Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Is this mere speculation on my part, this indictment of gender norms when it comes to aggression? Well, how else to explain why the M panel on my daughters’ quilts shows macramé for girls and machete for boys?

  OK, not really—M is always for moon. But there is clear evidence linking gender norms to the apparent gender difference in aggression. Namely, that when researchers place men and women in a context in which gender is unimportant or even unidentifiable, the Mars/Venus difference in aggression disappears.

  In one study at Princeton, researchers randomly selected names from a campus directory and invited eighty-four students to the lab in groups of six.14 Upon arrival, half of each group was directed to sit in the front of the room. They wrote their names on large name tags and were asked aloud a series of questions about their personal background and experiences. The researcher explained to these three individuals that their performance would be monitored closely for the duration of the study.

  The other three students stayed in the back of the room throughout this public inquisition. They didn’t answer questions, they didn’t put on name tags, and they were told that their performance would remain anonymous so as to create a nameless comparison group for the research. They just sat there and watched quietly.

  At this point, all six students were led to a computer room and seated at individual terminals. Their next task was to play a strategy game during which they had to both defend their own territory against a bombing assault and attack their opponent’s territory. Each participant played the same game against a computer-controlled opponent, though they thought they were playing against someone else in the room.

  How aggressively did students attack their cyber opponents? The front-of-the-room name-tag-wearing half exhibited a familiar gender difference: women used only twenty-seven bombs per game compared to thirty-one for men. The women played less aggressively.

  But a funny thing happened among the anonymous participants. Informed that their individual performance wouldn’t be assessed, confident that no one would know what they had or hadn’t done, everyone was more aggressive. Even more noteworthy, women were no longer outaggressed by their male compatriots. Liberated from concerns about appearance or how they were “supposed” to act, the average female now outbombed the average male, forty-one to thirty-seven.

  Sugar and spice and everything nice, sure . . . but not afraid to take the gloves off as long as nobody’s looking.

  THE SHAPE I’M IN

  I am directionally challenged. I have made wrong turns that have taken me over out-of-the-way bridges and inadvertently across state lines. When walking to restaurant bathrooms, only if I memorize and then reverse the sequence of maneuvers en route will I find my table again afterward. I once got so lost driving to my own high school that I just went back home and skipped classes for the day—as a senior in my fourth year at the same school.

  Unfortunately, my frequent copilot is of little help. My wife claims to be map-illiterate, and the more urgent my request for navigational assistance in the car, the more flustered she becomes. Before the wonderful world of GPS, the only way we were able to find unfamiliar destinations—not to mention save our marriage—was for her to drive and me to read the map.

  I know, I know . . . we’re quite the impressive couple. You’d think our gene pools would’ve been weeded out generations ago, yet here we are.

  Our different directional shortcomings have more to do with our limitations as individuals than any sort of universal gender difference. But navigation is yet another walk of life for which there are plenty of expectations regarding gender. Like the stereotype that men (present company excluded) have the better sense of direction. Or the notion that women are still less likely to get lost because, unlike their male counterparts, they’re not too stubborn to stop and ask for directions.

  The former belief, at least, garners support from the scientific literature on spatial skill. Over the years, many cognitive scientists have compared male and female performance on tasks such as 3-D visualization and mental rotation.15 In one series of studies, respondents were presented with what is known as the “Mental Cutting Test.” Not quite the paranormal experience it sounds like, the test requires the participant to recognize what an object would look like if it were sliced in half. Other research studies have asked men and women to navigate through a virtual reality maze or to determine which of several three-dimensional shapes could be created by folding a particular two-dimensional cutout.

  Though the exact difference varies by task, a clear conclusion emerges from hundreds of studies like these conducted over several decades: men perform better than women. Be it mental cutting, folding, or rotating—the spatial skill triathlon, if you will—the average man outperforms the average woman.

  While these tasks may seem trivial, this gender disparity is of some societal significance. Just think how important shape rotation is to a wide range of meaningful endeavors. Like engineering. Organic chemistry. Moving furniture. Tetris. No doubt, this is precisely the type of research that Larry Summers might have pointed to in support of the notion of innate differences in how men and women think.

  To be fair, there is some persuasive evidence that when it comes to the gender gap in spatial skills, biological and inborn processes play a role. How else to explain that developmental psychologists have reported that five-month-old infant boys are already better than girls at recognizing when they’ve seen a rotated object before?16 Or that neu-roscientists have found women’s spatial skills to fluctuate by hormone level, with better performance during menstruation and poorer performance right after ovulation?17

  So while I’ve devoted this book to championing the power of situations, I’d never suggest that there are no biological answers to questions about gender differences. That would be an outrageous claim. Biology does contribute to differences in how men and women think and act.

  But these gender gaps in thought and behavior aren’t nearly as pervasive or entrenched as we think they are. Quite often, situations trump physiology. For example, the male advantage in spatial skill winds up being just as context-dependent as other gender differences. You can eliminate this gap the same way as for math: convince women that the stereotypes don’t apply. In one study, German researchers asked 161 adults to complete what they believed to be a measure of their ability to empathize with others.18 Half of the respondents read about a family-oriented woman who worked part-time; others read about a self-confident man with a high-powered job. They were then told to imagine themselves in this protagonist’s shoes while answering several questions.

  Only then were all participants given nine shape-rotation problems. After having envisioned themselves in a female role, women answered only 3.9 spatial questions correctly, while men averaged 5.1. But after empathizing with an alpha male, the spatial skill difference went away: women averaged the same 5.5 questions right as the men.

  It’s a striking finding for what seems like an entrenched gender disparity. But it’s also old news. That is, you’ve already read about this sort of situational influence on math performance as well as aggression. The new lesson offered by research on spatial skill doesn’t have to do with expectations of female underperformance. Rather, it’s that the outward appearance of gender can distract us from the even more influential differences at play.

  Gender is about more than reproductive anatomy or hormones or—as I was recently informed by a preschooler in the midst of what I foolishly assumed would be a private shower—the fact that Daddy’s boobies are smaller yet hairier than Mommy’s (a conclusion, I’ll note, for which the entire family is grateful, two times over). Gender also predicts different life experiences, and these nonphysical divergences often account for gender gaps in domains such as spatial skill.

  To affect the gender difference in spatial performance, you don’t have to trick or distract people. It isn’t necessary to ask research participants to visualize high-powered men or convince them they’ll be anonymous or
even goad them into taking tests in swimwear. All you have to do is think about what gender really means in the context of mental rotation and the navigation of unfamiliar places. You just need to ask yourself what are the other important differences related to spatial skill for which anatomical sex is but a superficial proxy.

  The answer—or at least, one of them—is almost too mundane and lowbrow to believe. One key to unlocking the mystery behind the gender gap in spatial cognition turns out to be . . . video games.

  IN 2007, CANADIAN PSYCHOLOGISTS conducted a run-of-the-mill mental rotation study and found, as usual, that men outperformed women. But these researchers did more than record the gender of their college participants. They also assessed other characteristics that they thought might predict spatial aptitude, like age, academic major, and how often they played video games.19

  It was an idea brilliant in its simplicity. The more time spent playing video games, the more practice students would have navigating unfamiliar spaces, manipulating visual objects, and evaluating novel images. Male or female, gaming experience should translate into better spatial performance. This is exactly what researchers found: students averaging more than four hours of video games per week outperformed the nongamers on a mental rotation task.

  What about gender? Well, anyone who has ever been to an arcade can vouch for the fact that there’s nothing inherently masculine about video games. But few would argue with the premise that young men devote far more time to the pursuit than do young women. Just ask the dryer repairman who—in the midst of a recent service call at our house—proudly told me of his decision to tighten his budgetary belt by canceling phone service rather than give up the monthly subscription that allows him to play Xbox games against strangers in Europe. Apparently, his girlfriend was less than enthusiastic about his economic recovery plan.

  I confess that I have also spent too much time and money on such endeavors. My youth, like those of many men I know, was littered with tropical vacations spent inside windowless game rooms, school formals skipped in the name of “beating the next level,” and college Nintendo football leagues that mandated 2:00 a.m. walks across campus to play scheduled games against computer-controlled opponents. Had I devoted even a fraction of this energy to, say, emotionally meaningful conversation with others—standard operating procedure among the females of the species, I’m told—perhaps more of my long-term memory would be devoted to remembering friends’ birthdays or the names of their spouses and kids, with less space filled by secret game codes that get you thirty extra lives.

  (That’s up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start, by the way.)

  Does this difference in men’s and women’s exposure to video games really help explain the gender gap in spatial skill? The same Canadian research team ran a second study to find out. They recruited students with no gaming experiences over the past four years, and, once again, men scored higher than women on tests of spatial skill.

  Then these same students were subjected to four weeks of intensive “video game training.” They went into a research suite and played several hours of a first-person military shooting game on multiple occasions. The effects of this monthlong not-so-basic training? Spatial test scores improved across the board, but especially for women. And this improvement was long lasting: five months later, the positive effects of the video game sessions were still evident in the students’ spatial performance. Just imagine the cumulative effects of an entire childhood devoted to gaming.

  The lessons of the video game study are twofold. First, our moms had it all wrong. It wasn’t a waste of time spending a beautiful summer afternoon squirreled away in a dark basement or grimy arcade exploring cyber castles and dodging monkey-thrown barrels—we were just working toward careers in engineering.

  Second, studying gender is tricky. When researchers want to assess the effects of, say, Drug X, they randomly assign patients to take the drug and others to take nothing (or some sort of placebo). Then they compare final outcomes across the two groups. Having assigned the treatment and control groups at random, the researchers can be confident that any disparities at the end of the study must result from Drug X.

  But no matter how hard they try, scientists just can’t assign gender to research participants. All researchers can do is compare outcomes across the naturally occurring male/female distinction and then try to explain any disparities that emerge. That’s the blueprint that most gender studies follow. The complication is that our WYSIWYG tendencies send us straight for the internal explanation:

  Men outperform women on spatial skill tests? It must be because of physiology. Or hormones. Or sex-differentiated evolutionary pressures.

  Young girls read and write at a more advanced level than boys of the same age? Must be those same internal processes at play, just in reverse.

  These are the first answers to which we turn. And we get so carried away that we sometimes even fabricate new inborn physical differences that don’t actually exist, like the Garden of Eden–inspired allegory of Eve’s extra rib (for the record, men and women actually have the same number of ribs).

  Rarely do we stop to consider the different experiences accompanying biological distinctions between the sexes. Such as exposure to gender norms—those messages about what men and women are supposed to do or be good at—or the other, nonsexual differences that go along with growing up male versus female in our society. Like the different ways in which boys and girls pass their idle childhood hours, and the extent to which these activities help refine certain cognitive skills (or, alternatively, interfere with the development of other good habits, like reading).

  Biology plays a role in men’s and women’s spatial skills, as the infant and menstruation studies demonstrate. But too often we infer rather than examine directly the physiological basis for gender disparities. If I told you that my latest study found that sixty-five-year-old women are better than men of similar age at getting a baby to sleep or lending a sympathetic ear to a forlorn friend or calculating a household budget, would you attribute the finding to estrogen level? Sex differences in brain structure? I doubt it. And you’d be wise to avoid such jumps to innate conclusions when it comes to other gender gaps, such as those involving mental aptitude and cognitive skill.

  RETHINKING GENDER

  It can be a chicken-and-egg question, this matter of gender norms and gender difference. Many argue that the differences come first. That, yes, we have divergent expectations for men and women, but they grow out of real preexisting differences between the sexes. That we expect boys, but not girls, to wrestle with friends, get grass stains within minutes of going outside, and turn paper towel rolls into swords, because these are precisely the activities toward which boys are magnetically drawn.

  One goal of this chapter has been to get you to ponder the flip side possibility, even if for a fleeting moment. Believe me, I know what I’m up against: it’s hardly a popular or intuitive argument that our expectations precede many of the gender differences we observe. I’ve heard many a parent who has both a boy and a girl explain that their kids were born as if from different planets—one ready to bash into walls, one prone to cautious yet methodical exploration. And researchers now increasingly focus on physiological explanations as well, such as linking prenatal exposure to hormones like testosterone with children’s brain structure and subsequent social tendencies.

  We’re comfortable with this notion of gender gaps as mandated by biological difference. It makes sense. After all, men are taller and heavier than women. So why not inherently better at directions? Or worse at reining in their temper?

  But ask yourself what it means that many seemingly well-entrenched differences are so context-dependent. That you can wipe out gender gaps in math, navigation, and even aggression by convincing women of their anonymity or asserting that the well-known gender norms don’t apply in this particular instance.

  For that matter, even the link between testosterone and aggression is not as ironclad as scien
tists once thought. A recent European study found that telling women they’ve been given an oral dose of testosterone leads them to bargain with a partner in a more aggressive manner—that’s what we assume testosterone is supposed to do. But when the hormone was actually administered, it had no such effect, instead leaving women more likely to make equitable, generous first offers to their partners, exactly the opposite of what we might expect to happen.20 The more precise conclusion regarding the effects of testosterone seems to be that it increases motivation to seek and preserve social status. In some situations that means physical aggression, but in other contexts it leads to consensus building or efforts to ward off dissent.

  Returning to the idea of parental perceptions, as you’ve read, I have two kids. They’ve also come into this world exhibiting very different characteristics—in terms of sleep pattern, hair color, hot dog condiment preference, and baseball team affiliation. Some of these tendencies seem more inborn than others. But because I have two girls, I’ve been liberated from the assumption that my kids’ differences are driven by gender.

  Freed from this default expectation, I’ve also come to notice that my kids’ skills and limitations, their likes and dislikes, fluctuate wildly by context. It just so happened that the weekend before my older daughter shared her indifference to the female protagonists of standard kids’ movie fare, I had purchased the original Star Wars trilogy to bring on a beach vacation with a rainy forecast. So we broke out the first DVD a few days early.

  It took less than an hour for her to zero in on Princess Leia as her new costume of choice for October. And as the plastic light saber–inflicted damage to my desk lamp attests, the purported link between testosterone and swordplay is tenuous at best.