So I learned this in evolutionary psychology about women

Evolutionary psych is an emerging science. Basically it picks apart all of our behavior and tries to make a link to an evolutionary argument. Ill give you an example. New borns show the most attachment to the person who spends the most time with them after birth which is almost all cases is the biological mother. It turns out also that babies are born with an inborn knowledge of what a human faces looks like, if even a little bit. remember the child doesn't have to have an allegiance to anyone it just likes the person who spends the most time with it. Since babies cannot take care of themselves whoever spends the most time with them is the person who is keeping them safe, and alive. Recoginizing that face and wanting that persons company makes evolutionary sense because that person will keep you alive until you are able to pass on your genes and it all starts again.

So eventually I stopped reading about babies and this theory of womens behavior was explained. It said basically superior empathizing ability in females might be the result of female-female competition, that is girls and women compete by gathering as much information on other people as they can get and use this info to attempt to organize their web of social relationships as to have more control over these relationships and through this access to what they want.

What do you all think? Im especially interested in what the ladies have to say.

 

It is a theory, it's a scientific fact that even near new borns when shown pictures, boys prefer things, girls prefer people, there just is truth to that. If we take it back to a pre-historic era, women would be the primary care givers of the baby, and in group settings, the females and children of the group would generally stay together in camp or venture together for forage, with all that interaction combined with in general being the weaker sex does make empathy and being able to detect emotions more important. And this is also another fact that when looking at faces generally women are much better at detecting the emotion on them.

Men on the other hand when hunting for big game, other things that can be explain, for one, it's true, men do have a better sense of direction. Men map out things in their head more often using the cardinal directions and as linear lines, women use landmarks(i.e. you could say the mapquest way) as in go left at the big oak tree, right at the creek, ect. Also another fact(insert driving joke after this) men are in fact better at tracking moving objects then women are, big game on the movie.

 

As a woman, I think this theory is probably generally true, but generalizations are dangerous. Specific family genetics (as opposed to just gender) and the environment in which you are raised seem especially able to effect 'empathy'. I know I am not nearly as 'empathetic' as my peers (Is that a dead duck or a crow over there? Look, it's got green feet, but they're not webbed. Hrmm...), and I'm also quite good with spatial directions, thank you very much.

I'd say that... the tendency to relate to events and people emotionally is related to personality type, and personality type is related, statistically, to gender. I'm going on the statistics that go with the MBTI personality system - you might not like it, but it produces results which are, I think, good enough for this discussion. People who get as a preference 'F' on the MBTI (more likely to come at events from an emotional perspective, 'desire for harmony') are more likely to be female (75%). Correlation ≠ causation, however - it is difficult to determine whether this is due to nature or nurture. Western culture strongly nurtures females to emphasize socializing rather than other forms of play, from a very young age.

 

if your into psychology, you need to be studing object relations and, not just evolutionary psychology.
i'm in agreement with what most of number48 said.

 

I am not sure that it is true that females have greater empathic abilities than males. I am willing to bet that there is greater variability between members of the same sex than between the averages of both sexes. I am a proponent of evolutionary psychology but I don't think I agree with this particular argument. Also the link between empathic abilities and social success is too vague in the original post to be evaluated properly. I do not know what the specific hypothesis is.