2020-03-23 19:37:06
Science tells us that men and women differ markedly in some important aspects of personality, which is not to say that all men are the same, nor are all women.
An average human being is able to predict with 95% accuracy whether a face belongs to a man or a woman. In other words, the average differences between the faces of men and women are so important that simply by looking at a naked face, we humans can determine with that level of precision the sex of the owner of that face.
The question that now opens is whether at least scientific experts in psychology, developing certain measurement instruments based on questionnaires and tests, could determine the different dimensions of the various traits that define human personality. Among these traits we can mention assertiveness, meticulousness, sympathy, emotionality, neuroticism, etc. Each of these traits has a dimension, a value.
Combining the dimensions of various traits, be they physical or psychological (from light to intense), scientists have defined a metric value that they have called D. This value gives an idea of how different two groups are from each other, either in the physical dimensions of the different facial features, or in the psychological dimensions of the different personality traits. This metric value also makes it possible to take into account how the different personality traits are related to each other in the general population, since, like facial features, personality traits can take on values that depend on each other. Just as it is unlikely to have a wide face and a narrow mouth, certain personality traits can also be more or less compatible with each other.
Recently, four scientific studies have used the determination of the value of D to try to verify if there are clear differences in personality between men and women, studying thousands of people of each sex. All four studies have reached the same conclusion: that there are important differences. The differences are, in fact, so remarkable that knowing only the value of D calculated for a person can predict with 85% accuracy whether this is a man or a woman. It is not as high a precision as the one that can be achieved by analyzing a face, but it is a precision high enough to be able to conclude without much doubt that men and women, on average, differ significantly in their personality traits, as well as they differ in the features of their faces.
Referencia: Scott Barry Kaufman. Taking sex differences in personality seriously. Scientific American Mind. Marzo-abril 2020. Pp 19.
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