Isegoria

Psychologist John Holland devised his theory of vocational choice in 1959. It posited six clusters of orientations. He did this with no regard to sex differences, but — as Charles Murray points out in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class — there are huge differences in where men and women land on some of those orientations, on average:

The authors assembled a database from 81 samples that amounted to 243,670 men and 259,518 women. On average, women’s vocational interests tilted toward occupations involving work with or understanding of other people; men’s vocational interests tilted toward working with things.

The biggest tilts involved the Realistic orientation — a male preference — with an effect size of –0.84, and the Social orientation — a female preference — with an effect size of +0.68.

On the Data-Ideas dimension, there was virtually no sex difference.

On the People-Things dimension, the effect size was +0.93, meaning that women were on the People end and men were on the Things end of the dimension — a large effect size by any standard.

Charles Murray continues to explain sex differences in cognitive skills (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class):

The most famous cognitive measure is the IQ test. The tests are designed to minimize sex differences, but minor sex differences in test scores do exist, and they have usually, though not always, favored males.

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Girls outscored boys in reading in every single PISA country, with effect sizes that ranged from a low of +0.08 in Peru to a remarkable high of +0.83 in Jordan.

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“Sex differences in mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were universally present across nations, with men’s mean scores always exceeding women’s mean scores.”

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In all, the test yielded 26 male-female comparisons. Twelve of them amounted to an absolute effect size of less than 0.1. Women outscored men on six of the seven measures of accuracy with an effect size greater than 0.1, and they outscored men on four of the seven measures of speed with an effect size greater than 0.1.

• Females had more accurate memory for items involving words and people.
• On IQ-like items, women did better on the verbal ones; men did better on the spatial ones.
• On the three subtests measuring social cognition, females were both more accurate and faster than males on all of them.
• On the subtest measuring motor speed, males were faster than females.

On average males have substantially better visuospatial skills than females — as evidenced by the Piaget water-level test and the bicycle-drawing test — while women have better social cognition. Bright men can compensate, as Charles Murray explains (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, based on Diane Halpern’s Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities):

Males are rarely good at both systemizing and empathizing. In contrast, these skill sets are largely independent in women.

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The same study found evidence that men apply systemizing skills to empathizing tasks. Put another way, even when men do well in social cognition tasks, they are not using the cognitive tools most naturally suited to that purpose.

Memory comes in many forms — long-term and short-term, “autobiographical,” “episodic,” and “semantic,” among others — Charles Murray notes (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class), and females have an advantage in some of them (as Diane Halpern notes in Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities):

• Females tend to be better than males at remembering faces and names.
• Females tend to be better than males at recognizing facial emotions.
• Females tend to be better at remembering the minutiae of an event (labeled peripheral detail), while males tend to be better at remembering the core events (labeled gist).
• Females tend to remember speech they have heard better than males, particularly when it relates to emotionally laden events in their past.
• Females tend to retain memories from earlier childhood better than males do.
• Females tend to have better short-term memory than males (e.g., given a list of single-digit numbers, they remember longer lists than males do).
• Females tend to have better verbal working memory (e.g., remembering a list of numbers while answering questions about an unrelated topic).
• Females tend to have better memory for locations of objects (e.g., remembering where the car keys were left).
• Males tend to have better visuospatial memory (e.g., navigating on the basis of a combination of landscape features).

In Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray continues his list of specific skills and aptitudes that each sex performs better, taken from Diane Halpern’s Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, with a look at perceptual-motor tasks:

• Females have an advantage on certain perceptual-motor tasks. On digit-symbol coding, for example, where each symbol corresponds to a number (e.g., “substitute 2 for #”), women code faster than men do.
• Females have an even larger advantage in a variety of fine motor skills involving hand-eye coordination.
• In tests of motor skills, it sometimes happens that men are faster but women are more accurate.
• Men have a substantial advantage in many large motor skills, but few of them have much to do with cognition. The major exception is males’ pronounced advantage on tasks that involve throwing objects accurately at stationary or moving targets, because that accuracy is highly dependent on visuospatial processing in the brain.

Throwing like a girl is definitely a thing.

In Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray relies on Diane Halpern’s fourth edition of Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities (2012) for his list of specific skills and aptitudes that each sex performs better. He starts with sensory perception:

When it comes to the five senses — taste, touch, smell, sound, vision — the story is mostly one of small female advantages.

• Females tend to be better than males at detecting pure tones.
• Adult females tend to have more sensitive hearing for high frequencies than males.
• Females tend to have better auditory perception of binaural beats and otoacoustic emissions.
• Females tend to detect faint smells better than males.
• Females tend to identify smells more accurately than males.
• Males under 40 tend to detect small movements in their visual field better than females.
• Age-related loss of vision tends to occur about ten years earlier for females than for males.
• Males are many times more likely to be color-blind than females (the ratio varies by ethnic group).
• The balance of evidence indicates that females are more accurate than males in recognizing the basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter), though some studies find no difference.
• Females tend to be better than males at perceiving fine surface details by touch. This holds true for blind people as well as sighted ones.

Women are also more sensitive to pain and to disgust.

Gwern recently cited a paper, Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, that describes the neural basis of spoon bending and the dancing bar illusion:

Spoon bending. In this illusion the magician bends a spoon, apparently by using the power of the mind. In one part of the trick, the magician holds the spoon horizontally and shakes it up and down. This shows that the neck of the spoon has apparently become flexible. The apparent rubberiness of the spoon is an example of the Dancing Bar (or Rubber Tree) illusion, in which an oscillating bar (or rubber tree) seems to bend when it is bounced rapidly. The neural basis of this illusion lies in the fact that end­stopped neurons (that is, neurons that respond both to motion and to the terminations of a stimulus’ edges, such as corners or the ends of lines) in the primary visual cortex (area V1) and the middle temporal visual area (area MT, also known as area V5) respond differently from non­end­stopped neurons to oscillating stimuli. This differential response results in an apparent spatial mislocalization between the ends of a stimulus and its centre, making a solid object look like it flexes in the middle.