Quote:
Originally Posted by
yachtie 
Neither of these posts are convincing. Nice snark on the second, must be taking lessons from Fuuma. Sorry a website "article" with no links to the "studies" and no recitation of the form of meta-analysis done to the data does not leave me (not would it leave anyone with a good basis in statistics)with any sense of certitude regarding the results. Please note that 40 studies need more than 13 cites. Point being none of your posts have answered my questions. Therefore, I'll have to assume that you don't have an answer. Best of luck.
As has been pointed out, the information on the website is drawn from an article by Janet Shibley Hyde called "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis". An article that appears to be held in high regard by people in the humanities. I actually read the whole thing yesterday, and it was quite an interesting read. My main problem with it is that some of the studies Hyde makes use of, in my eyes, seem too unreliable to draw any good conclusions from. E.g.:
In an important experiment, Lightdale and Prentice (1994) demonstrated the importance of gender roles and social context in creating or erasing the purportedly robust gender difference in aggression. Lightdale and Prentice used the technique of deindividuation to produce a situation that removed the influence of gender roles. Deindividuation refers to a state in which the person has lost his or her individual identity; that is, the person has become anonymous. Under such conditions, people should feel no obli-gation to conform to social norms such as gender roles. Half of the participants, who were college students, were assigned to an individuated condition by having them sit close to the experimenter, identify themselves by name, wear large name tags, and answer personal questions. Participants in the deindividuation condition sat far from the experimenter, wore no name tags, and were simply told to wait. All participants were also told that the experiment required information from only half of the participants, whose behavior would be monitored, and that the other half would remain anonymous. Participants then played an interactive video game in which they first defended and then attacked by dropping bombs. The number of bombs dropped was the measure of aggressive behavior. The results indicated that in the individuated condition, men dropped significantly more bombs (M = 31.1) than women did (M = 26.8). In the deindividuated condition, however, there were no significant gender differences and, in fact, women dropped somewhat more bombs (M = 41.1) than men (M = 36.8). In short, the significant gender difference in aggression disappeared when gender norms were removed.
(One of the questionable things about the study cited above is that nothing at all was made of the fact that all of its participants were Princeton undergrads. It seems to me that this would be a very strange sample of individuals from which to draw conclusions about the population at large.)
