differenceblog, posts by tag: interaction - LiveJournal

"Did you Hear?"(9/18/2006) looked at gossip as a form of aggression, barely scratching the surface of positive news shared between friends. In a column also called "Did you hear?" (5/11/2007), Gail Rosenblum of the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune looks at research into the truly neutral nature of gossip, neutral in content and in gender. A survey commissioned by BT Cellnet in 2001 and conducted by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC, see undated report by Kate Fox) concluded that men gossip as much as women, although they are more apt to deny it. However, the definition used for gossip by the SIRC study is "chatty talk between friends", which makes it unsurprising that the study founf gossip to be the most popular use of mobile phones. However a secondary definition provided more depth: "the process of informally communicating value-laden information about members of a social setting."

The findings of the SIRC study are contrary to Levin and Arluke's (1985) finding that men spend less time gossiping than women, although Rosenblum's article quotes Levin in a way that suggests he may have adjusted his view since writing his book, Gossip: The Inside Scoop, 20 years ago. Baumeister et al (2004) proposes that gossip is a critical method of observational teaching for socialization, which he suggests is why people will gossip about strangers.

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I have been thinking about gossip a lot lately, since I have been making a greater effort to avoid it. Gossip is one of the things that has always turned me off of the idea of belonging to a community. I've actively avoided, in the past, having my friends know each other because the "did you hear about..." talk made me so uncomfortable. However, I've been thinking about it a lot in terms of the poly community lately, and it's felt like a really necessary safeguard in situations where normative behavioral "rules" are discarded. Without the gossip to warn me that so-and-so has a history of dragging people into her baggage, or that whats-his-face doesn't always use condoms, I think the already burdensome level of negotiations would become unworkable.

Keltner et al (1998) hypothesized that women would have more negative emotions associated with teasing than men, whether they were the aggressor or the target. While they tested this hypothesis only within heterosexual, college-aged romantic relationships, they did find support for this hypothesis, and also found that women were more upset by being teased by their partner than by teasing him. Keltner et al's 2001 meta-analysis suggests that the claim that friendly teasing is more prevalent among males is not supported.

Wirth and Schultheiss (2006) found that high-testosterone (for their sex group) people of both genders learned patterns more easily when associated with an "angry" face, leading to the conclusion that a fleeting "angry" expression is rewarding to these individuals. "Perhaps teasers are reinforced by that fleeting annoyed look on someone else’s face and therefore will continue to heckle that person to get that look again and again. As long as it does not stay there for long, it’s not perceived as a threat, but as a reward.” Schultheiss said in a University of Michigan press release.

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The difference in teasing -- and in accepting teasing without getting upset -- is one of the gender stereotypes that gets brought to my attention most often, and my experience has certainly played out that way. However, I feel that using romantically involved couples was a major weakness in Keltner's 1998 study. People react very differently to teasing from their partner than from a friend of any gender. However, I do think this is one of the areas in which individual differences far outweigh any gender patterns.

Who holds women back in the workplace more: men or women? Judith Sills' column (2006) in Psychology Today claims that women often feel their "worst enemy" in the workplace is another woman; Sills calls it "a common survey finding" and offers advice on how to deal with workplace competition between women. Garcia-Retamero and López-Zafra (2006) found more discrimination against women leaders from women than from men, although blogger Robert May at Business Pundit complains about the lack of "solid evidence" in this study.

Ramit Mizrahi's (2004) note in the Yale Law Journal asserts that female-on-female harassment is not only common, but does qualify as sex-based discrimination under the Civil Rights Act (see also Mizrahi, 2004). However, Berkley and Watt's (2006) review suggests that same-sex workplace harrassment is not covered under current statutes, and that further action is necessary to protect GLBT employees (admittedly a separate issue).

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I've heard many women complain about the pressure to join the old-boy's-network to gain acceptance in the workplace. When I was working as a female, I certainly wanted to be associated with the males I worked with more than the females, but I'm hardly good example in this circumstance. Working as a man, in a mostly female department, I've felt perhaps too supported by my bosses, and I sometimes worry that my progress may have more to do with my presenting gender than with the quality of my work.

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men. Levesque et al also found that masculine women tended to sexualize opposite-sex interactions more than feminine women, but there were no differences between "masculine" and "feminine" men (rated using the BSRI).

Levesque et al did not provide the ages or recruitment methods of their participants, nor was I able to find this information about Abbey and Melby's experiments, although later studies by Abbey (e.g. 1987, 1995) use college student samples. Also, no studies seem to have been done to assess the level of sexual intent inferred by gay men and lesbians in same or opposite sex pairings.

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In my experience, men assume no one is hitting on them, and women assume everyone is hitting on them. Obviously, this is an oversimplification. I've known and dated guys who were supremely arrogant and women who were painfully self-conscious. However, I still found that the arrogance in men tended to translate to thinking they would get a positive response to flirtation, and the self-deprecating women assumed that the flirtation was non-serious, or sexual only. It's a self-fulfilling observation in my case. I tend to assume that no one is flirting with me because they see me as male, and wonder if they're seeing me as something else if they make their intentions known.

"Everyone knows" that men are either bad at intimacy (e.g. AZ Republic 2005), or define intimacy so much differently than women that it's not even the same concept (Elmore 2004). Salas and Ketzenberger (2004) found significant gender differences on average self-reported intimacy in same-sex relationships, but not in romantic relationships. Fehr (2004) found that men and women agree on the prototypical patterns that indicate intimacy (such as emotional support and self-disclosure) but women seem to place more importance on these factors than men do. Roy et al (2000) found equal levels of trust in men's and women's same-sex friendships, but found that women rated the importance of spending transitional periods together higher (both positive and negative events). Very few studies look at opposite-sex friendships, but Reeder (2003) gender role (masculinity or femininity) affects friend-gender-preference, but that this has no effect on friendship closeness.

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My partner notes that we have ended up with a largely male circle of friends lately. He has traditionally had more female friends than male friends. Strangely, I feel like I have more female friends than ever, but note that we don't actually spend much time in person together - we "hang out" online. In person, the guys show up more. I have theorized that this is because the two main social event types we hold are "game nights" and sports viewing, but I have yet to explain why women don't more consistently attend game nights.

Gualdagno and Cialdini (2007) examined persuasive techniques on counter-attitudinal topics. While they found that both men and women were more easily swayed by people they believed to be like themselves, men were more likely to be persuaded via e-mail, and women responded better to face-to-face interaction. This effect was especially pronounced when the persuader was considered "unlike" the subject.

Stern and Mullinix (2004) examined the persuasiveness of human vs. computer-generated speech. While they found that women were more persuaded than men in general, and that human speech was more persuasive than computer-generated speech in general, there was no gender-by-modality effect. Audio vs. video presentation seemed to have no effect.

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Who among us hasn't gotten a computer to swear? It seems to be a truism of human nature that if you sit someone down in front of a speech-generating-computer, the first thing they'll do is try to get it to curse, sometimes at length (stupid Speak & Spell, and its curse filters). The swearing computer never fails to amuse, perhaps because the computer has no meaning, no emotional tone behind its words. The removal of emotional tone may explain part of why men are more easily convinced by email, and why women are not. Gualdagno and Cialdini used same-sex confederates in their experiments on persuasion; I would be interested to see whether there was an opposite-sex effect.

In fairness, I should admit that I am fairly easy to persuade, but I could probably be talked out of that.

Robin Hanson in Overcoming Bias discusses gender differences in complaining: "the politically correct theory, that women have worse lives, seems both wrong and biased." Kowalski's 1996 review of complaining suggests that Hanson is correct in observing that women complain more. However, it is suggested both speaker's and listener's impression of a statement as a "complaint" may vary according to gender. Kowalski (2002) also examines the positive aspects of complaining. Hanson's assertion that "women complain more [than men]" may have some truth to it.

Most of the study of complaining has involved married couples -- opposite-sex interaction. (Hanson's observations seem to focus more on same-sex interaction.) Fishman (1978) suggested that "women do more conversational work" than men. Stets and Burke (1996) also analyzed tapes of married couples, and found that the women used more negative strategies than the men. Flora and Segrin (2000) found that in married couples, complaining from wives had a greater negative effect on couple satisfaction than complaining from husbands. In fact, the correlations found by Flora and Segrin suggested that the lower wife-talk was, the higher satisfaction was.

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Before I started writing this blog, I probably would have agreed with Robin Hanson that women didn't have worse lives than men. Not only was I exceptionally lucky when I was living as a woman, but I tend to assume that any hardship is easier on me than it would be on someone else -- a particularly insidious piece of egotism. However, after the reading I've done for the eighty (wow!) posts I've written here, I have to conclude that: actually, women do have it harder. Women have more medical problems and receive worse care, they receive less pay for the same work, they do the bulk of both child-rearing and housework, and have less free time than men, which they receive less satisfaction from. So I ask: exactly where do men have it worse?