.

Some major themes

The quest for difference

For over a hundred years psychologists have been failing to find consistent, large, stable, psychological differences between men and women when they do laboratory experiments. At the same time there are plenty of differences, often contradictory, in one off experiments. Using meta-analysis and looking over time some differences between men and women that could be found in the laboratory appear to be getting smaller. This session attempts to understand this, and why after a hundred years of effort people are not happy to follow the data.

Attempting to categorise

Psychologists seem to love trying to find differences between groups of people. In order to do that it needs to establish categories of people. While some recent research suggests that (some) people shift in their sexual appetites across their lives binary categorisations remain remain popular. In recent history, and currently, a great deal of damage has been done to people who do not fit in with the accepted categories, and the accepted categories have changed across time.

Critical theories

Feminist psychology and social constructionism. There is a long standing strand of feminist psychology that has investigated how to make a science of psychology better with regard to understanding sex and gender. For over 40 years these researchers have been using meta-analysis to try to understand the contradictory laboratory experiments. At the same time they have been making suggestions on how to make laboratory experiments better, annoyingly other psychologists ignore these suggestions and continue to produce garbage research.

Another strand of feminist psychologists, and other social constructionists, question the whole experimental enterprise, and suggest we try to understand why sex & gender, and sexuality, are so important in current society.

Practical impacts

Being the object of discrimination is damaging. Believing that there are a narrow set of behavioural expectations can also be damaging. More women than men attract a diagnosis of depression, more men than women commit suicide. Stereotypes of men and women fit in with the idea that men are better leaders. Should we worry about the attainment gap in education between women and men. Is evolutionary psychology just a scientific gloss on top of current discriminatory practices. These are the sorts of issues I will write about in the coming weeks.

So I invite you to have a look at some of the current understandings of the psychology of gender and sexuality.

Not quite made my mind up if I am going to try to write this in the days just before the lecture, or just after the lecture. Teaching term starts Monday 17th September.

Some thoughts about the internet

On Friday, 13th of July my Virgin router stopped working. I decided not to report it until I was in work on Monday. After some time on hold I talked to their call centre and they agreed my router had stopped working and agreed to send out a new one. The new one arrived at 5.15pm on Wednesday 18th July. Luckily the carrier sent me an email giving me an esitmated time of delivery, as I ws expecting it Thursday or Friday as the call centre person told me 3-4 working days.

After a fairly long call to another call centre they 'activated' the router and I was all connected by shortly after 6.00pm.

So for just about 4 and half days I was without the internet, except by not very reliable 3G via my IPhone 5, or when I was working. So how was it?

It was hell!

News

I read most of my news online, using the Guardinian site, the local newspaper site, and occasionally the BBC site. I check the news 5 or 6 times a day. I had to watch the news on TV, and while there are 24 hour news channels you cannot choose what news to watch. It just felt so wrong. Before the internet I would check teletext (younger people don't know what I mean) 4 or 5 times a day, but rarely watched news programs,

Facebook

I play a facebook game called Pet Dragons 2. It is in its death throes. Once it had thousands of players and now it has tens of players. However, the game needs lots of checking on your pet dragon, at least twice a day, but I am a bit obessive so I have FB open constantly. This means I see notifactions constantly. I ignore most of the notifactions, but I really missed having them.

Shopping and services

I shop online, home delivery groceries and Amazon mostly, but also takeaways from time to time. I missed all that. I missed checking the Met office website, and the National lottery website.

Staying in touch

I regularly let my phone run out of battery. During term time I switch it to airplane mode when I am lecturing, and some times forget to turn it back on for days or even a week. The single most reliable way to get in touch with me is FB messages. That wasn't true anymore and I was worried. 

Random things

A song pops into my head, I find it on you tube. I hear a word I widon't recognise I search for it on Duck Duck go. I want to check the factuality of something on TV there is the search engine again. All of this was missed.

In summary

I am not addicted to the internet, in the same way I am not addicted to air. I need it for living. That is actually quite shocking.

Suspension of disbelief

I have been thinking about suspension of disbelief, and how it relates to role playing games, story telling (books, films, TV series) and therapy. Not sure exactly where this is going.

Genre buy in

If you do not like a genre you won't normally go out of your way to expose yourself to that genre. I do not particularly like the conventions of play D&D so while I will play one offs I won't commit to a D&D campaign. I don't like basic role play dice mechanics (although they seem to be getting better with the ability to spend luck points), so again I will avoid campaign games in that style. Likewise I don't read romantic novels, and I don't watch slasher horror films. All very understandable.

If/when I need support for mental health there are only two genres freely available (and one with long waiting lists) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and medication. The only choice here is to choose to go private and try to find a therapist who I can work with, but most people don't have the finances to do that.

Of course you can try and force yourself to buy in, despite a disbelief in the genre, with CBT I can normally manage that for the 5-6 weeks necessary. I do take a pragmatic approach most of the time, the actual exercises and interventions are useful even if the claims about how human beings work are not.

One of the things I noticed with the CBT classes run locally (and probably nationally) is they spend a lot of the first session trying to get people to believe in the model. While this might be useful for people who know little about the approaches it becomes a struggle otherwise.

Breaking Immersion

In the Walking Dead they played a game with their audience. One of the major characters appeared to have been eaten by zombies. They removed his name from the credits for a couple of weeks, and then he reappears after making a lucky (off camera) escape. That broke my suspension of disbelief. Since then I have sought out other reasons for not believing in that fictional world, two other things now bug me, the petrol in car petrol tanks should have gone off, and ammunition should be running low. I might watch the show if I am in the house when it is on, but don't seek it out on catch up.

In Tales from the Loop we have been playing through the adventures in the corebook. The third one involved the recurring bad person dragging dinosaurs into the present day. Immersion shattered. I can still play along but it becomes more game than roleplaying at that point.

A friend of mine was in a private therapeutic relationship, seeing someone twice a week, at considerable expense. They discussed with the therapist stepping down to once a week, the therapist saw this as trying to resist the therapy, and suggested they came more often. My friend couldn't afford that and ended up stopping the therapeutic relationship.

Breaking immersion carries heavier penalties in therapy than in leisure activities.

Is there anyway back from breaking immersion

This is the kicker. I am not willing to invest time in Walking Dead (or the Amazon version of Top Gear, the 'Grand Tour'). Role playing groups are about more than just what happens at the table, and we will be switching from Tales from the Loop soon. The more tricky thing is therapeutic relationships.

Will the new reporting guidelines for quantitative studies end the replication crisis

The narrative around the new reporting guidelines is very technocratic but the subtext is all about the much reported replication crisis. Back when I used to teach critical reading of psychology journal articles my approach was if something that should be in the report is missing that is because the authors are covering up a mistake. Hopefully the new guidelines will mean that authors will have to report the dodgy things they are doing, or they will be outright fraudulent. This can only be a good thing.

So lets get into some detail.

Preregistration
 An encouragement to preregister all psychology studies, but an acknowledgement it is only really happening in studies with a clinical application. This really does have to become routine across quantitative psychology.

Sampling

"Describe procedures for selecting participants, including...
• Percentage of sample approached that actually participated
• Whether self-selection into the study occurred (either by individuals or by units, such as schools or clinics)
• Settings and locations where data were collected as well as dates of data collection."

The idea of recording the number of potential participants approached is good, will give some information about possible volunteer bias. Self selection is another way that the characteristics of the participants can be problematic.
The requirement for date and location seems to be an attempt to deal with fraudulent data collection, follow this link for a recent example. 

Measuring instruments

"Define all primary and secondary measures and covariates, including measures collected but not included in this report."

After several failures to replicate 'power posing' findings one of the original authors made the claim that there were a whole bunch of measures that were not reported. That was always poor practice but these reporting conventions make sure that things are reported accurately, or the author(s) deliberately mislead.

Masking

"Report whether participants, those administering the experimental manipulations, and those assessing the outcomes were aware of condition assignments.
If masking took place, provide statement regarding how it was accomplished and if and how the success of masking was evaluated."

Everyone knows it is best that the person talking to the participant doesn't know the hypothesis and conditions, and if there is any chance of human error in scoring it is better that the scorer doesn't as well. But that is difficult to achieve and makes doing psychology experiments more expensive.

  

Analytical strategy

This works best if these are registered in advance.

Describe the analytic strategy for inferential statistics and protection against experiment-wise error for
Primary hypotheses
Secondary hypotheses
Exploratory hypotheses 

One thing that I suspect happens too often is people pretending exploratory hypotheses were the hypothesis they were always looking for. 

Participant Flow
Careful accounting of why any data was dropped, and keeping all the original data so others can look at it, both are necessary.

There is a lot more detail, but these are the things that seem to be important additions. It will be 2-3 years before the impact of this is felt, hopefully it is a step in the right direction. 

 

Reacting to the new APA guidelines for reporting qualitative studies

Yesterday the APA published guidelines for both qualitative and quantitative studies. I have had a quick flick both and am generally very encouraged. I might write about the quantitative guidelines this weekend, but I am going to write about the second paper now.


If you want to read the paper

Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Primary, Qualitative Meta-Analytic, and Mixed Methods Research in Psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force Report,” (PDF, 163KB) by Heidi M. Levitt, PhD, University of Massachusetts Boston,: Michael Bamberg, PhD, Clark University; John W. Creswell, PhD, University of Michigan Medical School; David M. Frost, PhD, University College London; Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, Fielding Graduate University; and Carola Suárez-Orozco, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, American Psychologist, Jan. 18, 2018.

I am just going to concentrate on the qualitative primary reporting standards.

The first eight pages are a good primer for quantitative research. I am very encouraged by the amount of flexibility that Levitt et al suggest is important, a worry before I read this was that they would be too constrained, but that is not a worry.

The main meat of the article is the table that begins on page 34.
The table has three columns, the section/subsection heading, a description of information and notes to reviewers and authors.

Here are some guidance notes I am particularly happy to see.


"Reviewers: The introduction may include case examples, personal narratives, vignettes, or other illustrative material."

"Reviewers: Method sections can be written in a chronological or narrative format." 
 

"Reviewers: Findings section tends to be longer than in quantitative papers because of the demonstrative rhetoric needed to permit the evaluation of the analytic procedure."

"Reviewers: Depending on the approach to inquiry, findings and discussion may be combined or a personalized discursive style might be used to portray the researchers’ involvement in the analysis."

All of these suggestions reinforce the notion that qualitative research is a very different thing to quantitative research and to some extent this should be reflected in how qualitative research is written, rather than mirroring the way that quantitative research is written.

I am very encouraged, and hope we will adopt these guidelines into our teaching practice.

Spoilers for The Last Jedi are ahead.

So I went to see The Last Jedi, at the Screening Rooms, a more expensive experience than the main cinema, but the more comfortable chairs, and smaller number of seats both appealed to me. I didn't take advantage of the wait service to your seat for snacks and drinks, but I think they make a lot of their money that way. Anyway the audience were well behaved, I heard no random talking during the film and the going to the cinema experience was very positive. All of which was good as this is a longish film, not Lord of the Rings long, but apparently the second longest Star Wars film.

I had been carefully avoiding reviews, or even random posts on facebook about the film. So now I am reading them, a couple of positive reviews in the Guardian. Then I came across this one which was the one from the 2601 reviews that IMDB decided to show me.

It is a one star review.

The shameful end of the beloved story.

15 December 2017 | by kuschilop – See all my reviews

The movie seems to be made by a neural network. It's sewn from the same familiar patches: a space battle here, a joke there, a teacher and a student story, a battle between light and dark side of the force. The winner of the battle? A new, SHITTY side of the force.

Evil characters are not serious and just pathetic. The story is not real anymore: it's just another comic book where the laws of the universe are changing on the fly, and there's no real risk. Storylines mostly make no sense, rendering the characters' feelings as fake and overblown, giving the movie a touch of a soap opera.

It's quite obvious that here the director has nothing to say. Seems like a board of executives were voting up and down for every episode, fiddling with the movie in a fear that it won't earn enough. And here we are: the film is a politically correct product of corporate cowardice and creative impotence.

It's all especially painful for those who grew with the pure miracle and magic of the original movies. You know, there's always a faith. But this time it was destroyed in a really mean way.

If you follow the link above the person, or people, using this identity have posted two reviews, the other one spends quite a lot of time praising the Russian empire before the revolutions that led to Soviet Russia. I do find it funny that someone who genuinely thinks an evil empire was the best version of Russia has written a Star Wars review.

So this all got me to thinking about the accusations of "politically correct product of corporate cowardice and creative impotence."

So corporate cowardice, yes it is a shame that many of the films currently being made at this level of blockbuster are franchise movies. I don't think the accusation that each scene was being ruthlessly fiddled with holds water.

So creative impotence and political correctness (spoilers start now).

Lots of strong female characters. Not only that though, Poe Dameron gets told off and demoted for a successful attack on a dreadnought because of the number of rebels killed, and because vice admiral Holdo won't tell him the secret plan he acts like a jerk and almost gets everyone killed. (There are other examples that androcentric people will not have enjoyed.)

The other big politically correct moment is when it becomes apparent that Rey is not descended from some famous Jedi. I know this has stirred up some controversy but I felt this was one of the best ideas in the film.

The other thing I felt was an interesting creative move was the end of the rebel fleet, because now the rebellion will have to be from the ground up.

There were bits I did not like, Leia's use of the force to save herself felt a bit hollow. And the pacing was a bit off.

All in all this is my favourite of the franchise.