Women, on average, are better than men at putting themselves in other people’s shoes and imagining what the other person is thinking or feeling, suggests a new study of more than 300,000 people in 57 countries .
Researchers found that women, on average, score higher than men on the widely used "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test , which measures "theory of mind" (also known as "cognitive empathy" ). This finding was observed at all ages and in most countries.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the largest theory of mind study to date.
A fundamental part of social interaction and human communication is putting yourself in the shoes of others, to imagine the thoughts and feelings of another person. This is known as ’theory of mind’ or ’cognitive empathy’ .
For decades, researchers have studied the development of theory of mind, from childhood to old age. One of the most widely used tests to study theory of mind is the ’ Reading the Mind in the Eyes ’ Test (or Eyes Test for short), which asks participants to choose which word best describes what the person is like in the photo. thinking or feeling, simply seeing photos of the eye region of the face.
Eyes Test was first developed in 1997 by Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen and his research team at Cambridge, and was revised in 2001 and has become a well-established assessment of theory of mind. It is listed as one of two tests recommended for measuring individual differences in "Understanding Mental States" by the US National Institute of Mental Health.
Over the decades, many independent research studies have found that, on average, women score higher than men on theory of mind tests. However, most of these studies were limited to relatively small samples, without much diversity in terms of geography, culture, and/or age. To address these shortcomings, a team of multidisciplinary researchers led by the University of Cambridge and with collaborators at the universities of Bar-Ilan, Harvard, Washington and Haifa, as well as IMT Lucca, merged large samples from different online platforms to analyze data from 305,726 participants. in 57 countries.
The results showed that, across all 57 countries, women on average scored significantly higher than men (in 36 countries), or similar to men (in 21 countries), on the eyes test. Importantly, there was no country where men on average scored significantly higher than women on the eyes test. The average sex difference was observed throughout life, from 16 to 70 years of age. The team also confirmed this average sex difference in three independent data sets and in non-English versions of the Eyes Test , covering eight languages.
Dr. David M. Greenberg, the study’s lead scientist, a Zuckerman Fellow at Bar-Ilan and an honorary research associate at Cambridge, said: "Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon: that women are, on average, , more empathetic than men – is present in a wide range of countries around the world. Only by using very large data sets can we say this with confidence."
Although this study cannot discern the cause of this average sex difference, the authors argue based on previous research that this may be the result of both biological and social factors .
Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, said: "Studies of average sex differences say nothing about an individual’s mind or abilities, as "that an individual may be typical or atypical for their sex. The Eyes Test reveals that many people have difficulty reading facial expressions, for a variety of reasons. Support should be available to those who seek it."
The researchers also showed that, in addition to gender, "D scores" (the difference between a person’s drive to systematize and their drive to empathize) are a significant negative predictor of scores on the Eyes Test . This adds to an earlier study led by Greenberg in 2018 of more than 650,000 participants, also published in PNAS, which found that D scores accounted for 19 times more of the variance in autistic traits than sex or any other demographic variable. Therefore, D scores appear to play a more important role than sex in aspects of human cognition.
Dr Carrie Allison, Director of Applied Research at the University of Cambridge Autism Research Center and member of the team, said: “This study clearly demonstrates a largely consistent sex difference across countries, languages and ages. "This raises new questions for future research into the social and biological factors that may contribute to the observed average sex difference in cognitive empathy."
