well this is lecture 6 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
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 that Big Five was a
pretty ugly theory when I first came
across it it wasn't one that I warmed up
too quickly I would say it probably took
between five and ten 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 neuro psychology there was no
neurobiology there was no real theory
there was no developmental theory it was
just lexical description and so it was
kind of was call so 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 five to ten
year period - 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 and also
more credible but but but that actually
that actually had certain benefits its
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's supported and I really
don't believe that the people who
develop the big5 theory were very much
affected by that I mean there are people
who built their reputation on this
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
that 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 can 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 the difference is roughly this if
you picked a random man and a random
woman out of the crowd and you said
who's more aggressive and you bet on the
woman you'd be right 40 percent of the
time which is actually quite a lot of
the time so there's more overlap between
men and women and 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 it's that's not
exactly right but it's close enough you
get a flavor for it with 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
trait 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% and 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 and 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