In They just can’t help it, Simon Baron-Cohen explains his theory that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems — although not all females have a “female” brain, and not all males have a “male” brain. He calls his theory the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory, and his simple E-S tests are on-line. (No doubt about it: male.) There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, but Baron-Cohen prefers scientific evidence:
Baby girls, as young as 12 months old, respond more empathically to the distress of other people, showing greater concern through more sad looks, sympathetic vocalisations and comforting. This echoes what you find in adulthood: more women report frequently sharing the emotional distress of their friends. Women also spend more time comforting people.
When asked to judge when someone might have said something potentially hurtful, girls score higher from at least seven years old. Women are also more sensitive to facial expressions. They are better at decoding non-verbal communication, picking up subtle nuances from tone of voice or facial expression, or judging a person’s character.
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How early are such sex differences in empathy evident? Certainly, by 12 months , girls make more eye contact than boys. But a new study carried out in my lab at Cambridge University shows that at birth, girls look longer at a face, and boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile. Furthermore, the Cambridge team found that how much eye contact children make is in part determined by a biological factor: prenatal testosterone. This has been demonstrated by measuring this hormone in amniotic fluid.
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Some psychological tests also show the male advantage in systemising. For example, in the mental rotation test, you’re shown two shapes, and asked if one is a rotation or a mirror image of the other. Males are quicker and more accurate on this test. Reading maps has been used as another test of systemising. Men can learn a route in fewer trials, just from looking at a map, correctly recalling more details about direction and distance. If you ask boys to make a map of an area that they have only visited once, their maps have a more accurate layout of the features in the environment, eg, showing which landmark is south-east of another.
If you ask people to put together a 3D mechanical apparatus in an assembly task, on average, men score higher. Boys are also better at constructing block buildings from 2D blueprints. These are constructional systems. And in Nick Hornby’s novel, High Fidelity, the male protagonist is obsessed with his record collection, and works in a second-hand record shop catering for (almost all male) customers searching for that one missing item in their collections of music. Collections (of albums, or anything else) are often highly systematic in nature.
The male preference for focusing on systems again is evident very early. Our Cambridge study found that at one year old, little boys showed a stronger preference to watch a film of cars (mechanical systems), than a film of a person’s face (with a lot of emotional expression). Little girls showed the opposite preference. And at one day old, little boys look for longer at a mechanical mobile.
The record-collecting thing really rang true.
