Most of us have bisexual traits

© bashta

Leviathan Press:

I guess many people have read the psychology bestseller "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus". When I first read it, I always felt something was wrong. It gave me a very stereotyped and dogmatic impression. During this period, many neuroscientists have studied the male and female brains and claimed that there are indeed differences between male and female brains in terms of spatial imagination and emotional processing. This has led to a general misunderstanding among the public that one gender is superior to the other, thus exacerbating gender bias. There is also a new term called "neurosexism" to describe this phenomenon.

(www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x)

The ancient Romans said, Quod volumus, facile credimus, which roughly means "we are apt to believe what we want to believe", so, as far as the public is concerned, the truth is probably only the one you are willing to believe. In fact, many researchers also think that they are wronged. It is obvious that the paper is just a study on the biological differences between men and women, but it was quickly taken out of context by the media to make an article. Genes, hormones and environment do cause gender differences in the brain. For any brain, as long as enough information is provided for certain characteristics, it is possible to infer very accurately whether the brain belongs to a man or a woman. However, this cannot be reversed: that is, the local anatomical structure and molecular basis of a person's brain, or his/her personality, can be predicted based solely on a person's gender.

It is not difficult to see how different the starting points of the two sides of the disagreement are: one side emphasizes differences, and the other side emphasizes chimerism/dimorphism (viewing the brain as a chimera composed of variable sexual characteristics), and the research and discussion of today's article (cisgender men and women) obviously belong to the latter.

How big are the differences between men and women?

Thirty years ago, a dating guide would have said something like this: Men and women have very different personalities. For example, the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus has similar dating advice.

Today, some academic circles have refuted the binary gender theory, which divides men and women into two different categories. (Note: The term "gender" mainly refers to "men", "women" and "non-binary people", and has strong cultural and social attributes; while "sex" mainly refers to "male", "female" and "intersex", which is a collection of biological characteristics and has strong biological attributes.)

Scientists also debate gender, sexuality, and personality. For example, researchers disagree on how big the personality differences are between cisgender men and women. The answer depends on how psychologists measure individual personality traits.

A study in the United States involved more than 300,000 subjects (who identified themselves as male or female) and observed both general personality traits, such as extroversion and agreeableness, and more specific aspects of these traits, such as a warm and welcoming communication style or altruistic behavior tendencies. In this sample, the researchers found that male and female subjects did not differ much in general traits, but in most cases showed large differences in specific traits.

© American Psychological Association

For example, overall, both men and women showed similar levels of extraversion (a general trait). However, when looking at specific aspects of extraversion, the researchers found that, on average, male participants were more likely to seek excitement, while female participants were more active.

(www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886918301521)

The researchers also debated whether it is more meaningful to study the size of personality differences by looking at one isolated feature at a time, or to consider all features at once. The latter approach tends to reveal larger differences. It's like if you only look at a person's eyes or nose, it's hard to tell if they are male or female, but it's easier to tell if they are male or female when you look at the whole face.

(personality-project.org/revelle/publications/eagly.revelle.21.pdf)

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p220131)

With ClearerThinking.org, a website that studies the psychology of happiness and decision-making, we hope to inform this discussion and help the public understand more about sex, gender, and personality. We conducted a series of 15 studies and analyzed more than 15,000 subjects in order to create the most comprehensive personality trait test to date.

Our analyses were limited to cisgender men and women because 98% of the participants in our sample identified with their biological sex at birth. Therefore, we did not have sufficient data to explore the personality traits of non-binary and transgender people. Although these groups are large, our research focused on cisgender men and women.

From the self-assessment data of the subjects, we found 18 specific personality traits that differ by gender. We then built an algorithm that aims to infer a person’s gender based on their self-assessment scores on these 18 traits, with an accuracy rate of 78%. This accuracy rate is not low, but it is far from perfect, which shows that it is difficult to determine a person’s gender based on a collection of personality traits.

Finally, we turned the research questionnaire into an online interactive assessment, where participants rated themselves on descriptions such as "I laugh very loudly" and "I often feel worried." Readers can try this test to see if the algorithm can accurately predict your gender.

(Test URL: programs.clearerthinking.org/gender_continuum_test.html#.Yg8fJvVBxb9)

To design the research questionnaire, we cast a wide net, looked at large personality research projects, consulted academic literature, and brainstormed. We eventually came up with more than 600 personality test questions to observe gender differences. Then we identified 18 personality traits that showed the greatest differences based on the sample results. These traits include not only general traits widely used in psychological research (such as extraversion and agreeableness), but also more specific thinking and behavior patterns (such as whether you take risks frequently or how much you care about aesthetics).

In the final test, we again obtained the same research results, which confirmed our conclusion that there were no significant differences between cisgender men and women in personality traits, and only showed small and limited differences in these 18 traits.

© The Establishment

The biggest difference we observed was in the level of sexual thoughts among cisgender people. Participants were asked to rate themselves based on questions such as whether they agreed with “I often have sexual thoughts when I meet someone attractive” or disagreed with “I don’t often think about sex.” (This “sexual focus” trait, while not a common primary personality trait in psychology, fits the idea that a personality trait corresponds to a pattern of thinking, feeling, or behavior, and is also related to the concept of sexual obsession.)

We found that 18% of the variance in sexual attention was attributable to gender. Men scored higher on average than women on this trait, but there were also a number of women who scored higher than most men. In other words, even though men tended to be different from women overall, there were also large individual differences between men and women. We also found that, on average, men self-reported more insensitive, risk-taking, and self-centered personalities, while women reported more selfless, compassionate, and peace-seeking personalities.

(www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224498909551510)

There was a lot of overlap between men and women for all traits. However, in the end, people's responses to the questions varied greatly, ranging from strongly agreeing to strongly disagreeing. For example, only a minority of men and women were low in empathy, but those who were very unsympathetic were more likely to be men. This conclusion is consistent with the finding that antisocial personality disorder is more common in men, that is, men are more likely to be unremorseful or lack empathy.

(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23544428/)

So, are there "male personalities" and "female personalities"? Interestingly, almost all of the subjects in our study were a mixture, with both "male common" and "female common" characteristics.

© WhatCulture.com

For any one characteristic, there is only a 61% chance that a female individual is closer to the average female population than to the average male population, and only a 57% chance that a male individual is closer to the average male population than to the average female population.

Only about 1% of men and 1% of women have personality traits that are almost entirely consistent with their gender. Because almost everyone is a mixture of the two, we call the personality test we created in our research a gender continuum test.

To test the accuracy of personality in predicting gender, we built a simple machine learning algorithm (a computer program that models data on the relationship between personality traits and cisgender men or cisgender women). We trained the algorithm using previous research results, and then applied it to new participants to see if personality traits could accurately predict gender. Using the most predictive trait, sexual concern, the algorithm correctly predicted gender 69% of the time. This result may seem impressive to some, but it is by no means perfect, as some women are more sexually concerned than the average man.

When we allowed the algorithm to include all personality differences at once, its accuracy improved to 78%. This is a welcome improvement, but it still left 22% of people with gender that it couldn’t correctly predict. When we released the test to the public, accuracy dropped again to 74%. Still, this is better than the average person’s prediction accuracy: when we asked a control group of people to predict gender from several sets of personality traits (each set of traits belonged to the same person), their accuracy was only 58%, not much better than flipping a coin.

We believe that our results provide new insights into the magnitude of gender differences in personality. However, there are some important facts to note. First, all of our participants were from the United States, and our conclusions cannot be generalized, given that factors such as culture can affect personality and gender self-identity. Second, our study cannot tell us the reasons for personality differences, such as the extent to which these differences can be explained by environment and culture in addition to biological reasons. Third, as mentioned earlier, due to sample limitations, we do not have enough data to study transgender, intersex, or non-binary people. We hope that future research will focus on these aspects, as well as other dimensions in discussions of personality, sex, and gender.

(www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115057)

At the same time, our research reminds us that, overall, cisgender men and women do have some minor or subtle personality differences, but almost all of them have both "male common" and "female common" traits. If you try to guess a person's personality based on his or her gender, you are likely to guess wrong.

Text/Spencer Greenberg, Holly Muir

Translated by Rachel

Proofreading/Amanda

original/

www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-of-us-combine-personality-traits-from-different-genders/

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Rachel on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan