Department Head, Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University. Tweets my own & are science communications not endorsements of specific views/findings.
Imagine ur lectures w/ >1 study from a BAME/BIPOC psychologist, >1 study w/ non-WEIRD samples, >1 concept emic to non-WEIRD cultures, >1 truly indigenous theory of non-WEIRD scholars. Imagine what students would learn. Imagine what u would learn. Inspire us all, commit to change.
Tinder study..."male subjects liked 61.9% of female profiles, female subjects liked only 4.5% of male...findings in line with evolutionary psychology and parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972)" +women like more if he has masters in business/engineering
80% of CEOs surveyed said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results
The gender gap in adolescent mental health...566,829 adolescents across 73 countries...Girls have worse average mental health than boys across 4 measures of mental health...More gender equal countries have larger gender gaps in mental health
80,000 people, 76 nations, representative sampling, reflecting 90% of both the world population...the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences
"Why Women Apologize More Than Men...men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior...men rate offenses as less severe than women"
"most people’s life satisfaction is highly consistent with their personality traits, even across many years. So, satisfaction is usually shaped by these same relatively stable factors that shape personality traits more broadly"
Sex differences in personality traits in Asian elephants..."male elephants score higher on the Aggressiveness trait than females, whereas female elephants score higher on the Sociability trait than males"
science says men are taller than women. critics point out there is no "male height" or "female height" in humans. science says "good point!" critics say therefore men's and women's heights are indistinguishable. science says...wait, what?
Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains - this battle of extreme positions obscures the more nuanced and realistic position of an interplay between biology and culture
"With visual simulated attraction cues, females but not males influenced by others' attraction to the model, thus providing evidence for mate copying in human females"
"recent advances in AI and large multicohort fMRI datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network"
"brains of males and females are highly distinguishable. Understanding sex differences in brain has implications for elucidating variability in incidence and progression of disease, psychopathology, and differences in psychological traits and behavior"
Five studies showed women prefer men with Benevolent Sexism attitudes and behaviors, especially in mating contexts, because BS mates are perceived as willing to invest (protect, provide, and commit)
“There is a growing awareness that depression is not a one-size-fits-all disorder, and understanding how women’s and men’s brains are fundamentally different will help pave the way for more personalized approaches to treatment.”
predicting IQ via whole-brain functional connectivity...1) higher correlations for women (.72) than men (.46), 2) IQ of women and men underpinned by different neurobiological correlates, consistent with sex diffs in cognitive domains (verbal vs. spatial)
"Big Five can indeed serve as an organizing framework for sizable majority of stand-alone psychological trait scales...adopting such an approach, construct proliferation may be abated and it would become easier to integrate findings from disparate fields"
"intelligence contributes 48–90x more than grit to educational success, 13x more to job success...previous studies range restricted on intelligence...findings suggest that although grit has some effect on success, it is negligible compared to intelligence"
View of What’s the difference between measures of wellbeing, quality of life, resilience, and coping? An umbrella review and concept map of 155 measures of positive mental health ()
at workplace, women particularly uncivil to other women who have high agency, civil to agentic men; men particularly civil to low agency, high communal women
"male researchers more often value/engage in research mainly aimed at scientific progress, which is more cited. Female researchers more often value/engage in research mainly aimed at contributing to societal progress, which has more abstract views (usage)"
Mate Preferences Across 45 Countries: A Large-Scale Replication...Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust...Beyond age of partner, neither pathogens nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences across countries
"But for those of us who strongly believe in the importance of psychotherapy, and think that many men are far too reluctant to seek help and support, the decision by the APA to pathologize half of humanity is terrible news"
"Independent of their physical strength (ability to protect), discovering that a person is willing to protect you greatly increased their attractiveness as a partner...discovering that a male date was unwilling to protect them was a deal-breaker for women"
"there are 11 papers published in peer reviewed journals reporting a total of 16 studies that have directly assessed the accuracy of gender stereotypes. Ellemer’s review did not cite a single one. How is this possible?"
"APA...guidelines set a poor precedent, suggesting that psychologists can be quite casual with facts and ignore discrepant research when ideological values are deemed more important. That's not how I was trained in psychology"
Machine learning algorithms reliably detect gender identity with high prediction accuracy in cisgender (men/women) and transgender (trans men/trans women) individuals based on resting-state functional connectivity signatures alone
from a gender dysphoria "working group" especially concerned with rapid onset GD..."Given the strong evidence of peer contagion in suicide, substance abuse and eating disorders, especially among adolescents, the role of peer contagion in gender dysphoria demands urgent attention"
Men’s physical features connoting strength provide information relating to indirect (i.e., genetic) and direct (i.e., resource acquisition) benefits...women preferred strong over weak men, preferences for strong men associated with certain ecological cues
"Trigger warnings may have been developed under incredibly well-meaning pretenses, but they have now failed to prove useful in study after study...probably useless for most people and potentially, though not definitively, a little harmful to some"
being able to do at least 10 push-ups better predictor of heart health than treadmill test (10-year study of male firefighters in USA); being able to do 40+ push-ups = 97% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease over next 10 years
"Intelligence and physical violence emerged as being especially likely to boost men's sex partner accumulation...for high socioeconomic status to be sexually attractive to women, men must demonstrate they are also capable of physically aggressive behavior"
in science, there isn't really a "final take" on most issues. but, with regard to IQ versus SES in predicting educational and occupational outcomes, most large reviews of the evidence find IQ is the bigger predictor (see )
"sex-linked disparities in gene expression are far more pervasive than once assumed, with more than a third of all genes displaying sex-biased expression in at least one tissue"
study found attractive female students got lower grades after classes moved online...school requested external expert...concluded study had not deviated good research practice, consistent w/European data-protection, followed ethic standards journal. Still?
sex differences in upset over being deceived in online dating...Males more upset by a date's attractiveness deception, females more upset by a date's deception over status/resources, in line with evolved mate preferences
"brain volumes in 514 newborns...While postnatal experiences likely amplify sex differences in the brain, our findings demonstrate that several global and regional on-average sex differences are already present at birth"
"21,245 participants b/t 18 & 65...importance of 82 mate-selection criteria for long-term relationship...selection relatively stable over life course...most men could imagine marrying someone w/lower education level (87.4%), most women could not (43.0%)"
"evolution doesn’t care if we’re happy, so long as we’re reproductively successful...If we were capable of experiencing lasting happiness, evolution would lose one of its best ways to motivate us."
"In summary, we found little support for the idea that psychological sex differences will vanish as societies develop...Instead, it appears that the dominant feature of psychological sex differences is their robustness in the face of social change"
“biophobia” virtual knee-jerk antipathy to any suggestion biology could have anything to offer in explaining human social behavior. Being uniformed by fields such as evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, population genetics, sociobiology...inexcusable
"In whose interest is it to persuade [students] they’re fragile, that they’re threatened, that words are violence, that an imagined slight is as bad as a real one, and that they’re surrounded by people and ideas from whom they need so much protection?" ?
nothing controversial here..."there was not a single childcare task that men liked more than women did. Our findings imply that aims of gender equity across the board may be difficult to achieve and may also work against partners’ individual preferences"
in Italian school system...males outperformed females in mathematics (and vice versa in reading)...gender gap in mathematics was larger in the richer northern Italian regions (also characterized by greater gender equality) than in southern regions
"Chinese women...show stronger preferences for partners with higher income, better family background, higher education, housing property ownership than men. For Chinese men...place greater importance on their potential partner’s physical attractiveness"
"A psychology that cares about scientific truth is one that must fully engage with behaviour genetics, accept temporary uncertainty about how genes and environment work together to shape all human thought, feeling, and behaviour, and work vigorously to update its priors."
It still amazes me that, for most of its history, the science entrusted with explaining why people turn out the way they do consistently ignored the single biggest factor: genes. But the tide is definitely turning...
interesting LGB finding..."men tend to regret sex they didn’t have, whereas women tended to regret sex they did have...in study including gay, lesbian, and bisexual participants, main finding that women tended to regret actions and men tended to regret inactions emerged again"
"Prior to puberty, no sex diff in testosterone or athletic performance, from puberty onward clear sex difference in athletic performance...testosterone concentrations rise in men because testes produce 30x times more testosterone than before puberty"
"females should leave a male if they fear he is weak...Many females leave a male long before he dies, suggesting that they may be able to determine when he is getting weaker, potentially using the outcome of aggressive displays between males when they meet as a hint"
When their
#silverback
gets old female
#gorillas
face a dilemma: Should they stay or should they go? New paper by Marie Manguette & Martha Robbins from
@MPI_EVA_Leipzig
, & colleagues. More: (en), (de),
"Taken together, results indicate more sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in countries with higher living conditions...most psychological sex differences will remain unchanged or become more pronounced with improvements in...gender equality"
oof..."We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias"
sex differences in sexuality...more about the gas pedal than the brakes
"In both studies, men succumbed to the sexual temptations more than women, and this sex difference emerged because men experienced stronger impulses, not because they exerted less intentional control."
men more highly value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, afford access to potential mates...In contrast, women more highly value friends who provide emotional support, intimacy, useful social information
coronavirus disproportionately affects older men...sex differences reflect genuine male vulnerability, rather than bias in exposure...immunologically speaking, men are weaker sex...rapidly growing patient numbers might reveal secrets of female resistance
"Women with unrestricted sociosexuality more likely to view masculine faces longer compared to feminine faces...Women high mate value more likely to view masculine faces longer...dwell time and looking behavior (i.e., number of fixations)"
"for Raznahan, de Vries, and McCarthy, the possibility of making progress toward understanding mental disorders makes studying brain sex differences an ethical imperative...“We can’t not make discoveries,” McCarthy says, “because they might be misused.”"
"Despite equal qualifications, male job candidates had about five percentage points lower chances of receiving a positive response than female candidates...female advantage is limited to female-dominated occupations and to women from the majority group"
“The USA is unique among wealthy democracies in terms of the number of people that are killed by its police forces...the No. 1 thing it comes down to is a lack of accountability by police departments, both legally and politically”
attractive female bodily features do NOT indicate good health and high fertility (noted by Lassek & Gaulin, 2017)... Instead "women's body attractiveness is defined primarily by cues that indicate high reproductive value as defined by youth and low parity"
"Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs"
Similar to therapy making psychopaths worse?...Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) ran from early 1990s until 2017...research showed 10% of men who had completed the SOTP reoffended, compared with 8% of those who had not done the programme