This reminded me of a study I read about in Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender:
“Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges used an empathic accuracy test in which participants watched a video of a woman talking about her failure to get a high enough score on an exam to get into the graduate school she wanted to attend. When the feminine nature of the empathic accuracy test was highlighted by asking participants for sympathy ratings before the empathic accuracy test, women scored significantly better than men. But a second group of women and men went through exactly the same procedure but with one vital difference: they were offered money for doing well. Specifically, they earned $2 for every correct answer. This financial incentive levelled the performance of women and men, showing that when it literally ‘pays to understand’ male insensitivity is curiously easily overcome.“ (Emphasis mine.)
(An endnote also states that “Men also scored equivalently to women when the sympathy rating was requested after the empathic accuracy test.”)
The passage goes on to add
“You can also improve men’s performance by inviting them to see a greater social value in empathising ability. Cardiff University psychologists presented undergraduate men with a passage titled ‘What Women Want’. The text, complete with bogus references, then went on to explain that contrary to popular opinion ‘non-traditional men who are more in touch with their feminine side’ are regarded as more sexually desirable and interesting by women, not to mention more likely to leave bars and clubs in the company of one. Men who read this passage performed better on the empathic accuracy task than did control men (to whom the test was presented in a nothing-to-do-with-gender fashion) or men who had been told that the experiment was investigating their alleged intuitive inferiority.“
In other words: men aren’t necessarily worse at sensing and understanding others’ feelings than women are; it’s just that quite a few of them don’t feel the need to put for the effort unless it profits them in some way… and perhaps don’t want to show too much empathy, because doing so would make them feel less masculine/manly.
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