“Pick a gender difference, any difference. Now watch very closely as–poof!–it’s gone. Social psychologists are becoming rather brilliant at setting up these gender difference sleights of hand. The examples are piling up in all sorts of domains–from social sensitivity to chess to negotiation–but the pièce de resistance is the visuospatial skill of mental rotation performance. In the classic and most widely used test of this ability, the test taker is shown an unfamiliar three-dimensional shape made up of little cubes–the target–and four other similar shapes. Two of these are the same as the original but have been rotated in three-dimensional space, and two are mirror images. The task is to work out which two are the same as the target. Mental rotation performance is the largest and most reliable gender difference in cognition. In a typical sample, about 75 percent of people who score above average are male. Gender differences in mental rotation ability have even recently been seen in babies three to four and five months of age. While it’s easy to see that a high score on the mental rotation test would be a distinct advantage when it comes to playing Tetris, some also claim (although they’re often strongly disputed) that male superiority in this domain plays a significant role in explaining males’ better representation in science, engineering, and math. People’s mental rotation ability is malleable; it can be greatly enhanced by training. But there are far quicker, easier ways to modulate mental rotation ability. By now, you already know what these methods involve: manipulating the social context in such a way that it changes the mind that is performing the task. For example, you can feminize the task. When in one study, participants were told that performance on mental rotation is probably linked with success on such tasks as ‘in-flight and carrier-based aviation engineering … nuclear propulsion engineering, undersea approach and evasion, [and] navigation,’ the men came out well ahead. Yet when the same test was described as predicting facility for ‘clothing and dress design, interior decoration and interior design … decorative creative needlepoint, creative sewing and knitting, crocheting [and] flower arrangement,’ this emasculating list of activities had a draining effect on male performance. Alternatively, instead of changing the gender of the task, you can keep the task the same but push gender into the mental background. Matthew McGlone and Joshua Aronson, for example, measured mental rotation ability in students at a selective liberal arts college in the northeastern United States. One group was primed with gender, while another group was primed with their exclusive private-college identity. Women who had been induced to think of themselves as a student at a selective liberal arts college enjoyed a performance boost, scoring significantly higher than gender-primed women. Likewise, Markus Hausmann and colleagues found that although gender-stereotype-primed men outperformed gender-stereotype-primed women, men and women primed with an irrelevant (geographical region-based) stereotype performed similarly on the mental rotation task. Another outrageous, but successful, approach was recently devised by Italian researcher Angelica Moè. She described the mental rotation test to her Italian high school student participants as a test of spatial abilities and told one group that ‘men perform better than women in this test, probably for genetic reasons.’ The control group was given no information about gender. But a third group was presented with a downright lie. That group was told that ‘women perform better than men in this test, probably for genetic reasons.’ So what effect did this have? In both the men-are-better and the control group, men outperformed women with the usual size of gender difference. But women in the women-are-better group, the recipients of the little white lie, performed just as well as the men. How can such easy maneuvers–changing the way a task is described, bringing a particular social identity to the fore, or telling a simple fib–have such an erosive effect on the most robust gender difference in cognition in the literature? We saw in the previous chapter that the social demands of a situation can change how motivated men and women are to perform well. And psychologists are beginning to uncover other ways in which the social context can change, for better or for worse, the mind’s power and effectiveness. There turn out to be a striking number of ways that being in the ‘wrong’ social group creates a trickier psychological path to navigate. With regards to gender, researchers have had quite a lot of success unraveling how the social context interacts with ability in traditionally masculine domains, especially mathematics.”
