Women across the world are better than men at assessing thoughts or feelings by reading the eyes, according to a study that researchers say establishes for the first time the advantage females enjoy in “cognitive empathy”.
The study covered 57 countries, including India. The researchers found that women across all ages and in most countries, on average, score higher than men on a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes”. The test measures cognitive empathy -- the ability of an individual to understand the emotions or the feelings of others.
Cognitive empathy, a subject of psychology research for decades, emerges in early childhood — children can typically understand the mental states of goals and desires in others in their second year of life — and persists into old age.
“It is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes — to understand what someone else is thinking and feeling,” said David Greenberg, a research scholar at the department of psychiatry, University of Cambridge, and the study’s lead author.
Several studies past too showed women scoring higher than men on tests designed to measure cognitive empathy. One of these is the eyes test in which respondents are shown 36 pictures of the region of a human face around the eye and asked to describe what the person is feeling. But most earlier studies were limited to small samples of people and confined to specific countries.
Greenberg and his collaborators in Israel, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the US have conducted the largest study yet, involving over 305,700 participants, and found that women, on average, scored significantly higher than men in 36 countries and similar to men in 21 countries.
The test involved looking at pictures of a set of 36 eyes and assigning to each one of four specific emotions or feelings: arrogant/ grateful/ sarcastic/ tentative (uncertain)/ decisive/ amused/ aghast/ bored. In no country did men, on average, score significantly higher than women.
“Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon that females are on average more empathic than males is present in countries across the globe,” said Greenberg. The study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a US research journal, on Monday.
“It is only with large data sets that we can say this with confidence,” Greenberg said. The study has also corroborated the female advantage in cognitive empathy across different ages, from 16 years to 70 years.
The researchers have cautioned that studies of on-average sex differences say nothing about an individual’s mind or aptitude since individuals may be typical or atypical for their sex.
“The test reveals that many individuals struggle to read facial expressions for a variety of reasons,” said Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research centre at the University of Cambridge and the new study’s senior author.
Scientists had earlier speculated that the sex difference in cognitive empathy may be the result of biological or social factors. For instance, in a first ever study in 2011, Baron-Cohen and colleagues had shown that extra testosterone reduces empathy.
Carrie Allison, another team member at the University of Cambridge, said the new results clearly demonstrated the sex difference across countries, languages and ages.
“This raises questions for future research on the social or biological factors that may contribute to these observations,” she said.
