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  • This is a lecture six and it's on sex differences in personality.

  • And so the first thing that you should be aware of this is the reason I put it in after neuroticism and agreeableness is that the biggest differences in temperament personality between men and women are in agreeableness and neuroticism, and that seems to be true.

  • Cross culturally.

  • And so because, you know, one of the things you want to know is so Look, look, what's happened is that psychologists have established a relatively a theoretical model of personality, and I don't believe that there was any bias built into it.

  • Or or at least that the biased was minimized by the method because the method was asked people as many questions as you possibly can and use statistical methods by multiple teams to sort out the relationships between the answers.

  • And, you know, I thought the Big Five was a pretty ugly theory When I first came across.

  • It wasn't one that I warmed up too quickly.

  • I would say it probably took between five and 10 years before I was convinced by the brute power of the analysis that it had to be taken seriously and as that happened, because the theory was first laid out only linguistically and statistically, there was no neuropsychology.

  • There was no neurobiology.

  • There was no real theory.

  • There was no developmental theory.

  • It was just lexical description.

  • So it's kind of was Consul.

  • It was like a theory in search of a place to exist as well.

  • Because, of course, before it was established, we didn't know what it was also capable of predicting and that all got built up around that, say, 5 to 10 year period, too.

  • And it became more as we started to understand the relationship between the descriptors and the underlying biology.

  • Then the theory became richer and more useful in also more credible.

  • But, um, but but that actually that actually had certain benefits.

  • It's lack of initial theoretical attractiveness because it also mitigated against bias.

  • You know, because if you find a theory attractive for whatever reason, then you're more likely to maybe be biased in favor of evidence that support it.

  • And I really don't believe that the people who developed the Big Five Theory we're very much affected by that.

  • I mean, there are people who built their reputation on the theory.

  • And, of course, they would be biased in favor of pushing their career forward.

  • But peer review, when it's done properly, keeps that nicely under control.

  • And then the fact that multiple different methods have converged on the same model and that there's pretty good evidence that it remains, you know, reasonably stable cross culturally.

  • And then it's associated with the child developmental literature.

  • That's all power.

  • Pretty powerful convergent evidence.

  • And and so well, once you have the theory laid out, you can start to use it to ask and answer interesting questions like, Well, are there differences between men and women?

  • That'd be the first pretty simple question, and the next question would be, if there are differences, well, then why did those differences exist?

  • But you don't have to get to that.

  • To begin with.

  • You could just start with.

  • Are there differences?

  • And the answer is yes.

  • There are differences and I'll tell you what they are, what we know so far.

  • So by far the biggest differences are in extraversion or agreeableness and neuroticism, and the biggest difference is actually in agreeableness.

  • And so the the difference is roughly this.

  • If you picked a random man and random woman out of the crowd, and you said, Who's more aggressive?

  • And you bet on the woman you'd be right 40% of the time, which is actually quite a lot of the time.

  • So there's more overlap between men and women than there are differences, even in the dimensions where the differences are the most pronounced.

  • And then if you took a man and a woman out of a crowd and you asked who feel negative emotion and you bet on the woman, you'd be right about 60% of the time, and so it's it's that's not exactly right, but it's close enough.

  • You get a flavor for it with that with that degree of estimation.

  • And so the first thing you note and this is the first thing to note from the comparisons of Men and Women is that men and women are more alike than they are different, especially at each trade level.

  • We did analysis with the Big Five.

  • I never published this, but I tried to come up with a set of questions that would maximally differentiate men and women.

  • So if you didn't know who had done the answering.

  • Could you predict by the pattern of answers?

  • And if I took the most, if I took the questions that most differentiated, the best I could ever do was about 75% classification accuracy.

  • And that's probably a bit of an overestimation, because the statistical technique I used was predicated on the fact that we already knew which men in which women had answered these questions and so capitalized to some degree on chance.

  • So my guess is that that if you use personality testing and it was optimal, you could probably get about 70% accuracy and classification, maybe 65%.

  • Something like that.

  • And you know, that's that's not bad, but it's not.

  • It's not enough to think of men and women as fundamentally different.

This is a lecture six and it's on sex differences in personality.

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