Blame somebody else

Listening to CBC radio's Quirks & Quarks show the other day, Steven Heine of UBC's social psychology dept was speaking about a recently published study of his investigating whether there truly is a sex difference between male's & female's math abilities.

The observation is that men generally do better than women in math, and science related fields. The question is whether that difference is a result of some sex differences (for some reason(s) the male brain is better equipped to solve math problems than the female's) or whether it's due to women being socialized to do poorly with math.

Heine took two groups of women, and had them read one of two articles before writing a difficult math test. Both articles were fabricated for the experiment, but were presented to the women as real. The first told the women that females performed worse on math tests because there is a gene on the Y chromosome (which men have and women do not) responsible for improved math performance. The other article told them that their historically reduced performance was due to social mechanisms holding women back. On average, the women that read the second article got twice as many questions correct on the math test written immediately afterwards.

This result doesn't rule out the idea that there is some sex difference in math performance, but it clearly indicates at least that there is a social component as well.

This reminds me of a particular model in Sport Psychology, in which attributing failure to some extrinsic factor results in greater future success than attributing a failure to an intrinsic factor. Regardless of whether there is a sex difference of not, women's performance on math tests will be best if they believe that their ability is high. And given a poor performance on one test, they will perform better on future tests if they attribute that failure to something outside themselves, like the professor, or social mechanisms, than if they attribute it to themselves, by saying "I'm just not good at math" or "my sex limits my math ability".

Maybe, just maybe, this can be a watershed for relations between nerds and jocks across the nation: the same guiding principles for the captain of the soccer team, and for the captain of the Reach team.