andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1114 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. . . . We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES [effect size], the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men a
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1 Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. [sent-1, score-0.53]
2 We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. [sent-3, score-1.28]
3 Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species,” said study researcher Paul Irwing, of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom. [sent-11, score-0.505]
4 The new findings may explain why some careers are dominated by men (such as engineering) and others by women (such as psychological sciences), Irwing said. [sent-12, score-0.496]
5 It’s too bad that men and women are almost a different species. [sent-14, score-0.505]
6 ) In this particular case, any observed differences between men and women can be explained in any number of ways so I see the connection to evolution as being pretty weak. [sent-21, score-0.766]
7 ) If you pick the dimensions in which men and women differ the most, you can find a large separation. [sent-25, score-0.751]
8 It makes a lot of sense to look at differences in many dimensions in addition to studying distributions for single measurements or traits. [sent-27, score-0.733]
9 From my subjective judgment, there certainly appear to be some traits and behaviors for which men are much different from women, and of course there are big statistical differences in crime rates and in some opinion items. [sent-29, score-0.885]
10 OK, so what about that idea that the distributions of men and women overlap by only 10%? [sent-32, score-0.935]
11 What they have shown is that, if one takes a large enough set of personality measures and then takes a linear combination to maximize gender differences, one can get a pretty big gender difference. [sent-39, score-0.877]
12 As an example, Feingold’s meta-analysis found gender differences in anxiety ranging in magnitude between d = -. [sent-47, score-0.593]
13 In a meta-analysis of research on gender differences in temperament – some of it based on parent or other adult report, some of it based on behavioral measures – the effect size for the gender difference in fear was d = -0. [sent-54, score-1.144]
14 Too much of the research on gender differences has relied on subjective self-reports, when objective, behavioral measures may show much different results. [sent-62, score-0.931]
15 As Hyde says, the mathematics of multivariate distributions are such that if you have two different distributions, as you go into high dimensions the overlap goes down. [sent-66, score-0.854]
16 Consider the following simple example in d dimensions with two distributions, x (the continuous personality traits for the population of women) and y (for men). [sent-68, score-0.5]
17 The distributions live in d dimensions and are separated by “a” in each dimension, thus the distance between their centers is a*sqrt(d)—think of the distance between opposite vertices of a d-dimensional cube. [sent-73, score-0.765]
18 I’m very supportive of work connecting personality to political attitudes, and if I think there can be big differences betweeen Democrats and Republicans, then it certainly seems plausible that there are big differences between men and women. [sent-94, score-1.271]
19 If, as I expect, the average differences between men and women are much larger than the differences between those other groups, this would strengthen the published findings. [sent-95, score-1.189]
20 If the distributions are identical, the overlap is 100%, if they are far apart, the overlap is near 0. [sent-109, score-0.77]
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