- I’m guessing that you’re familiar with common notions that men are spatial and logical thinkers, while females are more verbally proficient. A man being tested for spatial ability might assume that he’s going to have an easier time than a woman of otherwise equal intelligence, his conclusion based not on sexism but on objective science. And statistically speaking, he’s right.
It is true that men score higher on spatial reasoning tests, though you might have caught on that there’s a little bit more to this picture (why would a female MIT student publicize stereotypes that actively work against her?). If you’re now wondering whether I’m about to throw some kind of feminist rant at you, I'll give you a “well, sort of,” because calling out factual misconception is just as important as promoting feminist ideals here, and because I think those two go hand in hand anyway. I’ll largely put the romance of egalitarianism aside, though, to talk about empiricism.
WOW. That whole "women suck at spacial tasks" has been such an ingrained thing for so long that I learned it as a totally non-controversial "men have larger visual centers, women have larger corpus collosums, we've got the cadaver data to prove it" factoid in Psych 101. This is the first time I've heard about priming. Makes me wonder whether priming has any effect on color perception. In my brief and cursory Google search, it looks like a whole bunch of "nope, women are just superior" pop-sci crap.
I do have ghostery, but I think I have Disqus allowed. I might have to fix that.
The only time I regret allowing Ghostery to run in Brutalist mode is when it straight-up keeps a page from loading. Then I pause it and see if it fixes it, and often resort to Safari because for some reason Chrome just keeps sucking harder and harder. (kleinbl00 realizes that he no longer needs to run mod tools, and can therefore maybe try Opera or some other non-parasitic browser, and feels a great weight off his shoulders)
I have some people whose content I will watch ads to support, and I disable it for those people and white-list them on AB. I've never tried Opera, what's the advantage? aside from no Chrome bloatware?
insomniasexx has tried a couple times to talk me into it. I'll give her the option.
ButterflyEffect this is completely unrelated, but how did you get this URL? I work for a digital marketing firm and this url has a facebook parameter for the action ID and the fact that it was liked. I'm trying to find out if this reflects back onto the number of times an article was liked, when each of us end up on the page from the pre-parametered URL. If it does, it's costing us a lot of money.
I initially found it via The New Inquiry but after reviewing their link it doesn't have the Facebook parameters, maybe they changed it but i wasn't paying much attention to the URL when I posted this. Haven't seen this article anywhere else yet. I removed the parameter from this post.
If you advertise on Facebook you pay for every interaction. Clicks on links, but also shares and likes. If this is counting articles shared through emails, IMs and other message boards as likes, an advertiser would be paying for impression to facebook when facebook didn't spread the message.
I'm really digging the misandry tag on this post and OftenBen's post from this week. Adds a lot to the discussion, you know?
Probably because it's a mental thing. I guarantee that the women in the study all are feminists who think about gender constructs daily while the men are just random guys who don't care. If it were legit influencing, I'd imagine that the female prompt would hurt men's scores much more than the male prompt would improve female scores. Simply because it's much less socially acceptable for men to appear feminine than for women to appear masculine.
Just a few thoughts: 1. The title exercise is depressing. Kind of like real hell, sort of... 2. She doesn't mention trans people anywhere in the article... Do MtF trans people score like the women or men? Do FtM score like the men or the women? I can imagine MtF scores going up when primed with the female text. 3. The 'minority in the class' thing is way off and is clearly just some sort of weird internalized fear that has no bearing in reality. Given I'm a minority every day: Left-handed, trans, and white in a school of asians. I had no "minority existential crises". 4. IIRC, the spatial reasoning thing has been well debunked. There's no real difference between men and women, only between individuals.
2. If it's true that the difference in spatial reasoning is due to social factors as the priming study suggests, then you might expect trans people to perform like the sex they were born as since they were raised with that set of gender stereotypes before they transitioned (although this might additionally be modulated by how long they've been living as their true gender). And with the priminf stuff I don't know whether there are any predictions we can derive since so many things could happen. Having someone imagine themselves being the gender they were born as probably isn't a good experience for many trans people so you might expect both groups of trans peopls to be worse, or maybe it doesn't affect them negatively and you expect the same pattern of results as in the original study. It's hard to say and I don't think any experiments have been done. 3. This is why science is about population averages, not individuals. It's great you've never felt this way but it doesn't mean that on average various minorities don't feel this way. These feelings are going to be somewhat normally distributed and you just so happen to be on the tail. Or so you think - you can't predict how you would actually behave in an experiment. This is why we do psychology experiments, our introspection isn't always right and many things are subconscious! 4. Interesting! Do you have a link to that study? The original study has been replicates so many times and one counterexample could very well be a false negative.