The Story of Psychology (65 page)
Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
One such study, for instance, rated a group of pregnant women, on the basis of personality testing, as either Internalists or Externalists, and found a markedly higher rate of postpartum depression among the Internalists. These women blamed the difficulties of the period on their personal attributes; the Externalists blamed them on the situation and, though feeling helpless, were not particularly depressed.
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Later, Seligman broadened his theory into what he called “explanatory style.” It accounts for the basic aspect of personality that appears as overall optimism or general pessimism. In Seligman’s words:
Take a bad event such as a defeat in business or love, for instance. Pessimists attribute it to causes that are long-lasting or permanent, that affect everything they do, and that are their own fault. Optimists regard the causes of a defeat as temporary, limited to the present case, and the result of circumstances, bad luck, or the actions of other people.
Optimism leads to higher achievement than pessimism. Optimistic life insurance agents, we found, sell more insurance and stay at it longer than pessimistic agents. Optimistic Olympic-level swimmers, when they’re defeated, get faster; pessimistic swimmers, when they’re defeated, get slower. Optimistic professional baseball and basketball teams do better, particularly after they’re defeated, than pessimistic teams.
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On this basis, Seligman developed his own distinctive approach to personality: helplessness or pessimism could be learned (as the dogs had
learned it)—but so could the opposite, optimism; one could learn mental skills that would change one’s view of life in a positive and self-directing fashion. “Learned optimism” became the basis of what he views as a new discipline, Positive Psychology, which studies positive emotion, positive character traits, and therapeutic methods of achieving them. Since 2000 this has been Seligman’s main interest, and at the University of Pennsylvania he now heads a training and research facility known as the Positive Psychology Center.
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One other issue on which social learning theory cast new light is that of the differences between male and female personalities. Ostensibly wise persons have had a lot to say about this subject throughout the ages, most of them men, who have spoken well of their own sex and ill of the other. Their views have ranged from Plato’s mild denigration of woman (“The gifts of nature are alike diffused in both [sexes], but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man”) to Clement of Alexandria’s tirade against woman’s sinful nature (“You are the gate of hell, the unsealer of that forbidden tree, the first deserter of the divine law”) to Lord Chesterfield’s genteel sneer at woman’s mind and personality:
Women are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it…A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors them, and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child.
A number of traditionally female traits—emotionality, timidity, vanity, nurturance, perceptiveness, deviousness, and so on—have always been assumed to be innate. In the early decades of psychology, most psychologists, Freud among them, believed that these traits were the inescapable outcome of women’s hormonal and biological endowments and of the special experiences these brought about. As late as 1936, Lewis Terman and a colleague, C. C. Miles, published a well-received and influential study of male and female personalities,
Sex and Personality
, based on the results of a test they had constructed. Many of the answers were scored on the basis of traditional beliefs about gender differences. In the word-association section of the test, for instance, if the respondent’s association to “tender” was “meat,” the answer was scored as masculine, if “kind” or “loving,” feminine. Reading detective stories and liking chemistry were scored as masculine; reading poetry and liking dramatics, feminine.
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Extraordinary though it may seem today, the Terman and Miles test was used for many years before such assumptions were questioned. But as women’s social position changed in recent decades, so did many aspects of female personality; moreover, a mass of research findings by social-learning theorists and others challenged many of the traditional assumptions. A few examples of the hundreds in the research literature:
—Girls are indeed more fearful than boys of mice, snakes, and spiders—but largely because they learn early that it is more permissible for them than for boys to express fear.
—Girls spontaneously play with dolls more than boys do, a fact long taken as evidence that girls are innately more nurturing and helpful. But girls are more often
given
dolls to play with, a form of social training. Girls’ greater nurturance is at least partly learned.
—Elementary school girls appear to be more compassionate than boys, as judged by such criteria as their greater willingness to write letters to hospitalized children; boys, however, are very ready to be helpful when the activity called for is one they have been taught to think of as properly masculine. At the adult level, women seem readier to help people in distress than men, but chiefly in situations traditionally thought of as calling for female ministrations, such as tending a hurt child; males are readier to help in risky or strenuous situations. In sum, sex differences in helping behavior are partly or largely attributable to social learning.
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For a while, some feminists took the extreme position that virtually all personality and intellectual differences between the sexes are the result of social inequities, pressures, and conditioning. But as research evidence accumulated, it became clear that certain cognitive and personality differences are indeed influenced by biology. For instance:
—Women have become somewhat more aggressive in sports, business, and in experimental laboratory situations. But in social life most of them continue to be much less aggressive than men. The latter commit by far the larger share of family violence, rapes, homicides, and crime in general. The greater aggressiveness of males appears very early in life, well before most social influences come to bear; the findings strongly suggest that social learning, while it plays a large part, acts on and accentuates biologically built-in differences.
—Girls and women have the edge on boys and men in verbal ability, on the average, but are slightly inferior in spatial visualizing ability. The verbal difference appears early and the spatial difference before adolescence, when social influences become most influential; both, therefore, point to some degree of difference in the structure of the brain. A recent review of studies of the brain lists a number of minor differences between the female and the male brain—one such difference, a stronger linking between the two hemispheres in females, has been thought to account for females’ verbal edge over males—but the net conclusion is that “few data are available linking structural differences [in the brain] to functional sex differences.”
—Women are better than men at sensing the meaning of such non-verbal cues to emotion as posture, body movements, and facial expressions. In part this is probably an acquired skill, but some evidence, such as the appearance of these differences in early childhood, points to a biological predisposition produced by evolution. It may have been more important to the survival of the weaker sex to read body language.
—In a painstaking survey of recent data, Melissa Hines, a leading British neuroendocrinologist, reports that there are dramatic differences in “core gender identity” (the sense of oneself as male or female), but that other much-researched differences are quite small. She listed 3-D rotation ability (mental rotation of pictures of objects to see if they are the same as other objects), math ability, verbal fluency, spatial perception, and even rough-and-tumble play and physical aggressiveness. Some of these criteria favored males, some females, but in all cases the differences were small compared to the average sex difference in height. In any case, Hines concludes, “Variation within each sex is great, with both males and females near the top and the bottom of the distributions for every characteristic.
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The upshot is that while the radical feminist view is not justified by the findings, many traditional beliefs about innate differences in male and female personality have been disproved. Most male-female differences are now ascribed to social learning or to the interplay of social forces and biological factors, but some do appear to be innate. Kay Deaux, a psychologist at the City University of New York, concluded a review of research in the field with this comment:
What one may wish as a feminist is not necessarily what one sees as a scientist… Attempts to “disprove” the existence of sex differences have given way to arguments, both at the scientific and popular level, that differences do exist. Acknowledgment of the existence of differences should not, however, serve as a cap on efforts to understand the processes by which sex and gender have become influential in human behavior.
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But that temperate summary did nothing to quiet the long-running debate. Over the past two decades, many other studies of gender differences in personality have been published, some concluding that there are only trifling differences, others that there are significant differences, some holding that such differences as exist are culturally acquired, others that they are largely of genetic or biological origin. It would be tedious to exhibit examples of all this, but the distinguished researcher Stephen Kosslyn and co-author Robert Rosenberg recently summarized what has been learned:
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In general, personality differences between females and males are not very great, especially when compared with the large differences among people within each sex. For example, there are no notable sex differences in social anxiety, locus of control, impulsiveness, or reflectiveness.
Nonetheless, some consistent differences have been found. Women tend to score higher on traits reflecting
social connectedness
, which is a focus on the importance of relationships, men on traits reflecting
individuality
and
autonomy.
Women tend to be more empathic than men and report more nurturing tendencies [and] are better at spotting when their partners are deceiving them.
Males and females also differ in their degree of neuroticism, with men scoring lower. However, women generally score lower on anger and aggression.
The fact that a difference exists doesn’t tell us
why
it exists—what might be the role of biological or cultural factors. In spite of the evidence that culture and context shape gender differences, we must also note that there are biological explanations for these differences.
Which nicely illustrates a general truth about psychology that will become ever more apparent as our story proceeds: to some degree,
opposed and seemingly incompatible theories about many a psychological phenomenon, pitted against each other for two and a half millennia, are both proving in the light of accumulating knowledge to be right.
The theory that male-female trait differences are biologically determined is part of the larger one that personality is innate. There are two related versions of this theory: one, the characteristics of an individual’s body influence personality; and two, personality is determined by specific genes or the interactions of certain genes.
The first version is nearly as old as psychology itself. Galen’s humoral theory of personality was one form it took in antiquity. Another was physiognomy, the view held from Greek times to today that the shape of the features and configuration of the body are accompanied by related personality traits. One example, of thousands: In
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer pictures the sober, studious Clerk (scholar) as “not right fat” but “hollow,” the earthy, much-married Wife of Bath as “bold” of face, “red of hue,” and “gat-tothed” (gaps between the teeth, according to physiognomists, denote boldness and amorousness), and the vulgar Miller as stout, brawny, big-boned, and possessed of a gross nose with wide black nostrils.
In the early years of this century, body-personality theory took on the look of science when Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964), a German psychiatrist who worked in several mental hospitals in southern Germany, claimed he had found a relation between patients’ physiques and their personalities and mental states. Patients who were short-limbed, round of face, and thickset, he said, tended to have mood fluctuations and to be either very elated or very depressed; they were manic depressives. Those who were long-limbed, thin-faced, and slender tended to be introverted, shy, cold, and antisocial; they were schizophrenics. Those who had balanced physiques and muscle development were energetic, aggressive, and cheerful; they had other mental ailments.
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Kretschmer believed that both the body shapes and the personality types or mental states were produced by hormonal secretions. His theory, advanced in 1921 in
Körperbau und Charakter
(the English edition is called
Physique and Character
), attracted much favorable attention because it seemed to lend scientific support to ancient tradition. But
other scientists poked holes in Kretschmer’s theory. Many people, they noted, do not fit neatly into any of the three categories—short, fat people often have personalities that should go with being tall and thin, and tall, thin people often behave like athletic types. Moreover, Kretschmer’s sample was skewed. Hospitalized schizophrenics are younger, on the average, than hospitalized manic depressives, and this alone might account for much of the difference he found in the distribution of body fat.
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But the body-type idea was appealing and soon had a new and more scientifically rigorous champion, William H. Sheldon (1899–1977), a physician and psychologist at Harvard. Shortly after Kretschmer’s book appeared in English, Sheldon began a study of “somatotypes” (body types) and over several decades collected data on the physical dimensions and personalities of normal people. (Late in life, he extended his studies to mental patients and delinquent boys.)