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It doesn’t matter where in the world they live, whatever their cultural or family influences: in general, women identify with others better than men, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, said the study is the largest of its kind to date looking at a particular form of empathy – what scientists call a ‘theory of mind’ or “cognitive empathy”.
Empathy is an important quality because it governs how people interact socially and affects how their personal relationships develop.
Cognitive empathy occurs when a person is intellectually able to understand what someone else might be thinking or feeling, and they are even able to use this knowledge to predict how the person will act or feel at the time. coming. So if, say, a person tells you they had a bad time with their family over the holidays, a person with cognitive empathy will understand how that bad time makes the person feel by intellectually putting themselves in that person’s shoes. another person, so talk.
It’s different from another type of empathy called affective – or emotional – empathy, where a person senses another person’s emotions and responds with an appropriate reaction or emotion. For example, if someone is crying about a broken relationship, a person with emotional empathy will also begin to feel sad and feel compassion for that person as a result.
There are an exam on the University of Cambridge website which tests both forms of empathy. To conduct this new study, the researchers used a different test something called the “Eye-to-Eye Mind Reading Test”, or the “Eye Test” for short. It helps measure a person’s ability to recognize another person’s mental state or emotions.
The test asks participants to look at pictures of the area around a person’s eyes. The person makes a particular type of facial expression, and the study participant must identify what that person is thinking or feeling from a set of possibilities. Scientists often use this test to help determine if someone has mental or cognitive problems. Previous research has shown that people with autism, for example, often score lower on these tests; people with dementiaand people with eating disordersamong others.
To see if cultural differences impacted empathy scores, data was collected from teams around the world. The study authors worked at Cambridge University and Harvard University in the United States, Bar-Ilan University and the University of Haifa in Israel, and in Italy in the United States. ‘IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. By merging their results with large samples from different online platforms, the study authors were able to capture the results of nearly 306,000 people in 57 countries, including Argentina, Croatia, Egypt, India , Japan and Norway.
Across 36 countries, women averaged significantly higher cognitive empathy scores than men. In 21 countries, scores for women and men were similar. There was not a single country in which men performed better, on average, than women. The results were retained in eight languages and were consistent across the lifespan of people aged 16 to 70.
Scientists observed what author David M. Greenberg called a “slight decline” in cognitive empathy as people aged.
“This slight drop in empathy raises questions about the contributing factors that are at play,” she said. Greenbergpsychologist and researcher at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Cambridge.
The study could not determine why this decline is occurring. Greenberg said it could be partly biological; maybe there are hormonal changes happening in the body, or it could also have a social or environmental impact.
The study also couldn’t explain why women had so much more cognitive empathy than men, nor could the study talk about individual differences between participants.
The study is based on previous research who came to the same conclusion: that women have higher cognitive empathy scores than men.
In some of those previous studiesgender differences in empathy were sometimes attributed to biological and social factors.
Some studies in animals and in infants also show this sex difference in empathy. There may be different genetic pathways underlying the development of this type of empathy in different genders.
Understanding gender differences in empathy could help researchers better understand why certain mental health conditions affect men more than women. This latest study could also help scientists develop better support for people who may have trouble reading facial expressions, the researchers said.
“This study clearly demonstrates a broadly consistent gender difference across countries, languages and ages,” study co-author Carrie Allison, who is the director applied research at the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre, said in a press release. “This raises new questions for future research into the social and biological factors that may contribute to the observed mean sex difference in cognitive empathy.”
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