Delusions of Gender (28 page)

Another draw of neurononsense is what Yale researchers have referred to as ‘the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’. Deena Skolnick Weisberg and her colleagues found that people are pretty good at spotting bad explanations of psychological phenomena. Suppose, for example, you read about a study in which researchers found that men performed better than women on spatial reasoning tasks. Would you be satisfied by the circular explanation that ‘women’s poor performance relative to men’s explains the gender difference in spatial reasoning abilities’? Probably not. The researchers aren’t explaining their result, they’re redescribing it:
women are worse at spatial reasoning because women are worse at spatial reasoning
. But simply add neuroscience and the same non-explanations suddenly seem much more satisfying:

Brain scans of the right premotor area, known to be involved in spatial relational tasks, indicate that
women’s poor performance relative to men’s
causes different types of brain responses. This
explains the gender difference in spatial reasoning abilities.

In bold text is the circular explanation that people found unsatisfying. The extra neuroscience bit tells us that spatial reasoning recruits a part of the brain, which should hardly surprise us. But it doesn’t tell us
why
women performed worse than men. The explanation is still circular. But the neuroscience disguises
this, even for students enrolled in an introductory cognitive science class, Weisberg and colleagues found.
¹⁰
Although it’s not yet clear what it is, exactly, about neuroscience that is so persuasive, it’s been found that people find scientific arguments more compelling when accompanied by an image showing brain activation rather than, say, a bar graph showing the same information.
¹¹

All of which should make us very concerned that this talk of brain differences might influence opinion and policy far more than it should. As Weisberg suggests, the seductive nature of neuroscience creates ‘a dangerous situation in which it may not be the best research that wins debates in the public sphere.’
¹²

The effects of neuroscience may be personal as well as political. Gender stereotypes are legitimated by these pseudo-scientific explanations. Suddenly, one is being modern and scientific, rather than old-fashioned and sexist. Do you want to claim, in a book for teachers and parents, that ‘the world of the abstract … is explored more by the male brain than the female’, thus explaining males’ dominance in physics?
¹³
Why then, go right ahead! So long as the magic word
brain
is there, no further information required. But we have to wonder about the effect of this kind of information as it feeds back into society. As we saw in the first part of this book, the activation of gender stereotypes, even by means as subtle as our suspicion that they have found a home in the minds of others, can have measurable effects on our attitudes, identity and performance.

Neurosexism may also effect such changes directly. We can currently only speculate on the enervating effect of popular gender-science books on male patterns of leaving the milk to be bought by someone else. But there is evidence that media reports of gender that emphasise biological factors leave us more inclined to agree with gender stereotypes, to self-stereotype ourselves and even for our performance to fall in line with those stereotypes.
¹⁴
For example, one study found that women given a journal article to read that claimed that men are better at maths because of innate, biological and genetic differences performed worse on a GRE-like maths test than women shown an essay saying that men’s greater
effort underlies their superior performance. Likewise, women who had just read an essay arguing that there are genetically caused sex differences in mathematical ability performed substantially worse on a GRE-like test, compared with women who read that experiential factors explain sex differences in maths ability, psychologists Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Steven Heine found. (Being told this information by the experimenter had the same effect.) This damaging effect of the genetic account, the researchers suggest, may stem from people’s assumption that genetically based differences are more profound and immutable than differences that arise from social factors. ‘[M]erely considering the role of genes in maths performance can have some deleterious consequences’, they conclude. ‘These findings raise discomforting questions regarding the effects that scientific theories can have on those who learn about them and the obligation that scientists have to be mindful of how their work is interpreted.’
¹⁵

‘Caveat lector’ is Weisberg’s advice. Neuroscientists who work in this area have some responsibility for how their findings of sex differences in the brain are interpreted and communicated. When this is done carelessly, it may have a real and significant impact on people’s lives. Many neuroscientists do appear to be aware of this. They are appropriately cautious about interpreting sex differences in the brain, and many also take the time to remind journalists of just how far we are from mapping sex differences in the brain onto the mind. (And of course they may find their work being misrepresented, regardless.) Others, however, as we have seen, are more cavalier.

Not everyone would agree that the topic of sex differences in the brain requires a particular sensitivity. For example, sex-difference researcher Doreen Kimura has argued that ‘[w]e can’t allow ourselves to get into a situation in which we say … “This is a finding that won’t upset anyone, so I’m willing to generalize from it, but this other finding may be unpopular, so I need more evidence
to support it before reporting it.”’
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I am not inclined to agree that the content of the research makes no difference to the degree of care scientists should take in generalising a result, or their concern in how it is popularised by others. I have, for example, heard neuroscientists who work in the area of drug dependency talk about the efforts they go to to prevent simplification or distortion of their findings by the media. This is not because they are worried about ‘upsetting’ people, but because it is a sensitive area, and ‘brain facts’ about dependency can change people’s attitudes and feelings about a particular social group. These neuroscientists didn’t seem to consider it unreasonable to work under a heavier burden of caution – a burden that I suggest it is also appropriate to place on those who comment on sex differences in the brain.
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Finally, there’s an urgent need for editors, journalists and schools to develop far more sceptical attitudes towards claims made about sex differences in the brain. It is appalling to me that one can, apparently, say whatever drivel one likes about the male and female brain, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing it published in a reputable newspaper, changing a school’s educational policy or becoming a best seller. Scientists can help here (as many already are). Weisberg suggests (in relation to the interpretation of imaging studies in general) that we ‘take a more active stance as scientists, medical practitioners, and researchers.’ She advocates that researchers become ‘vocal critics’ of misleading articles, put more pressure on ‘newspaper and magazine writers to cover scientific issues with more depth and nuance’, and, to this end, offer their expertise to members of the media.
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Neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes. Three years ago, I discovered my son’s kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. And so I decided to write this book.
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To make this kind of confident claim about hardwired psychological differences between males and females is to overlook the likelihood of spurious findings, the teething problems of new technology, the
obscurity of the relationship between brain structure and psychological function and the difficulty of inferring psychological states from neuroimaging data. Dazzled by the seductive scientificness of neuroscience, commentators become blind to low-tech behavioural evidence of gender similarity, or flexibility in response to the social context. And, as we’ll explore more in the next chapter, the very concept of hardwiring needs some updating.

A
member of my family, who shall remain nameless, refers to all newborns as ‘blobs’. There’s a certain, limited truth to the description. Certainly, research continues to reveal just how sophisticated the neonate mind really is: already tuned to prefer its mother tongue, seek out facelike stimuli, time its waking up to coincide precisely with when its parents have just fallen most deeply into sleep. But it would not be an overstatement to say that newborns still have much to learn. Ideas about how this happens have been changing in important ways in neuroscience.

For decades, brain development has been thought of as an orderly adding in of new wiring that enables you to perform evermore-sophisticated cognitive functions. According to this maturational viewpoint, gene activity at the appropriate time (and with the necessary experience and environment) brings about the maturation of new bits of neural circuitry. These are added in, enabling the child to reach new developmental milestones. Everyone, of course, acknowledges the essential role of experience on development. But when we think of brain development as a gene-directed process of adding in new circuitry, it’s not difficult to see how the concept of hardwiring took off. It’s been helped along by the popularity of evolutionary psychology, versions of which have promoted the idea that we are the luckless owners of seriously outdated neural circuitry that has been shaped by natural selection to match the environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

But our brains, as we are now coming to understand, are
changed by our behaviour, our thinking, our social world. The new neuroconstructivist perspective of brain development emphasises the sheer exhilarating tangle of a continuous interaction among genes, brain and environment. Yes, gene expression gives rise to neural structures, and genetic material is itself impervious to outside influence. When it comes to genes, you get what you get. But gene
activity
is another story: genes switch on and off depending on what else is going on. Our environment, our behaviour, even our thinking, can all change what genes are
expressed
.
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And thinking, learning, sensing can all change neural structure directly. As Bruce Wexler has argued, one important implication of this neuroplasticity is that we’re not locked into the obsolete hardware of our ancestors:

In addition to having the longest period during which brain growth is shaped by the environment, human beings alter the environment that shapes their brains to a degree without precedent among animals.… It is this ability to shape the environment that in turn shapes our brains that has allowed human adaptability and capability to develop at a much faster rate than is possible through alteration of the genetic code itself. This transgenerational shaping of brain function through culture also means that processes that govern the evolution of societies and cultures have a great influence on how our individual brains and minds work.
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It’s important to point out that this is not a starry-eyed, environmentalist, we-can-all-be-anything-we-want-to-be viewpoint. Genes don’t determine our brains (or our bodies), but they do constrain them. The developmental possibilities for an individual are neither infinitely malleable nor solely in the hands of the environment. But the insight that thinking, behaviour and experiences change the brain, directly, or through changes in genetic activity, seems to strip the word ‘hardwiring’ of much useful meaning. As neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier put it over two decades ago,
we should ‘view biology as potential, as capacity and not as static entity. Biology itself is socially influenced and defined; it changes and develops in interaction with and response to our minds and environment, as our behaviors do. Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.’
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And so, what do popular writers, scientists and former presidents of Harvard
mean
when they refer to gender differences as ‘hardwired’, or ‘innate’, or ‘intrinsic’, or ‘inherent’? Some philosophers of biology, so far as I can tell, devote entire careers to the concept of innateness and what, if anything, it might mean. As cognitive neuroscientist Giordana Grossi points out, terms like
hardwired
– on loan from computer science where it refers to fixedness – translate poorly to the domain of neural circuits that change and learn throughout life, indeed, in
response
to life.
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Certainly, there is far more acknowledgement now of the role of experience and environment compared with a century or so ago. In the early twentieth century, ‘[g]enius was considered an innate quality which would naturally be manifested if it were possessed’, as psychologist Stephanie Shields summarises.
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No one now, I should think, would agree with this. And yet there remains, in some quarters, a Victorian-style attachment to notions of innate, immutable, inevitable qualities. How else to explain why the Greater Male Variability hypothesis – the idea that men are more likely to be outliers, good or bad (‘more prodigies, more idiots’
⁶
) – appears to be no less appealing now than it was over a century ago?
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In the early twentieth century, the Greater Male Variability hypothesis offered a neat explanation of why men so outnumbered women in eminence, despite the fact that there was little sex difference in the average scores of men and women on psychological tests. As Edward Thorndike (the sociologically unimaginative psychologist we met in the Introduction) explained it in 1910: