Neuroscience
A huge study involving over 12,000 participants across 51 cultures from Argentina to Uganda has concluded that men tend to have more varied personalities than women. Peter Borkenau, his co-authors and a small army of international research assistants recruited 12,156 college students (52% were female) to fill out a detailed personality questionnaire about "someone they knew well" - either a person younger or older than forty years.
Averaged across all 51 cultures, men's personalities showed more variation for four of the Big Five traits: extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The exception was neuroticism, which tended to vary more widely in women.
Greater variability in male personalities was not observed in all cultures. In fifteen countries, including Japan and Peru, the pattern was reversed. Across both sexes, personality showed more variation in countries that were more prosperous and had better education systems. Another finding was that female raters showed more variability in the personality ratings they gave, be that for a man or woman. Borkenau and his colleagues said this could explain why past research using self-report questionnaires (where people rate their own personality) has not shown men to have more varied personalities.
The researchers were agnostic as regards the reason why men's personalties show more variability on most dimensions. They said there could be genetic reasons, with traits linked to genes on the X-chromosome in women being averaged across the genetic variants found on each of a woman's two X-chromosomes, thus reducing the likelihood of extreme traits (men have just one X-chromosome, precluding this averaging process).
Social factors are also likely at play, as evidenced by cross-cultural differences in the link between sex and personality variability, although how these manifest is far from straightforward. A key finding was that men's personalities were even more varied than women's in cultures that are more developed, gender-egalitarian and individualistic - "high individualism may facilitate expressions of personality dispositions among men more than among women," Borkenau and his colleagues said. Perhaps, they surmised, this is because in such cultures men still spend more time than women in work environments, which could conceivably offer more freedom for variation in self-expression.
Whether the reasons are biological or social, Borkenau's team think that sex differences in personality variability probably kick in some time during puberty. They say this based on the fact that a study of children aged 3 to 13, published in 2006, did not find greater variability in the temperament of boys.
Conducting cross-cultural research of this kind is fraught with difficulty because of logistics and translation issues. Realising this, the researchers included measures of data quality, such as missing answers, and they factored this into their analysis. There was evidence that data quality influenced their results, but their main findings held even when controlling for this. Another issue is that men and women's average personality scores differ, with women tending to have higher mean scores. However, the researchers don't think that explains the greater variability in men's personalities - for instance, for several personality facets, men were over-represented in both the high and low extremes.
As with any personality research that relies on questionnaires rather than actual behavioural observations, it pays to interpret the findings of this new study with extreme caution. That male and female students tended to rate men's personalities with more variability might say more about how men are perceived, than about how they actually are. That said, if personality really is more varied in men than women (in most cultures), it joins a list of other characteristics that past research has identified as being more varied in men, including cognitive ability, height and sprint speed.
_________________________________
Borkenau, P., McCrae, R., and Terracciano, A. (2013). Do men vary more than women in personality? A study in 51 cultures Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (2), 135-144 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.12.001
--Further reading--
Interview with Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender, in The Psychologist magazine.
Two Myths and Three Facts About the Differences in Men and Women's Brains
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do People With Dark Triad Personality Traits Fare At Speed Dating?
People who score highly in the Dark Triad personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – are vain, selfish, callous and manipulative. They're not the kind of people you want to spend much time with. This raises the obvious...
- You Can Change Your Personality At Will
Surveys show that most of us wish our personalities were different. Change is certainly possible: people's personalities evolve as they get older (for example, most of us become more friendly but less open-minded), and there's research showing...
- The Stability Of Your Personality Peaks In Mid-life (then Grows Increasingly Wobbly Again)
As we continue to settle into ourselves, you might think that personality would be something that becomes ever more cemented through life. Not so, according to a survey of nearly 4000 New Zealanders aged from 20 to 80 years (including 2409 women)....
- Women's Memories Are More Speech-filled Than Men's
To gasps of surprise from some quarters, a spate of recent studies have shown that women don't talk any more than men do. But now Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan have looked at people's autobiographical memories and found that while women may not...
- Investigating The Missing Participants
An inevitable weakness with psychology research is that so much of it is conducted with people (usually students) who have volunteered. If certain kinds of people routinely opt out of research, it could mean our estimates of what is psychologically average...
Neuroscience
Do men have more varied personalities than women?
Averaged across all 51 cultures, men's personalities showed more variation for four of the Big Five traits: extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The exception was neuroticism, which tended to vary more widely in women.
Greater variability in male personalities was not observed in all cultures. In fifteen countries, including Japan and Peru, the pattern was reversed. Across both sexes, personality showed more variation in countries that were more prosperous and had better education systems. Another finding was that female raters showed more variability in the personality ratings they gave, be that for a man or woman. Borkenau and his colleagues said this could explain why past research using self-report questionnaires (where people rate their own personality) has not shown men to have more varied personalities.
The researchers were agnostic as regards the reason why men's personalties show more variability on most dimensions. They said there could be genetic reasons, with traits linked to genes on the X-chromosome in women being averaged across the genetic variants found on each of a woman's two X-chromosomes, thus reducing the likelihood of extreme traits (men have just one X-chromosome, precluding this averaging process).
Whether the reasons are biological or social, Borkenau's team think that sex differences in personality variability probably kick in some time during puberty. They say this based on the fact that a study of children aged 3 to 13, published in 2006, did not find greater variability in the temperament of boys.
Conducting cross-cultural research of this kind is fraught with difficulty because of logistics and translation issues. Realising this, the researchers included measures of data quality, such as missing answers, and they factored this into their analysis. There was evidence that data quality influenced their results, but their main findings held even when controlling for this. Another issue is that men and women's average personality scores differ, with women tending to have higher mean scores. However, the researchers don't think that explains the greater variability in men's personalities - for instance, for several personality facets, men were over-represented in both the high and low extremes.
As with any personality research that relies on questionnaires rather than actual behavioural observations, it pays to interpret the findings of this new study with extreme caution. That male and female students tended to rate men's personalities with more variability might say more about how men are perceived, than about how they actually are. That said, if personality really is more varied in men than women (in most cultures), it joins a list of other characteristics that past research has identified as being more varied in men, including cognitive ability, height and sprint speed.
_________________________________
Borkenau, P., McCrae, R., and Terracciano, A. (2013). Do men vary more than women in personality? A study in 51 cultures Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (2), 135-144 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.12.001
--Further reading--
Interview with Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender, in The Psychologist magazine.
Two Myths and Three Facts About the Differences in Men and Women's Brains
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do People With Dark Triad Personality Traits Fare At Speed Dating?
People who score highly in the Dark Triad personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – are vain, selfish, callous and manipulative. They're not the kind of people you want to spend much time with. This raises the obvious...
- You Can Change Your Personality At Will
Surveys show that most of us wish our personalities were different. Change is certainly possible: people's personalities evolve as they get older (for example, most of us become more friendly but less open-minded), and there's research showing...
- The Stability Of Your Personality Peaks In Mid-life (then Grows Increasingly Wobbly Again)
As we continue to settle into ourselves, you might think that personality would be something that becomes ever more cemented through life. Not so, according to a survey of nearly 4000 New Zealanders aged from 20 to 80 years (including 2409 women)....
- Women's Memories Are More Speech-filled Than Men's
To gasps of surprise from some quarters, a spate of recent studies have shown that women don't talk any more than men do. But now Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan have looked at people's autobiographical memories and found that while women may not...
- Investigating The Missing Participants
An inevitable weakness with psychology research is that so much of it is conducted with people (usually students) who have volunteered. If certain kinds of people routinely opt out of research, it could mean our estimates of what is psychologically average...