| Knowing me, knowing you ... AHA! ABBA or Alan Partridge? |
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It has become normal to say that men are from Mars and that women are from Venus. This was based on various studies done over the years which seemed to show differences in the way things were looked at and thought about as between the sexes. It also seemed to be common sense to many people. A metastudy has now been carried out however which, as a result of its review of all these separate studies, puts a different perspective on the situation. It turns out that although there are differences, they are very small as compared to the variation which already exists within each of the genders. Indeed, rather than men being from Mars and women from Venus, it is would be nearer the truth to say that men are from Chipping Norton and women are from Chipping Campden, the difference is so small. Having said that, there is recent research which tells us that women are better at correctly identifying moods from photographs of strangers' faces than men are. Recognising whether someone-else is happy, sad, angry or upset is a pre-requisite for empathising with him. If you do not know what other people are thinking, you cannot begin to feel their feelings. We are not often called upon to make purely rational decisions - those without any emotional context for the person deciding - such as a when a judge has to come to a view as to whether tax is due, having regard to the actual wording of the relevant Finance Act. Normally we are trying to decide how best to implement our wants and wishes. Our emotions, need to eat etc. give us a framework for what we want to achieve and we use our reason simply to determine how best to achieve it. So our decisions, whilst rational, are made in order to give effect to our desires. In the absence of those desires, we would have no decisions rational or otherwise to make. And so perhaps this is why we often find it difficult to understand each other's decisions. We do not necessarily feel the same emotions or not with the same intensity and so would ourselves have made a different ‘rational' decision in apparently the same circumstances. Add to this then the likelihood that a women will understand what someone-else is feeling more easily than a man and the probability of mutual incomprehension increases. Men will see women as acting ‘irrationally'. Of course they are not - well no more often than the average man anyway. They are making rational decisions as to how to achieve their emotional aims, but in a world which they perceive in a slightly different way to the men around them. So maybe only the female half of ABBA could truthfully have sung ‘Knowing me, knowing you...'. But, its use as a theme by ‘Alan Partridge' as a sociopathic Michael Parkinson was inspired, even if perhaps a little too close to the truth for men generally... AHA! |