From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/the-tangle-of-the-sexes.html?ref=global
By BOBBI CAROTHERS and HARRY REIS
Published: April 20, 2013
MEN and women are so different they might as well be from separate planets, so says the theory of the sexes famously explicated in John Gray’s 1992 best seller, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”
Indeed, sex differences are a perennially popular topic in behavioral science; since 2000, scientific journals have published more than 30,000 articles on them.
That men and women differ in certain respects is unassailable. Unfortunately, the continuing belief in “categorical differences” — men are aggressive, women are caring — reinforces traditional stereotypes by treating certain behaviors as immutable. And, it turns out, this belief is based on a scientifically indefensible model of human behavior.
As the psychologist Cordelia Fine explains in her book “Delusions of Gender,” the influence of one kind of categorical thinking, neurosexism — justifying differential treatment by citing differences in neural anatomy or function — spills over to educational and employment disparities, family relations and arguments about same-sex institutions.
Consider a marital spat in which she accuses him of being emotionally withdrawn while he indicts her for being demanding. In a gender-categorical world, the argument can quickly devolve to “You’re acting like a typical (man/woman)!” Asking a partner to change, in this binary world, is expecting him or her to go against the natural tendency of his or her category — a very tall order.
The alternative, a dimensional perspective, ascribes behavior to individuals, as one of their various personal qualities. It is much easier to imagine how change might take place.
But what of all those published studies, many of which claim to find differences between the sexes? In our research, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we shed an empirical light on this question by using a method called taxometric analysis.
This method asks whether data from two groups are likely to be taxonic — a classification that distinguishes one group from another in a nonarbitrary, fundamental manner, called a “taxon” — or whether they are more likely to be dimensional, with individuals’ scores dispersed along a single continuum.
The existence of a taxon implies a fundamental distinction, akin to the difference between species. As the clinical psychologist Paul Meehl famously put it, “There are gophers, there are chipmunks, but there are no gophmunks.”
A dimensional model, in contrast, indicates that men and women come from the same general pool, differing relatively, trait by trait, much as any two individuals from the same group might differ.
Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/the-tangle-of-the-sexes.html?ref=global
