HomeLarge Study Finds Something Fascinating About Women: Don't Say I Didn't Warn...

Large Study Finds Something Fascinating About Women: Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

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Researchers have been studying the evolution of theory of mind for decades, spanning from early childhood to old age.  The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, or “Eyes Test” for short, is one of the most popular ways to study theory of mind.

It asks participants to choose the word that best describes what the person in the photo is thinking or feeling just by looking at a photo of their eyes.

The Eyes Test, created in 1997 by Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen and his Cambridge research group, was refined in 2001 and has now gained widespread acceptance as a tool for evaluating theory of mind. It is one of the two tests that the National Institute of Mental Health in the US recommends for assessing individual differences in “Understanding Mental States.”

Over the years, many independent studies have found that, on average, women do better than men on tests of theory of mind. But most of these studies only looked at small groups of people who didn’t come from different places, cultures, or ages. To fix these issues, a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Cambridge University merged large samples from various online platforms to analyze data from 305,726 participants in 57 countries. The team also included researchers from Bar-Ilan, Harvard, Washington, and Haifa Universities, as well as IMT Lucca.

On average across all 57 nations, females performed better than men on the Eyes Test (by a large margin in 36 countries) or had results that were on par with males (21% of the time). Importantly, there was not a single nation where men performed considerably better on the Eyes Test on average than women. The average sex difference was seen between the ages of 16 and 70. The team also found this average difference between sexes in three separate datasets and in versions of the Eyes Test in eight different languages.

“Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon – that females are on average more empathic than males – is present in wide range of countries across the globe,” adds first author Dr. David M. Greenberg. 

“It’s only by using very large data sets that we can say this with confidence.”

Even though this study can’t say for sure what causes this average difference between the sexes, the authors talk about how other studies have shown that it could be due to both biological and social factors.

“Studies of on-average sex differences say nothing about an individual’s mind or aptitudes, since an individual may be typical or atypical for their sex,” says senior author Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen. “The Eyes Test reveals that many individuals struggle to read facial expressions, for a variety of reasons. Support should be available for those who seek it.”

The study also shown that ‘D-scores,’ the difference between a person’s desire to systemize and their drive to empathize, are a substantial negative predictor of Eyes Test results, even after controlling for gender. In 2018, Greenberg conducted a study of over 650,000 people that was published in PNAS; that research indicated that D-scores accounted for 19 times more variation in autism symptoms than sex or any other demographic predictor. So, D-scores seem to be more important than sex in some ways that people think.

“This study clearly demonstrates a largely consistent sex difference across countries, languages, and ages,” adds one of the authors on the study Dr. Carrie Allison. 

“This raises new questions for future research about the social and biological factors that may contribute to the observed on-average sex difference in cognitive empathy.”

The findings of the study were published today in PNAS.

Image Credit: Getty

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