All things considered, I was expecting there to be much higher gap between genders and ages.
At only one point is there more than a 10% difference. In my experience men and women claim entirely different wants and needs.
The differences between men and women are usually not as dramatic as standup comedy and television make them out to be. The differences aren't dramatic, but they are statistically significant.
Or any other social institution for that matter: religion, newspapers, families, schools, sports, &c. Social institutions are fundamental or at the very least complicit in the legitimization of the social mechanisms of typification. That is to say, licensing the idea and practice that individual behavior can be simplified to types.
We all know the dangers of using oversimplified models in other contexts, but the same applies here and happens to be one of the largest generators of present conflict. It's a classic map-territory problem applied to people themselves and - whether the map makers know this or not - those who control the maps can sometimes also control the territory.
It's a meta-study based on already "summed-up" attributes, so at least two levels of information loss. And it's hardly qualitative. It can easily say, "both want X", but not touch at all "how" they express this want, or how they perceive X.
Yes, giving identical labels to very different phenomena is a big problem in this kind of survey-based approach.
On Maggie McNeill's blog, one post touched on the idea that women want sex to last longer. She pointed out that women do frequently say this, but what they mean is that they want foreplay to last longer.
In my experience men and women's emotional levels aren't very different but how they respond to those emotions can be different because cultural context must also be navigated. In America it isn't manly to express a deep craving for cuddles, but every heterosexual woman I've met have been surprised by how touch-needy men end up being.
Basically this just tells me that people lie on personality tests, or they interpret questions differently. Behaviorism is the only science in psychology. Question answering should be considered a behavior, and not a reflection of internal characteristics. In that light, you essentially have, among men mostly, a behavior, direct presentation of mating intentions, which has been consistently punished, and the opposite behavior, reflection of female mating desires, which has been inconsistently rewarded. The result is either duplicity or avoidance. It seems that the reverse phenomenon may occur for expectations later in the relationship, as evidenced by females initiating 90% of divorces among college-educated women.
sofard|3 years ago
kelseyfrog|3 years ago
We all know the dangers of using oversimplified models in other contexts, but the same applies here and happens to be one of the largest generators of present conflict. It's a classic map-territory problem applied to people themselves and - whether the map makers know this or not - those who control the maps can sometimes also control the territory.
1auralynn|3 years ago
coldtea|3 years ago
thaumasiotes|3 years ago
Yes, giving identical labels to very different phenomena is a big problem in this kind of survey-based approach.
On Maggie McNeill's blog, one post touched on the idea that women want sex to last longer. She pointed out that women do frequently say this, but what they mean is that they want foreplay to last longer.
PuppyTailWags|3 years ago
jl2718|3 years ago
Basically this just tells me that people lie on personality tests, or they interpret questions differently. Behaviorism is the only science in psychology. Question answering should be considered a behavior, and not a reflection of internal characteristics. In that light, you essentially have, among men mostly, a behavior, direct presentation of mating intentions, which has been consistently punished, and the opposite behavior, reflection of female mating desires, which has been inconsistently rewarded. The result is either duplicity or avoidance. It seems that the reverse phenomenon may occur for expectations later in the relationship, as evidenced by females initiating 90% of divorces among college-educated women.
PuppyTailWags|3 years ago