Cognitive Styles, Stereotypes and Collateral Damage

(Cross-posted from my Tumblr)

I saw a really interesting post on Tumblr about, among other things, different disability stereotypes and some of the less-than-perfect ways different subsets of cognitively or developmentally disabled people cope with them.

The part of the post I'm responding to:

You know how there is a subset of badbrains people who are like “ACTUALLY, our BADBRAINS MAKE US SMARTER. We are not disabled, we are the NEXT EVOLUTIONARY STAGE, we are BETTER. There is us on the top, then normals in the middle, then unsmart r-word badbrains people on the bottom. Given time they will see.” And I was attracted to that subset of badbrains people for a while before I realise they were assholes (And also stopped being academically smart.) And there was a subset of the subset who said “the unsmart r-word badbrains were just expensive useless people who should die, I NEVER thought that (not that I deserve some kind of “not a murderer” cookie) but those people existed and exist. 

But I feel like there is also a subset of badbrains people who are like “ACTUALLY, our BADBRAINS MAKE US KINDER, we are a PURER  type of human, more whole and loving and sane, more Hufflepuff, than the normals. There is us on top, normals in the middle, and the evil heartless non-sensory, abstraction-based, heartless badbrains people on the bottom, they probably all worship Richard Dawkins and watch my little pony and are racist and rape everyone they meet. They are all just like Elliot Rodger, we should probably kill them before they kill us.”

The bolded parts ring true for me too.

I know that both types of “badbrains people” — the ones whose minds handle abstract concepts well, but don’t really get emotions or people*, and the ones whose minds don’t handle abstract concepts or words well but are good at empathy and perceptual, sensory stuff** — exist and have to deal with ableism from NTs, and have various ways of coping with that and saying, no, actually we have value and are good at things.

And I know that those coping mechanisms can turn into ways of hurting other DD/MI people — the ones whose cognitive styles are as different from our own as they are from the norm. We might think we’re trashing a stereotype but actually be trashing real people who share traits with the stereotype. 

I actually overlap a bit with both of the subsets of people you’re describing — most of the mockery I got in grade school was of the “look at the stupid R-word, she believes whatever you tell her” variety; I do live primarily in a world of sensory information and sometimes I’m not exactly within reach of words; I sort of straddle a line between very concrete, literal thought and more abstract, logical, analogy- and metaphor-based thought; I think very slowly and sometimes speak haltingly; but at the same time I’m very good at academics, including STEM subjects, I can be pretty far removed from my emotions (like, it took me until my 20s to even realize I was capable of certain emotions, or to express them), and I am ridiculously insensitive to nonverbal cues and emotional subtext in conversation.

The latter set of traits make me very much a stereotypical “Aspie” that autistics who don’t have those traits have been bashing as non-representative of what actual autism is like. I’m not really bothered by it because I know they’re right. My observations do tell me I’m in the minority in having those traits, especially the lack of affective empathy. 

The stuff I’ve seen from other autistic people has been more along the lines of “this type of autistic person doesn’t really exist” than “this type of autistic person is evil,” though.

(From NTs, of course, I've seen a whole lot of "this type of autistic person is evil" stereotyping. It's almost coming to replace the autism stereotypes I remember more from childhood, the ones that imagine us as having no inner life.)

*Continuing with the Harry Potter Sorting Hat theme in the quoted passage, it would probably make the most sense to associate this cognitive style with Ravenclaw, and maybe Slytherin.

**Probably more likely to be in Hufflepuff or Gryffindor

The Delusion Illusion

There's a very interesting discussion in the comment thread on this post at Respectful Insolence; it's about something that's definitely been on my mind a lot as a skeptic, which is the problem of Why People Believe Weird Things.

Here's how it starts:

... [T]he people who claim that the vaccine is useless, and that polio eradication is the result of sanitation, must be mentally challenged at some level. There are not many of them I don't think --- their numbers obviously are a lot less than the incidence of schizophrenics, for example, and I have to wonder about the ability of those folks to organize rational thinking.

What this commenter is doing is trying to grapple with how a person could believe something that is obviously false. (In this instance, it's not just obviously false but also dangerous, in that the belief that vaccines don't work leads people to decide not to vaccinate themselves or their children, which undermines herd immunity and puts other people at risk of disease).

The conclusion he comes to --- that it must be mental illness that makes them cling to their counterfactual beliefs, despite any and all contradictory evidence you might throw at them --- is one I've seen a lot of people use to try and explain other people's mind-bogglingly irrational beliefs or bizarre or evil actions. I see it most often in this latter context, where someone commits a horrible crime, like mass murder, and in the news coverage the label "disturbed" or "troubled" or "mentally ill" or "unstable" gets attached to the perpetrator. (Even if he had never been to a psychiatrist in his life.)

It's easy to understand why a non-mentally-ill person would think that --- you see someone do something that you would never do, that you cannot even fathom doing, and you want to know what could possibly drive someone to do it. If imagining yourself in their shoes doesn't give you an answer, you're left with the possibility that this person must differ from you in some fundamental way.

You don't usually have enough information about the person to guess at how they differ from you, why they make a choice that you would not make under the same circumstances. (Just so you know, the choice I'm thinking of is the choice to become an anti-vaccine activist, not the choice to commit mass murder. Insert joke about the indistinguishability of those two things here.)

Anyway, for people with no experience of mental illness themselves, "mental illness" seems to function as a kind of conceptual black box that can be invoked to explain anything anyone does that otherwise defies explanation.

It also works to preclude introspection, to cordon off the person being labeled as mentally ill as not needing any more explanation. If someone is violent, their violence is a symptom of "mental illness," not a universal human tendency aggravated by social conditions. You don't have to ask any questions about, say, which human lives society values over others, or about whether there might not be conflicting cultural messages about violence (i.e., violence is bad but you're not a man unless you are capable of violence), or anything like that. No one need be examined or judged except the person who acted out.

Similarly, if someone is being illogical, or ignoring evidence, or deceiving hirself about something, you need not ask whether you might not be deceiving yourself about something else. The person making the illogical argument is not demonstrating the limitations and biases of human thought, to which all people are susceptible --- no, they're just crazy.

It's an easy explanation, but it's wrong and it makes life a lot harder for people who do have mental illnesses.

Here's another comment that explains how that works:

People who argue against vaccination are dangerous extremists. They are irresponsible and willfully ignorant. Their lies and manipulation are not a political issue for me, they're an intensely personal slight on who I am, and a threat to my very life.

It's clear that you can't grasp why your ableist language is problematic in this context, so I'll break it down for you.

1. Virtually the entire foundation of the anti-vax movement is the lie that vaccination causes autism and other developmental disabilities.

2. These people refer to non-neurotypical and developmentally and physically disabled people as "vaccine damaged", "broken", "stolen", "lost", and "soulless", among others.

3. Their argument is that death by vaccine preventable disease is better than life with a disability.

4. When presented with the fact that many disabled and chronically ill people are at greater risk of dying of VPDs they often claim that it's simply Darwinism in action, that the virus is cleaning up the gene pool.

5. It is not uncommon for these people to abuse, and even kill, their own disabled or non-NT children. When they do so they are often lionised by their peers, told what good parents they are, and let off by the just system because having to live with their (now dead charge) meant they'd "suffered enough."

Ergo, when you breeze in and spew back the same rhetoric as them, equating their deliberate cruelty and ignorance with developmental disability, then you're as bad as they are. You're saying "These people are bad, they're doing the wrong thing, they must be mentally disabled."

I can bring a fairly recent comparison to mind, that of the media reaction to pretty much every instance of an American gunman mowing a group of innocent people down. Do they say "He must be angry" or "He's a truly awful man"? No. They claim he must be autistic, or schizophrenic. Just like you they conflate wrongdoing with disability or mental illness, because Cthulhu knows there isn't already enough stigma around either topic, or enough fear or disgust at those of us on the receiving end.

Clear now? If the anti-vax monkeys shit in their hands and fling it, you're not going to make them stop by curling one out into your own palm, and lobbing it into their cage.

This same commenter also makes another important point, that being delusional is not at all like being a crank with a megaphone (or a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives):

The kind of fixed, delusional beliefs that go along with schizophrenic mental illness are typically just as distressing to the person with the diagnosis, if not more so. Watching someone in the grip of a florid delusion is very different to watching the majority of the anti-vax crowd's stubborn refusal to heed facts. I've seen people with various MIs, eating disorders in particular, who know that all food isn't poison, but can't make that inner dialogue relinquish the claims it makes. With my OCD I am excruciatingly aware that doing Y won't stop Z from happening, but knowing that truth, and feeling that it's safe to act on it feel like they're a million miles apart. 

So obviously, anyone who is genuinely suffering compulsions or delusions requires help and support, and an understanding that it's not deliberate. The anti-vax crowd requires a cluebat to the brain, perhaps in the form of a trip to somewhere that VPDs roam unchecked.

I've never been delusional, exactly, but I have had severe depression, and what this person says about knowing that what you're thinking is wrong but still being powerless to stop the thoughts rings very, very true.

I can't imagine a person stuck in that kind of epistemological nightmare state would be very likely to get up on a soapbox to try and convince other people to adopt the same delusions.

No, that sounds more like the behavior of someone who has never had cause to question their own grip on reality.

Anyway, I'm going to bastardize Occam's Razor and say that you don't need invoke a relatively uncommon phenomenon* to explain something that could just as easily be accounted for by something more commonplace.

Normal, baseline human thought is prone to a whole bunch of biases, errors, shortcuts and unconscious distortions that make each person a sort of Unreliable Narrator** of their own life.

Here are a few that I could see making someone think vaccines cause autism:

1. People prefer stories to lists of things that happened. (Thus, if one thing happens after another thing, you might see a connection between the two, even if there is none. Also, one person telling a very personal, emotional story is going to move you more, and stick in your mind longer, than someone throwing a bunch of statistics at you.)

2. People tend to idealize the past. If you didn't notice that your child was different right away, but only once they started to miss developmental milestones, you might start remembering them as more ideally "normal" than they really were as infants.

3. People like to think they are more or less in control of what happens in their lives. So thinking that their child is autistic because they chose to vaccinate hir might, weirdly, be less scary than thinking their child just is autistic and there was no way they could've prevented it***.

4. People's experiences color their view of the world. Along with #1 and #2, this one could make a person who had seen their "normal" baby suddenly develop autism in toddlerhood blame vaccines, and also greatly overestimate how drastically the prevalence of autism has risen. (At the same time, this explains why so many people feel like they can just opt out of vaccination; unless they're a lot older than most new parents are, they don't know what a lot of the vaccine-preventable diseases were like.)

5. People also tend to believe what the people around them believe. If your friends tend to mistrust doctors and medicine, and prefer "alternative" medicine, you might find it easier to believe that modern medicine's great accomplishments, including mass vaccination, aren't really that great and doctors just took credit for something that was already happening (e.g., the first comment I quoted, where the commenter mentioned having heard people say that improvements in sanitation, not Jonas Salk's vaccine, were responsible for eradicating polio in the U.S.), or even that modern medicine is making us sicker than we were in the idyllic past. (See also #2).

Finally, I don't have data on this (will look for some, but that's another post), but I strongly suspect that believing something made your child autistic correlates with seeing autism as The Worst Thing Ever.

*Mental illness is actually not super-uncommon, but it is still definitely a minority experience

**Everyone else is even less reliable at describing your life, though. So you still win.

***This probably won't matter to people who've managed to accept their child's autism; they tend to care less about why their child is autistic and more about how to help them live a full, independent life.

More About Stigma

Miri at Brute Reason has a very thought-provoking post up about social stigma, and whether anyone deserves to be stigmatized.

She doesn't think so, and she gives lots of very good reasons, including these:

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes,  and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. ...
...
[W]ielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it's very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I'm not sure that's the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

But, as good as these arguments are (and I am still turning them over in my head, and will probably keep this idea, that stigma and ostracism are inhumane and that there is nothing anyone can do that is bad enough to make them deserving of such treatment, for a very long time*), I'm not sure I can follow them all the way.

Between the ongoing story I've been following in my local newspaper about a girl in my city --- identified only by the initials LP --- who was found locked in a closet in her mother's apartment and my discovery of the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog, and also Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism blogging somewhat regularly about the disturbingly popular child-rearing philosophy of Michael and Debi Pearl, my mind has been more preoccupied than usual with the vilest, most extreme forms of child abuse.

I commented on Miri's blog that, if anyone does deserve to have a stigma permanently attached to them, it's the perpetrators of those horrors, particularly the Pearls (who were not content merely to abuse their own children, if indeed they followed their own method, but who wrote books proclaiming their combination of hard-core obedience training, enforced by frequent beatings, and withholding food from "defiant" children is the only thing that will guarantee a child will grow up to be a Godly person who is saved from Hell) and the mother in this ten-part personal narrative on Homeschoolers Anonymous.

Doing that to a child, for as long as the anonymous author's mother did --- from the spread in ages of the various children in the family, and the author's Conclusion where she mentions that her two youngest brothers are still with her parents and the abuse is ongoing, it had to have been more than a decade --- is a world away from, say, committing an armed robbery. This wasn't a single act, this was a long-term campaign this woman waged against her children. She stayed at home, ostensibly "homeschooling" her children throughout this period, so it's hard to see a line between these acts and the rest of her life. 

Yet, with the LP story, which is just as horrific, and which makes me feel just as much rage on the victim's behalf, I can see more of Miri's point. LP's mother was very young when she had LP, and at several points in the story you can see hints of someone who was overwhelmed, and who might never have done what she did to her daughter if she had gotten the help she needed but probably never asked for. It's hard to see whom it would help to stigmatize her, when she was already probably stigmatized for other reasons (poverty, blackness, living in a subsidized apartment, being an unmarried mother of three children by two different fathers), which might well have contributed to her feeling that the only thing she could do with her eldest daughter was to keep her out of sight.

But the Pearls, and the parents in the anonymous woman's story? They're not stigmatized at all, except by people like me, who have no power in their lives or social contact with them, or people who have left the conservative evangelical Christian circles those people move in. Within that community, they are revered as leaders and role models. I'm sure that this knowledge is part of the reason I want so badly to rain down opprobrium upon them: because, unlike Jacole Prince, they're getting off scot-free, and they continue to believe that what they are doing is right.

And Miri does grapple with the problem of great evil in her post, too --- where I chose to focus on child abuse, she wrote about rape. And she made another great point in doing so:

Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity -- it's just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

I absolutely see a dynamic like this playing out in mainstream society's attitudes about child abuse; child abuse is so heinous, so evil, so stigmatized that we can't ever believe anyone we know is abusing their child. So we second-guess ourselves when we start to wonder about a child's suspicious bruises, unexplained absences, dirty clothes, poor hygiene etc. The stigma attached to child abuse is terrible, so we are reluctant to call it down on our neighbors' heads, even if we suspect they are abusing their children. What if we're wrong? We'll have ruined an innocent person's life! 

(This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has been raped, or who has spent any time reading about rape culture.)

Another thing worth pondering about this problem as it pertains to child abuse is that, when the child who is being abused, neglected, or even murdered has a disability, the abusive, neglectful or murderous parent is not stigmatized so much as they are pitied. The poor dear, she was carrying an impossible burden. 

A mother can appear in a film in which she tells the camera she has thought about putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge with her, and the main reaction to this film will be sympathy, not shock or horror. 

I point this out not to argue that parents of disabled children don't deserve sympathy, or much better support than they're currently getting from society at large, but to argue that this reaction leaves no room for the child. They're a person too, and they have the right to food, shelter, medical care, education, love, and as much freedom and autonomy as is developmentally appropriate**. Focusing on how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even if you're only trying to explain the parent's actions, works to excuse the parent and put some of the blame for their fate onto the child. It also works to make life harder for all disabled people, because it makes it sound like we're being unreasonable just by existing, and that attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that resists making accommodations for us, even when those accommodations are not particularly expensive, awkward or difficult.

Particularly when we're talking about children whose disabilities are behavioral, this idea that it's just too hard works to excuse awful things like restraint and seclusion, at home and in school. At its extreme, it can lead to parents keeping their disabled children in dog cages; they see no other way to treat them because it's too hard and it's not like the children are normal children, for whom such treatment would be abusive, no, they're abnormal children for whom it is necessary.

So even while I see that a heavy stigma attached to child abuse can be counterproductive, in that it might discourage people from reporting their suspicions, I also think there are some kinds of abuse that are not heavily stigmatized, that are even excused (i.e., abuse of children with disabilities, which is often framed as a tragic consequence of disability) or met with approval (i.e., abuse within insular communities that don't share the wider culture's norms).

And it makes me furious that there isn't a heavy stigma, that people like, say, Michael and Debi Pearl don't even think they've done anything wrong, and sleep the untroubled sleep of the just.

*"Keeping an idea" is what I do when I read or hear something that blows my mind, but that I do not immediately know whether to accept it as truth. I kept a lot of ideas related to feminism in the (long) time before I decided I was a feminist, and I kept an idea of Richard Dawkins's that I now think I do believe is true, that raising a child to believe in Hell (at least, a Hell that they could go to --- I'm not sure it's true if Hell is only for big evildoers like Hitler and Stalin) is an abusive practice. I'm also keeping the idea that veganism is a moral imperative for those who are able to adopt it. A lot of the ideas that I keep are of the form "actually, this thing that we do all the time is bad, and you should stop doing it/get other people to stop doing it.")

**This notion --- that freedom and autonomy can't be absolute when you're talking about children --- is actually more complicated than it sounds, especially when we're talking about children with disabilities, or dependent adults with disabilities. How can you define what is "developmentally appropriate" for a child whose development has been atypical? Especially if said child is ahead of his age in some ways while also being delayed in others? (This was me, and I suspect it is most autistic people!) I know only this much: the way these decisions are currently made gives too little freedom to developmentally disabled adults.

Cognitive Sex Differences within Autism - Part I

One hypothesis about why there are so many more boys and men on the autism spectrum than there are girls and women is that boys and men, for whatever reason, are more likely to get diagnoses of autism spectrum conditions.

One of the reasons commonly put forward by people (including me) making this argument is that the diagnostic criteria reflect a picture of autism derived disproportionately from autistic boys and men, and autistic girls and women differ sufficiently from their male counterparts in their abilities, behavior, developmental histories etc. to ensure that they will often fail to meet those criteria.

While browsing PLOS ONE I found a couple of recent-ish articles looking into what those differences might be.

The more recent study, just published this week, involved giving four largish groups of participants (one autistic and one neurotypical group within each sex, with each group having thirty-two people in it) a battery of tests designed to measure five different skills: theory of mind, emotion recognition, executive functioning, perceptual attention to detail, and manual dexterity.

What are all those things and how would you go about measuring them? Well, the first of those skills, theory of mind --- also called cognitive empathy or mind-reading --- is one I've written a lot about on this blog. I've also written a lot (usually in the same posts) about the tool psychologists seem to use most of the time to assess this skill in adults: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. I don't think I need to say anything more about either the skill or the test; the test is relatively straightforward, a series of black-and-white photographs of faces, cropped to show only the eyes, paired with a choice of four emotion words. You are supposed to guess which of the words best describes what the person whose eyes are in the photograph is feeling.  

I listed theory of mind and emotion recognition separately, even though the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test obviously involves both. There's another test the researchers used, one that they describe as a test of emotion recognition, that reads to me like it's almost the same thing as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, only it uses pictures of entire faces instead of just eyes. It's called the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces Test.

To test the participants' executive-functioning abilities, the researchers used something called the Go/No Go Task. This involves pressing buttons on a computer keyboard in response to certain cues appearing on the computer screen; in this study the cues were arrows pointing either to the right or to the left. (Right and left were each associated with a different target key: P for right and Q for left. So the people taking the test were literally minding their P's and Q's!) The test also includes extraneous cues that test takers are not supposed to respond to. So what's being tested is not just one's ability to hit a key when a light goes on; it's also one's ability to restrain one's key-hitting impulse when something close to, but not exactly like, the target stimulus appears.

There were some other things the researchers included under the umbrella of executive functioning: working memory (tested by having the participants repeat nonsense syllables), word generativity (ability to come up with lots of words beginning with the same letter in a short amount of time) and motor planning, which they tested using the Assembly subtest of the Purdue Pegboard Test. (This involves putting simple objects together in a set order using whatever hand they tell you to use.) This obviously assesses manual dexterity as well as the ability to figure out what you need to do in what order (i.e., motor planning), although they also had the participants complete the other parts of the Purdue Pegboard Test to test manual dexterity alone.

Finally, the test they used to measure attention to detail was the Embedded Figures Test, which I've also blogged about before, noting that autistic people have shown a particular aptitude for this task.

The results are mostly unsurprising: the autistic study participants did worse at both of the facial-expression-interpreting tasks, and also at pressing the right key in the Go/No Go task. On the two language-related memory tasks, they performed no differently than the control group. (This is not surprising given that all of the participants are described as "high-functioning," having average-to-above-average IQs (about 115, plus or minus about 15 points) with verbal IQ greater than or equal to performance IQ).

The emotion-recognition data get more interesting when you look more closely at them, though; apparently the autistic study participants had more trouble identifying some emotions than others. Fear was the one it took them longest to recognize; it was also the hardest one for the non-autistic people to identify, too, but the gap between the two groups' average reaction times is the biggest in this category. It took the autistic study participants, on average, somewhere between four and five seconds (closer to five) to identify the fearful faces. For the non-autistic participants, it took maybe three and a half seconds. Happy faces were the easiest for both groups to identify, and the difference between groups was only half a second compared to the 1-1.5 second gap in their response times to fearful faces. All the other reaction times are clustered within a relatively narrow range for both groups: between 2.5 and 3 seconds for the autistic group, and between 2 and 2.5 for the control group. So, even though fear was tricky for everyone, it proved especially challenging for the autistic people. The study authors guess that maybe this is because autistic people studiously avoid looking at other people's eyes, and the eyes are apparently the most important cue that someone looks frightened.

There were also a couple of novel findings, too, though. For instance, on the Assembly component of the Purdue Pegboard Test, it was only the autistic men who had any problems relative to their same-sex control group. The autistic women were, you might say, indistinguishable from their peers. 

But the most surprising thing, for me, was their results on the Embedded Figures Test. This is a pretty solidly defined Thing Autistic People Are Really Good At, yet in this study, where there was a difference between autistic and non-autistic groups, it was the non-autistic people who found the hidden shape faster. (That was also true for the men and not for the women).

In general, the authors describe a pattern of male and female autistics having more or less the same degree of impairment in what they call the "hallmark" of autism spectrum conditions, which is inability to pick up on another person's nonverbal cues to their mental or emotional states*, but with the autistic men, and not women, also having additional impairments in other domains.

The authors point out that this contradicts what had been conventional wisdom about cognitive sex differences within autism, which held that autistic women were usually more severely disabled than autistic men**.

I haven't forgotten about the other, earlier study; I'm just going to give it its own post so as not to make this one overlong.


Lai, M., Lombardo, M., Ruigrok, A., Chakrabarti, B., Wheelwright, S., Auyeung, B., Allison, C., , ., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2012). Cognition in Males and Females with Autism: Similarities and Differences PLoS ONE, 7 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047198


*This elusive quality can be called theory of mind, mentalizing, "mind-reading" or empathizing. It may also involve more than one cognitive, emotional or perceptual ability, but this study doesn't really go into that.

**To be REALLY picky, this study doesn't address the issue of intellectual disability, as no one who participated in it would meet the criteria for having ID. This shows that autistic men of slightly above average IQ are more likely to have problems with motor planning and figure disembedding.

More Autistic Strengths: Symmetry-Spotting

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: A recent study has added to the list of cognitive strengths peculiar to autism: in this study, a group of autistic teens/young adults and a group of age-, IQ-, sex- and eyesight-matched control subjects were shown a series of paired images, all of them different arrangements of lots and lots of tiny black-and-white dots, and determine which of the two images has some of the dots arranged in a symmetric pattern. Consistently, the autistic young people were able to pick out the symmetrical images at lower signal-to-noise ratios (i.e., with smaller proportions of the dots possessing mirror images) than their non-autistic peers.
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Michelle Dawson and Laurent Mottron have done lots of research on perception and cognition in autism --- particularly visual processing. (Morton Ann Gernsbacher is another frequent collaborator, but she didn't participate in the research I'm about to describe).

Their research has identified several cognitive strengths* specific to autism: enhanced sensitivity to pitch; enhanced sensitivity to, and recall of, details (without any corresponding loss of ability to see the big picture); ability to switch between different strategies (big-picture vs. small details) as needed; . Autistic people also do a lot better on one particular IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, than you would predict based on their scores on other IQ tests (e.g., various Wechsler tests).

A new skill has just been added to this constellation: the ability to quickly determine whether a complex pattern is symmetrical or not.

In a study published this past spring in PLoS ONE, a group of Canadian researchers --- Mottron and Dawson, along with three others: Audrey Perreault, Rick Gurnsey and Armando Bertone --- had participants look at very complicated, visually "busy" patterns of small dots arranged on a video screen and determine, in the very short time the pattern remained onscreen (250 milliseconds), whether it was symmetrical or not. (They were shown two different patterns, one symmetrical and one not, and they had to identify the symmetrical one.)

Here's an example of the kind of image they would have to categorize:
(If it looks obvious to you, remember they only got a fraction of a second to look at it!)

The images were all just black and white, except for the one colored dot in the center, where the participants were told to focus their attention. In the above image, which is 100% symmetrical, each dot has a twin, the same size and color, placed so that they would lie one on top of the other if you printed the image out and folded it along its axis of symmetry. In that image, you can see that the vertical axis is the axis of symmetry; some images are symmetrical along the horizontal axis, and others are symmetrical along an oblique axis, the line y = x in a Cartesian coordinate plane with the colored dot at the origin.

These shapes are symmetrical about the horizontal (x) axis:
These shapes are symmetrical about the vertical (y) axis:

The pink and green curves are symmetrical to each other about the line y = x (blue)

Some of the images were also only partially made up of symmetrically-paired dots; the study participants were supposed to identify which of the two images shown to them had any degree of symmetry at all. (It was always just one; I guess you could design an experiment where both of the images had some degree of symmetry and the participants had to determine in which the degree of symmetry was greater, but that would be harder than just picking out which one had any degree of symmetry at all.)

The two groups whose performance was compared in this study were a group of 14** autistic young people (ages 14 to 35) and 15 typically-developing young men matched with the autistic subjects for age, IQ and visual acuity.

The criterion used to compare the two groups was "symmetry detection threshold", or the proportion of dots in a symmetrical design that had to have mirror images before a given person could identify the symmetrical design 75% of the time. Average detection thresholds were compared across groups, and also across what type of symmetry the image displayed. Both groups did best at spotting symmetry along a vertical axis, and both groups did the worst at spotting it across the line y = x.

But for all of these conditions, the autistic people had lower detection thresholds --- they correctly found symmetry more often in patterns that had less of it, relative to background noise --- than their non-autistic peers.

The study authors see this as indicative of our (autistic people's) ability to look at things more than one way simultaneously. (Another recent study, not referenced in this one, also found something suggestive of that: autistic people were better able to reproduce "ambiguous figures," or line drawings that look like they could be one of two things, depending on how you look at them). They also see their results as incompatible with the "weak central coherence" theory of autism, which explains our relatively keen collective eye for detail as a deficit in big-picture thinking. But this symmetry-spotting task requires both processes at once --- local-level, small detail perception for checking individual dot pairs to see if they really are exactly symmetrical, and also larger-scale, "gestalt" perception of whole shapes created by all the dots together.

Perreault, A., Gurnsey, R., Dawson, M., Mottron, L., & Bertone, A. (2011). Increased Sensitivity to Mirror Symmetry in Autism PLoS ONE, 6 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019519

*Other, earlier research has also identified autistic strengths: as early as 1983, Amitta Shah and Uta Frith discovered that autistic children did especially well at disembedding figures; those two researchers were also the ones who identified the other really well-known "islet of ability", in the Block Designsection on various IQ tests.

**There were originally 17 people in that group, but three of them couldn't do the experimental task, so they did not contribute any data.

Memento Mori: Thoughts of Mortality Can Subtly Bias People's Ideas about Human Origins

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

-- John Donne, from Holy Sonnet X (also called "Death, Be Not Proud")

BPS Research Digest described a recent study in which a group of psychologists looked at the influence of thoughts of one's own death on people's attitudes toward two different ideas about human origins: evolutionary theory and the variant of creationism known as Intelligent Design.
The researchers --- Dr. Jessica L. Tracy, who is an assistant professor of social and personality psychology at the University of British Columbia's Vancouver campus, where she is also director of the Emotion and Self Lab, Dr. Joshua J. Hart, who is an assistant professor of psychology at a small liberal arts college in New York called Union College, and UBC graduate student Jason Martens --- went to rather more trouble than is usual in these social-psychology studies in their search for a diverse study population.

Too often, these studies make claims about "people" based on surveys of psychology undergraduates at one university. In this study, one of the five mini-experiments involved people from all over the US who filled out surveys online. They ranged in age from 18 to 75, with a median age of 37, so most of them were substantially older than the college students questioned in the other four experiments. They also came from (one assumes) a broader distribution of socioeconomic classes; socioeconomic data are not given for any of the student groups, but the general-population group includes people from a wide range of income levels: 12% of respondents reported making less than $20,000 a year, 25% made between $20,000 and $40,000, 20% made between $40,000 and $60,000, 11% made between $60,000 and $80,000, 8% made between $80,000 and $100,000, and 9% made more than $100,000 a year. (Fifteen percent of respondents chose not to say how much money they made). The general-population sample also included people with more widely varying educational backgrounds: 26% had a high school diploma or less, 33% had been to college but hadn't gotten a degree, 32% had a college degree, and 9% had a postgraduate degree.

The other four groups consisted entirely of college students; two of the groups were all psychology students recruited from either UBC or Union College, one group was college students recruited online from all over the U.S. and Canada, and the last group was natural-science students* from UBC and Union College.
Each group of participants was asked to specify their religion and rate how religious they thought they were, and then to read a passage written by either Richard Dawkins or Michael Behe discussing either evolution or Intelligent Design, and rate their attitudes toward the two belief systems and their representative authors.

Right before they did this, they were asked to imagine one of two unpleasant things (death vs. painful dental work) and write briefly about their feelings. The reason for including this morbid exercise was to see if bringing mortality to the forefront of people's minds had any effect on their preference for a naturalistic or deistic worldview.
They found that, for most people, being reminded of death does tend to make you more receptive to Intelligent Design and more hostile to evolution. This is true regardless of one's educational attainment, religion or religiosity. It was also true regardless of one's attitude toward evolution as measured before the experiment.
(Some more explanation of that last sentence: yes, being more religious meant you were more likely to be receptive to Intelligent Design whether you were asked to contemplate death or not; likewise with being Christian rather than belonging to any other religious tradition, or claiming no religion. But within each category, the researchers saw the same effect of the memento mori nudging people toward Intelligent Design and away from evolutionary theory. Oddly, being reminded of death did not prompt people to rate themselves as more religious, even though it had a noticeable effect on their ideas about human origins.)

While how much education a person had didn't make any difference in how they responded to the memento mori, the type of education did have some dampening effects. Compared to the general-population and general-student-population groups, the psychology students expressed less hostility to evolutionary theory in response to the memento mori, although they showed the same increase in receptivity to Intelligent Design.

Resistance to these effects was strongest in the natural-science students, who actually responded in the opposite way to the memento mori; when confronted with the thought of death, they reported feeling a stronger affirmation of evolution and repudiation of creationism.

The authors hypothesized that people would react to the thought of death by looking for something that confers some lasting meaning on human life; for most people, a divine Creator fills that role readily enough. One of their experiments --- one of the two using psychology undergraduates as guinea pigs --- addressed this hypothesis directly: they compared the responses of students who had read a passage by Carl Sagan aimed at dispelling fears that the scientific understanding of the universe is nihilistic with those of students who did not read this humanistic passage, looking to see if exposure to a Middle Way between deism and nihilism didn't moderate the shift toward Intelligent Design prompted by the students' meditating on their own deaths.

Here is the Sagan passage:

It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. And understanding the nature of the world and the nature of ourselves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about. Truth should be pursued, and science helps us pursue it; science gives us meaning. All we have to do is maintain some tolerance for ambiguity, because right now science does not have all the answers. This tolerance goes with the courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations and knowledge tell us. The more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from something outside science, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves. If we are merely matter that is intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less, or does that make matter more? We make our purpose. And we have to work out what that is, for ourselves.

Ahhh. Humanism. (Go on, bask in it!)

Sure enough, students who read this passage did seem to be less threatened by evolution, even with thoughts of their own individual mortality foremost in their minds: they responded to the thought of death by reporting less of a warm feeling for Intelligent Design, and more for evolutionary theory.

Here is the authors' summation of their findings:

The present findings demonstrate that reminders of one's mortality --- inducing a state of mortality salience --- promote relative support for [Intelligent Design Theory], and skepticism toward [Evolutionary Theory]. Individuals respond to existential threat by becoming more accepting of a theory that offers a greater sense of meaning by depicting human life as having ultimate purpose (while appearing consistent with the scientific worldview), and/or less supportive of the theory that is the true mainstay of the scientific worldview but seems to offer little in the way of existential comfort. These findings also suggest that a desire to find greater meaning in human life accounts for this effect (at least the effect of mortality salience on belief in IDT), because it is reversed by making ET more meaningful, and among natural-science students for whom ET is already meaningful. The findings are notable because they (a) help explain why some people are motivated to believe in IDT and doubt ET in terms of fundamental psychological drives; (b) account for the underlying causal process; and (c) emerged regardless of preexisting religious ideologies, religious affiliation, or (with one highly limited exception, discussed below) views of evolution. The last point suggests that although religion influences baseline beliefs in IDT and ET, it cannot account for the impact of MS on these views. Given previous research suggesting that many MS effects are heightened, or occur only, among individuals with certain preexisting belief systems or cultural associations, the fact that we found no moderators of MS effects --- other than the extent to which naturalism is seen as meaningful --- suggests that embracing IDT or rejecting ET may be a unique, broadly appealing mechanism that addresses the existential concerns of religious and, for the most part, more scientifically oriented individuals alike. In contrast, explicitly religious ideologies tend to be fairly parochial, limiting their appeals and making them viable defenses only for those who already believe in a supernatural god.

Yet, an exception emerged in Study 5, where individuals whose life goals require strong acceptance of ET showed the opposite responses. Like those explicitly taught, in Study 4, to view naturalism as a source of meaning, natural-science students responded to MS with stronger antagonism toward IDT. This provides converging support for the causal process found in Study 4, and suggests that rejecting IDT can be a source of existential comfort for a limited population of individuals. These individuals are not simply those steeped in the scientific cultural worldview --- presumably psychology undergraduates fall into that category --- but rather those who more specifically view evolution as a critical part of their understanding of the world and a source of meaning and purpose.

They also point out in the final section of the article that these results might shed some light on why creation-vs.-evolution has remained such an intractable social issue: rather than being solely determined by religious doctrine, political ideology or (lack of) scientific literacy, people's embrace of creationism is also a response to the fear of death. Merely cataloguing the evidence for evolution doesn't address these underlying emotional issues; it tears away the defense mechanism while providing nothing to replace it. To my mind, that goes a long way toward explaining not only the deadlock between sides but also the rancor in this debate.

(Of course, many evolution-defending speakers do emphasize the existential perks of their worldview: a sense of wonder at being part of such a beautiful, intricate, ever-changing universe; the feeling of joy as you discover deeper and deeper layers of life's complexity; a stronger sense of kinship with other forms of animal life, etc. Why, even Richard Dawkins, the theorist featured in this study as representative of the godless, naturalistic worldview, has written a lot --- most notably in his book Unweaving the Rainbow --- about the beauties and benefits of that worldview. So the emotional angle isn't all there is to this, though I think it is important and not usually given the prominence it deserves).

*The authors do not explain what fields are included in this umbrella category "natural sciences." As it is commonly used, it encompasses fields having nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, like physics, or chemistry, or astronomy or geology. So I would quibble a bit with their assertion that strong acceptance of evolutionary theory is necessary for one to progress in the "natural sciences" --- it is quite possible to complete a degree in a non-biological science field without ever encountering it.


Tracy, J., Hart, J., & Martens, J. (2011). Death and Science: The Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design and Discomfort with Evolution PLoS ONE, 6 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017349

Coming Unstuck in Time

Neuroskeptic posted about this case study of two autistic young men who experience "time slips" --- extremely vivid memories, as if they are reliving the past instead of just remembering it:

CASE 1

Case 1, a male patient, was 16 years old at the time of his first visit to our hospital. He had not shown any delay in language development but had been isolated and unable to make friends since his infancy. In addition, he was extremely clumsy. He was extremely afraid of developing liver dysfunction. He had been bullied by a classmate when he was in the 8th grade; thereafter he refused to go to school and began to stay indoors. One day, he clearly recalled bullying incident that had occurred a few years earlier and re-experienced the feelings of fear and frustration as if he were once again experiencing that event. Thereafter, he often had similar experiences, even though he did not purposely intend to recall the event, and he became strongly distressed. He and his family stated that the recalled content was always the same. He thought that the distress could only be relieved by obtaining revenge on the boy who had bullied him, and he visited the boy's house with a knife. He was subsequently admitted to the emergency ward of our hospital.
...
The patient continued to experience the [time slip] even after he was hospitalized. If he saw any man with an appearance similar to that of the boy who had bullied him, he recalled the same experience of being bullied and became violent. The patient's doctor and the ward staff observed that the patient made no effort to avoid the recall stimuli but instead seemed to approach the stimuli. ...

CASE 2

Case 2, a male patient, was 27 years old at the time of his first visit. He had shown no marked clinical signs of delayed language development. However, since an early age, he had exhibited disturbed reciprocal sociality and did not have any close friendships. His interest was limited to collecting figures of comic characters. He began to be bullied during junior high school. He entered senior high school but quit during the second year. Thereafter, he tended to seclude himself at home. One day, he watched his neighbor discarding a cigarette butt in front of his home. Thereafter, he began to be annoyed by that memory. Almost every time he heard the voice of that neighbor or saw that man, he would leave his home and curse at the neighbor. His behavior became more violent and he eventually threatened the neighbor with a wooden sword. Because of this event, his family brought him to our hospital as an emergency patient.
...
In this case, an acoustic or visual stimulus (the voice or appearance of the neighbor) provoked the [time slip] resulting in the recollection of the same visual scene accompanied by the vivid emotions that he had experienced at the actual time. He took no measures to avoid remembering the event and tended to advance closer to the neighbor.

The authors of the paper observed four cases of time-slipping autistic patients in all; two of the troublesome recurring memories involved bullying at school, and two involved bad experiences with neighbors. All of the instances of time slipping that they heard about were bad; the memories triggered strong, unpleasant emotions and drove all four young people (three male and one female) to violence.

I mentioned in the comment thread at Neuroskeptic's blog that I experience this kind of vivid, immersive reminiscence --- it can be like those described in the article, where I remember being bullied or some other unpleasant experience with no buffers between me and it, but most often the things that come up are emotionally neutral, and not even necessarily episodes from my life; they might just be something I've seen before.

An example of the latter sort of memory might be my remembering, for decades, a random doodle I drew in preschool. Even now I can call it up --- a monster's face, with scraggly green teeth and a huge lumpy oval of a head. I even remember what color markers I used to draw it. I have similarly clear memories of making colored spinners out of paper plates, cutting off the edges, using a compass to bore a hole through the middle, and drawing a checkered pattern of concentric rings in contrasting colors. I would string a long piece of yarn through it, with a big, bulky knot on one end, and then spin it so that it would climb up the string and into the air, like a brightly colored UFO. This would captivate me for hours; I probably spent most of my schooldays in fifth or sixth grade doing this.

Most of these are really fragmentary, though; a single image, or a single multisensory impression. I don't really have flashbacks where I relive an incident, as the guys in the article seem to be doing. Even when I do recall an episode, it's only fragmented impressions that come back with this immediacy; the whole episode I have to reconstruct with narrative memory, as most people do.

I said on Neuroskeptic's blog that I considered my randomly retrieved archived sensory impressions to be a visual analogue to echolalia --- I hear echoes in my head of many of the things I hear, and sometimes I feel compelled to repeat them aloud; these memories are like visual echoes. However old they are, they persist, and sometimes they'll find their way into my conscious mind and I will hear the sound, or see the image, again. Even if I first saw it ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.

Gender on the Brain: Cordelia Fine Exposes "Neurosexism"

I was given Cordelia Fine's new book, Delusions of Gender, as a Christmas present, and I just finished reading it a couple days ago*.

It's very easy and fun to read, despite going into a lot of technical detail about the design of various studies (although she manages to write about those details in wonderfully clear, simple prose --- I *try* to do that on this blog, but I think her book is better-written, and easier to understand, than many of my researchy posts) and trying to tease out the separate strands of a very complicated knot of biology, psychology, culture that lies underneath the surface of what we understand gender to be.

She spends a lot of time discussing a topic that's also been on my mind a lot recently: fetal testosterone. She takes a much broader view of this literature than I do, because I am focusing exclusively on those studies that I consider relevant to the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, while she's addressing the whole idea that a "male brain" and a "female brain" even exist, much less that they differ as radically as most people writing popular (and academic) books on brain sex seem to think.

She peppers her book with quotations from such works as Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain (if you have time, read Mark Liberman's series of posts on Language Log debunking this book; they're hilarious and eye-opening), Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters, John Gray's however-many-there-are-now Mars and Venus books, Allan and Barbara Pease's** Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, and various books authored or co-authored by Michael Gurian of the Gurian Institute: Leadership and the Sexes, It's a Baby Girl!, and What Could He Be Thinking?

As an additional bit of context, she also quotes liberally from sources a hundred years old or more, laying out their nearly-identical visions of the masculine and feminine mind; the only difference is in what kind of pseudoscientific technobabble is used to justify the idea of separate spheres for men and women: in the old books, it is woman's physical frailty, nervous sensitivity and smaller brain that fit her for a purely domestic life, while in the new books, it is her relatively larger corpus callosum, her greater verbal fluency and emotional sensitivity, that fit her for the caring professions or for full-time wife-and-motherhood.

The book is divided into three parts, the first and last of which (called "'Half-Changed World', Half-Changed Minds" and "Recycling Gender") deal with psychological research on the effects of sexism and gender stereotyping on women's choices, behavior and performance on various tests, and with how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories, starting at very young ages.

Those parts of the book fill in the background for the middle part, "Neurosexism," which discusses research into hormonally-driven "hard-wiring" of gendered interests, behaviors and aptitudes. (It's in this part of the book that she tackles the prenatal-testosterone literature). While she does offer some critique on methodological grounds, her biggest beef is with popularizers who extrapolate universal truths from ambiguous results derived from very small, restricted samples of people.

An example:

[W]hen I decided to follow up [Louann] Brizendine's claim that the female brain is wired to empathize, it nonetheless proved to be an exercise that turned up surprise after surprise. I tracked down every neuroscience study cited by Brizendine as evidence for feminine superiority in mind reading. (No, really, no need to thank me. I do this sort of thing for pleasure). There were many such references, over just a few pages of text, creating the impression that it is no mere opinion, but scientifically established fact, that the female brain is wired for empathy in a way that the male brain is not. Yet fact-checking revealed the deployment of some rather misleading practices. For example, let's work our way through the middle of page 162 to the top of page 164 in her book. We kick off with a study of psychotherapists, which found that therapists develop a good rapport with their clients by mirroring their actions. Casually, Brizendine notes, "All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women." For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study.
...
A little later, readers are told that "brain-imaging studies show that the mere act of observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state can automatically activate similar brain patterns in the observer --- and females are especially good at this sort of mirroring." Cited as support for this feminine superiority in emotional mirroring is a 2004 neuroimaging study by cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer and colleagues, who compared brain activation when someone was either receiving a painful electric shock to the hand or was aware that a loved one was receiving the same painful electric shock to the hand. Singer and colleagues found that some brain regions were activated both by being shocked and watching someone else be shocked. If you think I'm going to be nitpicky about what any sex differences in activation in this study mean, you're wrong. Actually, the problem of interpretation is rather more basic. Only women were scanned.

Even when there aren't gross factual errors in the reporting of the research, Fine's inclusion of social- and developmental-psychology perspectives on gender --- how children learn it, how children and adults learn to change their behaviors, and their understanding of themselves, to fit into it --- makes it clear that whatever gendered differences do turn up on brain scans, they are as likely to be the effects of gender socialization as they are to be the underlying physiological cause of gender.

So, if we're not "hard-wired" by means of prenatal and pubertal hormone surges into immutable, characteristic and complementary "male" and "female" selves, what are we? Are we just blank slates, onto which society can write whatever it likes? Is there no such thing as human nature at all?

That's the alternative vision most commonly invoked in these debates: if you don't accept the idea that gender is hard-wired, you must be an environmental determinist who doesn't believe people are born with anything at all in their heads.

Luckily for us, this isn't a binary, and we don't have to choose between nature and nurture.

Here's Fine again, this time from the Epilogue of her book:

The fluidity of the self and the mind is impressive and is in continual cahoots with the environment. When social psychologists discover, for example, that mere words (like competition), everyday objects (like briefcases and boardroom tables), people, or even scenery can trigger particular motives in us, or that similar role models can seep into our most private ambitions, it makes sense to start questioning the direction of causality between gender difference and gender inequality. We are justified in wondering whether, as gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, "gender difference is a product of gender inequality, and not the other way around."

Nor is gender inequality just a part of our minds --- it is also an inextricable part of our biology. We tend to think of the chain of command passing from genes, to hormones, to brains, to environment. (As biologist Robert Sapolsky describes this common misconception, "DNA is the commander, the epicenter from which biology emanates. Nobody tells a gene what to do; it's always the other way around.") Yet most developmental scientists will tell you that one-way arrows of causality are just so last century. The circuits of the brain are quite literally a product of your physical, social, and cultural environment, as well as your behavior and thoughts. What we experience and do creates neural activity that can alter the brain, either directly or through changes in gene expression. This neuroplasticity means that, as [neuropsychologist Anelis] Kaiser puts it, the social phenomenon of gender "comes into the brain" and "becomes part of our cerebral biology."

As for hormones that act on the brain, if you cuddle a baby, get a promotion, see billboard after billboard of near-naked women, or hear a gender stereotype that places one sex at a higher status than the other, don't expect your hormonal state to remain impervious. It won't. "Even how we behave or what we think about can affect the levels of our sex hormones," point out Gene Worship authors Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers. This continuous interplay between the biological and the social means that, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has put it, "components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being."

And so, when researchers look for sex differences in the brain or the mind, they are hunting a moving target. Both are in continuous interaction with the social context. Some researchers have even started to investigate how the brain, or hormones, respond differently while doing stereotyped tasks, depending on whether gender stereotypes are made salient. And gender differences in the mind can shift from moment to moment: for example, as stereotype threat is created or dispersed, or self-identity changes. But also, our actions and attitudes change the very cultural patterns that interact with the minds of others to coproduce their actions and attitudes that, in turn, become part of the cultural milieu: in short, "culture and psyche make each other up." When a woman persists with a high-level math course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotions, values, interests, hormones, and brains --- because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.
...
Our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable, and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.

This closing statement encapsulates what I like so much about this book; it brings feminism, sociology, and a more accurate, more nuanced understanding of human biology together to give us a broader view of what gender is --- or at least how many different things, over a person's whole lifetime, go into creating gender.

For some other reviews of this book, see Neuroskeptic*** and Echidne of the Snakes (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

*I was also given Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, which covers similar ground --- both books poke and prod at the conventional wisdom that sex hormones shape "male" and "female" brains before birth, and that masculine and feminine behaviors, interests and life paths are the inevitable outcomes of these two different types of brain. I haven't finished reading Brain Storm yet, but I will probably also review it here when I do.

**Another of their books, not cited in Fine's book, refers in its title to a particularly stubborn gender stereotype that drives many feminists --- particularly sex-positive feminists --- absolutely batty: Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love. As if no woman has ever been horny, or no man ever wanted to be loved!

***Who is cited as a source twice, and quoted once, in this book!