Posted by Jim Lindgren:
Steven Pinker in the New Republic on the Summers Hypothesis.--
In the [1]New Republic, Steven Pinker (a Harvard psychologist) has a
fascinating exploration of the Larry Summers's affair, including a
brief discussion of what Pinker sees as the possible merits of
Summers's statements about women in science. (Disclosure: my wife is a
Ph.D. geneticist who is a medical school professor; she has always had
a greater aptitude for science than I do.)
Pinker [2]argues:
Summers's critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that
innate differences might be one cause of gender disparities (a
suggestion that he drew partly from a literature review in my book,
The Blank Slate) into the claim that they must be the only cause.
And they have converted his suggestion that the statistical
distributions of men's and women's abilities are not identical to
the claim that all men are talented and all women are not--as if
someone heard that women typically live longer than men and
concluded that every woman lives longer than every man. . . .
Many of Summers's critics believe that talk of innate gender
differences is a relic of Victorian pseudoscience, such as the old
theory that cogitation harms women by diverting blood from their
ovaries to their brains. In fact, much of the scientific literature
has reported numerous statistical differences between men and
women. As I noted in The Blank Slate, for instance, men are, on
average, better at mental rotation and mathematical word problems;
women are better at remembering locations and at mathematical
calculation. Women match shapes more quickly, are better at reading
faces, are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have
a better memory for verbal material. Men take greater risks and
place a higher premium on status; women are more solicitous to
their children.
Of course, just because men and women are different does not mean
that the differences are triggered by genes. People develop their
talents and personalities in response to their social milieu, which
can change rapidly. So some of today's sex differences in cognition
could be as culturally determined as sex differences in hair and
clothing. But the belief, still popular among some academics
(particularly outside the biological sciences), that children are
born unisex and are molded into male and female roles by their
parents and society is becoming less credible. Many sex differences
are universal across cultures (the twentieth-century belief in
sex-reversed tribes is as specious as the nineteenth-century belief
in blood-deprived ovaries), and some are found in other primates.
Men's and women's brains vary in numerous ways, including the
receptors for sex hormones. Variations in these hormones,
especially before birth, can exaggerate or minimize the typical
male and female patterns in cognition and personality. Boys with
defective genitals who are surgically feminized and raised as girls
have been known to report feeling like they are trapped in the
wrong body and to show characteristically male attitudes and
interests. And a meta-analysis of 172 studies by psychologists Hugh
Lytton and David Romney in 1991 found virtually no consistent
difference in the way contemporary Americans socialize their sons
and daughters. Regardless of whether it explains the gender
disparity in science, the idea that some sex differences have
biological roots cannot be dismissed as Neanderthal ignorance.
Since most sex differences are small and many favor women, they
don't necessarily give an advantage to men in school or on the job.
But Summers invoked yet another difference that may be more
consequential. In many traits, men show greater variance than
women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high
ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning
disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top
percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though
boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. . . .
What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual
discourse in this affair--the statistical innumeracy, the confusion
of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific
literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable
lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its
treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of
a fascinating bit of human psychology.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of
taboo--the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is
sinful even to think them--is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or
religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In
2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of
unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy
and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the
highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did
not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and
outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to
consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse
themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound
familiar?
The psychology of taboo is not completely irrational. In
maintaining our most precious relationships, it is not enough to
say and do the right thing. We have to show that our heart is in
the right place and that we don't weigh the costs and benefits of
selling out those who trust us. If someone offers to buy your child
or your spouse or your vote, the appropriate response is not to
think it over or to ask how much. The appropriate response is to
refuse even to consider the possibility. Anything less emphatic
would betray the awful truth that you don't understand what it
means to be a genuine parent or spouse or citizen. (The logic of
taboo underlies the horrific fascination of plots whose
protagonists are agonized by unthinkable thoughts, such as Indecent
Proposal and Sophie's Choice.) Sacred and tabooed beliefs also work
as membership badges in coalitions. To believe something with a
perfect faith, to be incapable of apostasy, is a sign of fidelity
to the group and loyalty to the cause. Unfortunately, the
psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship,
which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to
determine whether it is wrong.
At some point in the history of the modern women's movement, the
belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable
became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had
been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone
who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is
seen as "not getting it" when it comes to equality between the
sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts
a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science
and the spirit of free inquiry.
References
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1. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=IZMZoxUzwPMhvmZIyM6y9R%3D%3D
2. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=IZMZoxUzwPMhvmZIyM6y9R%3D%3D
Hidden links:
3. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1110510783.html
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