Everyday Mind Reading

Where Is Women's Intuition?

Dr. William Ickes — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:46:10 +0000

When my colleagues and I began doing research on empathic accuracy (everyday mind reading) about 20 years ago, we expected to find that women would be more accurate than men at inferring the specific content of other people's thoughts and feelings. This expectation was based on the cultural stereotype of "women's intuition."

Surprisingly, however, when we tested for evidence of this expected gender difference, we kept failing to find any support for it. In seven straight studies, the average empathic accuracy score of our female participants was not significantly different from the average score of our male participants.

So where was the evidence for the presumed superiority of "women's intuition"? We didn't find it in a study of the initial interactions of opposite-sex strangers. We didn't find it in a study of the initial interactions of same-sex (female-female versus male-male) strangers. We didn't find it in a study of all-male groups versus all-female groups. And it failed to appear regardless of whether the study had been conducted in Texas, in North Carolina, or in New Zealand.

But just when we had begun to conclude that the stereotype of "women's intuition" was a cultural myth, a very strange thing happened. In the next three studies that we conducted in our lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, we found a significant gender difference favoring the female perceivers. Seven studies in a row with no gender difference, and now three studies showing a difference. What was going on here?

When my graduate student colleague, Tiffany Graham, compared the methods of all 10 studies to see if she could find a change in the procedure that might help us understand what was going on, it took her less than a day to find the answer. In the first seven studies, it wasn't clear to the participants that their empathic ability was being assessed. However, in the last three studies, we had changed the procedure. Each time the participant had written down their inference about what the other person was thinking or feeling at a designated point in the interaction, we then asked the participant to rate how accurate they thought their empathic inference was. In retrospect, it seemed likely that the effect of asking them to rate the accuracy of their empathic inferences was to make clear to them that we were measuring their empathic ability--an ability at which women (according to the women's intuition stereotype) are supposed to excel.

To check the plausibility of this interpretation, we conducted a new study using the "old" procedure, and the gender difference again failed to appear. We then conducted another new study using the "new" procedure (the one requiring self-ratings of empathic accuracy) and the significant gender difference re-appeared. Aha! We could "turn off" the gender difference by removing the cue that signalled that this was an empathic ability task, and we could "turn on" the same difference by restoring that cue.

This pattern of results suggested to us that although the average woman doesn't have more empathic ability than the average man, we could create a heightened level of motivation in the women by reminding them that the task was one in which women should excel. When we re-analyzed our findings with this hypothesis in mind, we found strong evidence that the gender difference we had occasionally observed was indeed based on differential motivation rather than differential ability. Women, on average, don't have greater empathic ability than men, but they do try harder to live up to their stereotype in situations in which they are reminded of it.

At this point, two creative researchers at the University of Oregon, Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges, decided to conduct a study in which they would cue both men and women that they were working on an empathy-related task. However, to see if they could bring men's motivation up to the level of the women's in the study, they paid the participants in one condition of their study to be as empathically accurate as possible!

What did they find? In the condition where no payment was offered but the participants were reminded that they were working on an empathy-relevant task, the women did significantly better than the men (just as my colleagues and I had found when we provided the participants with a similar cue). However, when the same reminder was given but the participants were also paid to be as accurate as possible, the men's performance matched that of the women, suggesting that Klein and Hodges had found an incentive (money) that would motivate men as strongly as the women's intuition stereotype was able to motivate the women.

As Klein and Hodges concluded at the end of the article reporting their research, men as a group aren't poor "everyday mind readers"; they are simply unmotivated ones. If you want men to show you how well they can compete with women in "reading" other people's minds, just pay them for it!

For a more complete account of this research, see Chapter 6 of Everyday Mind Reading, by William Ickes (Prometheus Books, 2003).

The Man Who Measured Mind Reading

Dr. William Ickes — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:21:39 +0000

I must have been about 11 or 12 years old when I first heard about the field of psychology. Living in a small Iowa town just west of Des Moines, I was an expert on comic books and Mad Magazine in those days and not much else.

Hearing that the field of psychology was concerned with "the study of the mind," I immediately (and erroneously) jumped to the conclusion that most psychologists spent their time either reading other people's minds or trying to figure out how to read other people's minds. I thought that some day, when comic books, satire, and science fiction (my newest enthusiasm) had begun to lose their appeal, I might look into this psychological study of mind reading.

Flash forward to my college years. I completed the hours for my English major in just over two years, and realized on the way to class one day that I was starting to find it boring. On the other hand, I liked the fact that my minor area, psychology, was so reliably open-ended and lacking in closure. Every time you did a study in the attempt to answer a question, the data opened up new and interesting questions that you hadn't considered before. Some people would find that frustrating; I liked it. I understood that if I developed a research career in psychology, I would probably never be bored.

About a year after completing my Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, I decided to study the initial interactions of pairs of strangers (for a more complete account of this period in my iife, see Chapters 2 and 3 in my 2003 book, Everyday Mind Reading). After spending about 10 years studying how people's personality traits and characteristics affect their initial, unstructured interactions, I figured out a way to measure how accurately the new acquaintances could infer each other's thoughts and feelings. And, with this discovery, the study of empathic accuracy ("everyday mind reading") was born.

Here's how we do it. We bring the strangers together for the first time outside our social interaction lab. At this point, they realize that they will be participating in the study together. Without introducing them to each other, the experimenter escorts them into a lab room that looks a lot like a waiting room. The strangers are seated together on a couch, and are asked to wait a few minutes while the experimenter runs a quick errand. By the time the experimenter returns (6 minutes later), we have unobtrusively captured the new acquaintances' initial interaction on audiotape and videotape, using a concealed camera and microphone.

Of course, in order to use the tapes as data, we have to obtain the participants' permission. So we explain the reason for not telling them about the taping in advance (they wouldn't have interacted as naturally with each other if they had known), and then asked them to sign a release form letting use use the tape of their interaction as a data source. If they both agree, fine. If either or both says no, that's okay too; we simply erase the tape on the spot.

If they both agree to release the tape and participate in the next phase of the study (another consent form), they are seated in separate cubicles. A large TV monitor faces into their cubicle (it's on the other side of a window between the cubicle and our control room). By using a start/pause control that is connected to a VCR, they can each view a separate copy of the videotaped interaction in which they both just participated.

Their first task is to start the videotape, let it play until the first point at which they distinctly remembered having had a particular thought or feeling, and then pause the tape to write the content of that thought or feeling (in sentence form) on a standard thought/feeling reporting form. They then start the tape again, stop it to write down the next thought or feeling they had, and continue doing this until they have each completed a listing of all of the thoughts and feelings they had during their interaction together.

Their next task is to try to "read" each other's minds. We explain that they will now see the videotape of their interaction again, but this time we will pause it for them at each of those points when the other person (the interaction partner) reported having a thought or a feeling. Their job, at each of these "tape stops," is to try to infer the specific content of the thought or feeling that their interaction partner reported and to write it down (again, in sentence form) on a standard thought/feeling inference form.

By the end of the experimental session, we have lists of each acquaintance's actual thoughts and feelings and lists of the inferred thoughts and feelings they thought their interaction partner had reported. We then ask trained raters to compare the content of each actual thought or feeling with the content inferred by the interaction partner and rate the accuracy with which the interaction partner was able to infer the content of the actual thought or feeling. An aggregated (combined) measure of these individual accuracy scores gives us an overall index of empathic accuracy. It's a direct measure of how well one interaction partner was able to "read" the other interaction partner's mind.

My colleagues and I have been doing empathic accuracy research for about 20 years now, and I'll tell you about the the results of that research in future blogs. In the meantime, I think it's both amusing and ironic how my erroneous childhood assumption about what psychologists study (minds and how to "read" them) eventually led me to devote the largest part of my research career to the study of "everyday mind reading." There is perhaps less distance than there once seemed to be between the boy who speculated about mind reading and the man who measured it.