Q&A with Dr. Robert Deaner, sex differences researcher

get ugly wrote:

Honestly, I think the author would get laughed out of the room in a serious anthropology or gender studies department.

Teehee

I want to be clear, I agree with your positions on the topic, I wasn't trying to disagree or challenge you. Great research, clear paper, and intriguing conclusions! And I don't deny my serious lack of reading. Thank you for the book suggestions. I will certainly look them up.

All that said, I also don't disagree with many of Gladwell's assertions. What I do take issue with is people polarizing the issue when it is clear that human nature and society are so interconnected that it is impossible to say that one has an independent influence (which you haven't, again this is not meant as a challenge, just an observation). In the process of the debate sometimes we get caught defending or trying to strengthen our perspective that we realize we are making it less accurate. That is where we see Gladwell (and Get Ugly) being stubborn about his nurture position, it causes controversy and sells books, and consequently gets people like me (and others who are even more naive or less likely to use critical thinking) to engage in a debate that is pretty much unproductive. I guess that is what I meant when I said I don't understand why it matters. I just wanted to redirect the discussion towards the applications of your study (ie. policy changes? coaching approaches? more effective motivation strategies for the different genders?). I believe there have to be better ways to advance a genuine understanding of how biological sex and/or psychological gender influence the characteristics of the sport than debate whether soft or hard science is the better epistemology. *Full disclosure my background is heavily physiology biased.

Again, thanks for the reading suggestions. I recently came across an interview (http://www.salon.com/2011/12/19/why_women_need_fat/) with Steven J.C. Gaulin, coauther of the book “Why women need fat.” I haven't read the book yet but it seems like something that people interested in this discussion would also be interested in.

You appeal to logic yet commit the fallacist's fallacy. The falsity of a premise does not guarantee the falsity of the conclusion drawn from that premise. Attack the conclusion not the premises.

It's also curious that you judge the letsrun message board to be a more relevant authority than the Supreme Court.

If you can construct a more compelling argument than the authors did, that would be to the standards of a serious anthropology or gender studies department, I'd like to hear it.

With regard to social/cultural (as opposed to biological/evolutionary) explanations for observed differences in male and female road racing performances: it behooves us to keep in mind that our attitudes and behaviors are constantly being affected by a panoply of factors of which we aren't aware. Our non-conscious minds are sensitive to social and other forces that our conscious minds don't pick up on.

My favorite illustration of this involves a study in which college women were administered a standard math test. There were two versions of the test, but they were identical except for one thing: whether there was a space at the top of the page for the student to check "male" or "female." The women who were asked to provide their sex at the top of the page did significantly worse than the others ON THE EXACT SAME MATH TEST.

Perhaps people wedded to the idea that the role of stereotypes and other social forces in shaping behavior is dwarfed by that of our evolutionary history will offer competing explanations, but the most intuitive way of interpreting this study is that being reminded at the outset of the test that they were female primed the venerable "women can't do math" stereotype in these students (perhaps consciously, more likely not), and this became a self-fulfilling prophesy. (For further reading, I recommend Claude Steele's "Whistling Vivaldi.")

The general lesson here is that extremely subtle variables in our environment (a look or a tone, images in the media, the wording of articles about women's athletics) can affect our attitudes, our behaviors, and yes, our performances in dramatic ways, especially when compounded over the course of a lifetime.

I'm willing to concede that evolutionary explanations for the data are live hypotheses, but proponents of such explanations seem to be underestimating the staggering complexity of the social worlds we inhabit, and the corresponding difficulty of tracing the real causes of observed gender differences. Our understanding of how these forces shape our lives is too rudimentary for anyone to be saying that the evolutionary explanations are leading this race.

Everyone knows God made Adam a little better than Eve. Geesh!

I don't doubt that unconscious feelings of inferiority impact performance on tests to some degree. The gender gap in math aptitude is brought up to support this, but the reverse gender gap in verbal aptitude is always ignored. It may be that men feel unconscious test anxiety about their verbal ability and their performance suffers, or maybe women are a little better at verbal tasks due to differential selective pressures.

The 'staggering complexity' argument is used similarly by proponents of intelligent design who claim humans are too complex to have been created by chance mutations and natural selection.

levi strauss wrote:

The 'staggering complexity' argument is used similarly by proponents of intelligent design who claim humans are too complex to have been created by chance mutations and natural selection.

It is hilarious that you would say this because this is a classic logical fallacy--guilt by association. It's like saying that pants are bad because Hitler wore pants.

It is not, however, a logical fallacy to discredit a premise in order to call into question someone's ability to support a conclusion. I never said that it is not possible that evolution is the cause. I've said from the beginning that the author cannot sufficiently support his claims with his data.

But surely the only reason why women fall for that sort of "trick" while men don't (if indeed they don't) is that there is a biological difference that accounts for it. I mean, seriously, at some point...all that is left is biology!!! So all you are doing by positing "social forces" type arguments is delaying your inevitable arrival at "biology" as the root cause.

rsbones wrote:

But surely the only reason why women fall for that sort of "trick" while men don't (if indeed they don't) is that there is a biological difference that accounts for it. I mean, seriously, at some point...all that is left is biology!!! So all you are doing by positing "social forces" type arguments is delaying your inevitable arrival at "biology" as the root cause.

Sorry, I fear you've misunderstood me. The psychological effects in question are quite general. Male African-Americans asked to provide their race perform worse on "intelligence tests" than those not made to identify their race. When a mini-golf task is described as a "test of natural athletic ability," African-Americans perform better than whites (across gender), but when the same task is described as a "test of geometric reasoning ability," the pattern flips (again, irrespective of gender). Sensitivity to stereotypes and expectations (and a tendency to fulfill them when primed) appears to be quite a general feature of human psychology.

So when people like myself and get ugly suggest that socialization and stereotypes might be playing a larger role here than others are allowing, the idea isn't that women are somehow susceptible to socialization and stereotypes in a way that men aren't, but rather that these forces affect all of us, but the *particular* ways in which women are socialized and stereotyped (in contrast to the way men are) are affecting, e.g, the number of women choosing engineering as a major and the number of women running such-and-such for a 5k.

I'm not sure you're saying anything novel. You've got to keep going. What causes the "particular ways" we are socialized and causes them to have particular effects? We can just keep regressing, but in the end: biology.

rsbones wrote:

I'm not sure you're saying anything novel. You've got to keep going. What causes the "particular ways" we are socialized and causes them to have particular effects? We can just keep regressing, but in the end: biology.

This is getting tiresome. I don't even know how to start to respond to this other than by saying that you are very far behind. I thought we already got past this. I will say that even the author of the study, who I strongly disagree with, would not support your claim that everything is just biology. Maybe Runner+Man+Feminist has a good response. He seems to write more clearly than I do.

rsbones wrote:

I'm not sure you're saying anything novel. You've got to keep going. What causes the "particular ways" we are socialized and causes them to have particular effects? We can just keep regressing, but in the end: biology.

I confess I'm not sure what you're driving at. Are you suggesting that humans are biologically predisposed to believe that women are worse at math than men, or that people of African heritage are naturally superior athletes? I'm saying that culturally-prevalent *beliefs* about what to expect from people who fit into particular categories end up affecting the way people in those categories think about themselves, and consequently, how they behave and perform. So unless you think that every stereotype about genders, ethnicities, etc. is programmed into our DNA, I don't see how the influence of stereotypes reduces to biology.

Maybe it's that you think we only develop stereotypes in response to patterns in behavior we actually observe, and that these patterns are all ultimately biologically determined. But, again, the phenomenon I'm describing--people's performance/behavior matches the expectations set for them--is extremely general, and can be made to work for *any* stereotype, and it's just implausible that all of these have a biological basis. Even if it were true that women really are "biologically" less competitive and worse at math, or that Africans are "biologically" more athletic, do Jews have a "biological" affinity for money? Are French people "biologically" romantic? If not, why should the effects of stereotypes on women be "biological"? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Oh wow...oh wow...oh wow.

It's not evolution, it's CREATION!!!

A question for Dr. Deaner (if you're still reading): I noticed that on another thread, you mentioned that the same depth disparity seems to have disappeared in competitive swimming. Granted, it's just one data point, but doesn't that impugn the "evolved competitiveness" hypothesis? If women are evolved to be less competitive, why are female swimmers evidently finding the competitive urge to train hard with the same frequency as male swimmers? Either the women who tend to become swimmers are biologically different from the women who tend to become runners, or there are relevant differences between the institutions of competitive running and of competitive swimming.

Have you looked at potential cultural differences between competitive running and competitive swimming? I don't know much about competitive swimming, but if the typical fare on LetsRun.com is any indication, the world of competitive running is a very hostile one indeed for women (one can easily imagine a moderately talented female runner wanting to step up her game, asking for some training advice on this website, and coming away as turned off to serious running as Alex DeLarge was to Beethoven's 9th).

get ugly wrote:

levi strauss wrote:

The 'staggering complexity' argument is used similarly by proponents of intelligent design who claim humans are too complex to have been created by chance mutations and natural selection.

It is hilarious that you would say this because this is a classic logical fallacy--guilt by association. It's like saying that pants are bad because Hitler wore pants.

It is not, however, a logical fallacy to discredit a premise in order to call into question someone's ability to support a conclusion. I never said that it is not possible that evolution is the cause. I've said from the beginning that the author cannot sufficiently support his claims with his data.

The too complex argument is indeed a fallacy known as appeal to incredulity. Just because an evolutionary explanation seems incredible to you doesn't mean it isn't true. Likewise, just because you think it is obvious that gender discrimination is rampant doesn't mean that it is.

Think of it like this: P is too incredible; therefore P must be false, or It is obvious that P, therefore P must be true. These arguments ignore and do not properly eliminate the possibility that something can be both incredible and still be true, or appear to be obvious and yet still be false. These fallacies are often used to shift burdens of proof in debates, which is exactly what you are doing by saying the authors claims can't be supported by the data. What kind of data would properly support the conclusion in your eyes, if any?

If you believe all of this then you've been reading too much psychology! Psychologists are forever exagerrating the importance of priming effects, and the media love them for it. Yes, priming effects are sometimes reliable and sometimes relevant in the real world. But usually not. Stereotype threat is only the latest example of this myth.

Here's the title and abstract of a paper by Stoet and Geary that is about to come out in Review of General Psychology.

Can Stereotype Threat Explain the Gender Gap in Mathematics

Performance and Achievement?

Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this tudy and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the riginal results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions.

Great question/point: yes I have claimed that the difference in relative performance has disappeared in swimming. I haven't published this yet but I'm quite confident it's true. I do have some ideas about what is different the culture of swimming vs. running but for the sake of time, I won't get into them here.

The main thing is that running is the much more representative sport in terms of sex differences in motivation. I'm doing several studies of this right now but the main point is that in most of the commonly played sports in U.S. high school and colleges, there are very big differences in actual participation. For example, although the number of girls and boys who play organized high school soccer and basketball is very similar, boys actually play, on a daily basis, more than 3 times as much. In adults, the differences are even larger than this. So I promise you'll hear more about this research. Hopefully the first paper will come out this spring.

Regarding the possibility of male courseness/abruptness discouraging women in running (and other sports and other activities), yes this could be very important. But I think it's a mistake to view the male courseness/abruptness as primarily directed at women; men behave this way towards each other and most men (and boys) learn to deal with it. It's often (not always) an important part of succesful group functioning. Read UNC coach Anson Dorrance for a good description of how he handles female soccer players vs. how he handled males.

Two things, Nutty Prof.:

1) I'd be really interested to hear why you think the gender gap has disappeared in swimming and not running

2) To steer this conversation in a constructive direction: Let's say, for argument's sake, that you're right: more men put in the work to become great runners because they are more motivated to seek the status/power/honors associated with being a highly competitive runner. Is there any way to CHANGE the incentives so that more females would be motivated to strive to put in the work to become great runners? To put it another way, what sort of factors are WOMEN disproportionately motivated to strive for? And would these changes have to happen at a societal level, or would it be possible for a coach to "create" a microcosm where women are motivated to train as hard as men are (for example, the way Bill Aris has cultivated a strong culture of hard work and dedication among his high school team's girls)?

Thanks for spending the time wading through all the comments here on LRC.

Litigiousness wrote, "If Harvard found out I was publishing the trash you publish they would take my degree back!"

So what degree was it? Of course without your real name it won't be possible to verify it.

But maybe you'll offer up your name. It wouldn't be the first time I've contacted Harvard to check up on an alleged degree, so I know the right office to email.