Prima che l'argomento divenisse tabù e ci venisse imposto il concetto secondo cui l'uomo e la donna sono perfettamente intercambiabili in ogni campo,
la scienza (esempio, ma esistono tantissimi altri articoli come questo) ha sempre descritto differenze caratteriali e di virtù (oltre a quelle fisiche che sono ovvie) tra i due sessi che li rende più o meno adatti a determinati compiti. I ruoli tradizionali si sono definiti nel tempo proprio sulla base di queste differenze.
Ovviamente ciò non significa che fare diversamente è impossibile o che sia fonte di chissà quale deviazione, ma non la ritengo la decisione ideale per le coppie che desiderano una famiglia nei casi in cui c'è possibilità di scelta.
Scusa se riesumo un post vecchio di tre pagine.
La correttezza e l’affidabilità della concreta applicazione del metodo scientifico in un determinato contesto sono aspetti fondamentali che vanno verificati caso per caso nell’ottica di stabilire se ciò che è stato fatto è veramente degno di rientrare in questa definizione. Non è scontato che chi si occupa di scienza sia sempre perfettamente in buonafede, non lo è che applichi sempre metodologie rigorose ed efficienti come ci si aspetterebbe da un professionista del settore, e quando questo non accade possiamo trovarci davanti a conclusioni precipitose ed errate, specialmente su un argomento caldo, spinoso e controverso come i ruoli di genere, in cui capita che alcuni insigni dottori puntino a soffiare prestigio verso la propria persona, il proprio studio e/o la propria testata proponendosi come divulgatori di rivelazioni definitive e tendenti ad un sensazionalismo nascosto dietro l’aria sobria e composta dell'eloquenza accademica.
Hai parlato di “carattere” e “virtù”. Per poter continuare devo attribuire alla seconda parola il mero significato di “capacità, dote, predisposizione, talento” escludendo l’accezione forse più comune in cui è implicata la sfera dell'etica, altrimenti risulterebbe incompatibile col discorso.
Ebbene, ci troviamo in un ambito ancora ben lungi dall’essere completamente esplorato e padroneggiato, anzi per adesso non sappiamo neanche se mai giungeremo a una conoscenza da incominciare a ritenersi esaustiva, cioè quello delle neuroscienze, un'unica parola usata per raccogliere un insieme di discipline che studiano la struttura e il funzionamento del sistema nervoso umano (branca medica, biologica, fisiologica) in relazione alla mente e al comportamento (branca psicologica, sociologica, financo linguistica), ciascuna in base alle proprie competenze e approcci.
Ora, detto ciò, scusa Jigen, ma come fai a linkare quell’articolo e parlare di scienza nella stessa frase? Premetto che leggere il nome del sito mi ha messo già un po' sull'attenti, ma poi l’autore parte citando la Genesi per estrapolare verità sulla natura umana (per me incipit già molto scoraggiante) e conclude sciorinando un elenco di semplici statements, presunti “tratti distintivi” (che già il solo buon senso mi suggerirebbe di associare a pure fantasie), senza fornire uno straccio di argomentazione suffragata dall’esposizione approfondita di studi in merito o perlomeno da una sintesi utile alla comprensione degli stessi. Le fonti in fondo alla pagina sono una serie di libri fra i quali ho riconosciuto in particolare titolo e copertina di uno citato e mostrato in mezzo agli altri da
Cordelia Fine all’inizio del seguente intervento, mi riferisco a “Men are like waffles, women are like spaghetti”. Lascia perdere le risate della platea in sottofondo, a me interessa il contenuto.
Sempre in quell’articolo per i motivi sopracitati rispondo all’unico punto che sembrerebbe ambire a sfoggiare una minima parvenza di valore scientifico risicato (anche se l’ostentata sicurezza riposta nella
obvious connection mi fa tornare il dubbio), e non sto dicendo che ci riesce. E' questo:
Active and aggressive. There’s an obvious connection between initiation and active aggression. In light of this, it’s interesting to note that the male brain is two-and-a-half times larger and more vital in the center devoted to aggression and action than the female brain.
Intanto andrebbe spiegato cosa si intende per “vital” in termini di attività cerebrale, dopodiché dovrebbe bastare (ed è solo un esempio) il seguente paragrafo tratto dal libro
Delusions of Gender (2010) della stessa Fine (forse non dovrei dirlo ma in questo momento il testo è reperibile anche gratuitamente online) per minare fortemente le fondamenta e la credibilità di quell’assunto.
Just as bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better with regards to the size of brain structures, neither does more activation necessarily mean better or psychologically more. Researchers who study development, or learning, sometimes find that some patterns of activation reduce, or become more streamlined, as development or expertise proceeds.36 Bizarrely, activation isn’t even a surefire sign that the activity is doing anything useful. For example, Chris Bird and colleagues studied a patient who suffered extensive damage to the medial prefrontal cortex following a stroke. The scope of the damage included pretty much all of the brain regions that have been reliably activated in literally dozens of functional imaging studies of mind reading. Yet the patient was fine at mind reading! As the researchers note, ‘the data reported here urge caution in concluding that medial frontal cortex is critical for effecting ToM [theory of mind]’.37 Vision scientist Giedrius Buracas and colleagues had an equally surprising finding. They found that brain region V1 was activated more than region MT in a motion perception task. Yet it’s well-established from neurophysiological research with primates that MT – which was activated less – is critically involved in motion detection, while V1 – which was activated more – is not.38 These two studies serve as warning flags: even though a part of the brain might light up during a task, it may not be especially or crucially involved. The location of activation in the brain is also surprisingly uninformative. Clearly, the whole brain isn’t involved in doing everything. Different parts of the brain are specialised for processing different sorts of information. But a particular cortical region or population of neurons can be specialised for different jobs in different contexts. As imaging experts Karl Friston and Cathy Price put it, specialisation is dynamic and context-dependent.39 For example, a particular population of neurons in the temporal cortex may, at different times, represent both identity (Whose face is it?) and expression (Is it happy or sad?). What those neurons are doing depends both on what sort of information is being fed in, and also what sort of information is being fed back from higher regions in the processing chain. ‘Specialisation is therefore not an intrinsic property of any region’, argue Price and Friston, and that means that seeing a brain region in action doesn’t mean you know what it’s up to in your particular task. For many parts of the brain, this problem is acute. For example, the anterior cingulate is activated by so many tasks that one cognitive neuroscientist I know refers to it as the ‘on button’. There just isn’t a simple one-to-one correspondence between brain regions and mental processes, which can make interpreting imaging data a difficult task. As Jonah Lehrer recently explained in the Boston Globe: [O]ne of the most common uses of brain scanners – taking a complex psychological phenomenon and pinning it to a particular bit of cortex – is now being criticized as a potentially serious oversimplification of how the brain works.… [C]ritics stress the interconnectivity of the brain, noting that virtually every thought and feeling emerges from the crosstalk of different areas spread across the cortex.40 If so, the familiar spots of colour on brain activation maps (derided by some as ‘blobology’), labelled as male-female difference in activation, are going to tell a very oversimplified story, and one in which much of the important information may be lost. It’s also a story that, as neuropsychologist Anelis Kaiser and colleagues point out, is geared to emphasise difference over similairy.41 Then, there is the sad fact that, at its most precise, functional imaging technology averages over a few seconds the activity of literally millions of neurons that can fire up to a hundred impulses a second. (For PET the time-scale is even longer.) ‘Using fMRI to spy on neurons is something like using Cold War–era satellites to spy on people: Only large-scale activity is visible’, says Science journalist Greg Miller.42 This severely limits the interpretations that can be made about brief psychological events. Understandably, given all these interpretative gaps, many neuroscientists hesitate to speculate what their data might mean in terms of sex differences in thinking. Many, to their credit, have performed admirably as The Voice of Restraint in popular articles about gender and the brain, and in their academic work explicitly warn against making unwarranted inferences (pleas that, in certain quarters, fall on deaf ears). It’s not, by the way, my intention to present myself as a neuroscience sceptic. Not only are some of my best friends, as well as family members, neuroimagers, but I also think that neuroscience is an extremely exciting and promising field, and can be usefully employed in combination with other techniques. I also understand that speculation is an important part of the scientific process. Nor is the topic of gender difference by any means the only area in which overinterpretation can occur. And I certainly don’t think that research into sex differences in the brain is wrong or pointless. There are sex differences in the brain (although, as we’ve seen, agreeing on what these are is harder than you might think);43 there are sex differences in vulnerabilities to certain psychological disorders, and hopefully greater understanding of the former might help to illuminate the latter. My point is simply this: that neither structural nor functional imaging can currently tell us much about differences between male and female minds. As Rutgers University psychologist Deena Skolnick Weisberg has recently argued, we should ‘remember that neuroscience, as a method for studying the mind, is still in its infancy. It shows much promise to be someday what many people want to make it into now: a powerful tool for diagnosis and research. We should remember that it has this promise, and give it the time it needs to achieve its potential – without making too much of it in the meantime.’44 Are early twenty-first-century neuroscientific explanations of inequality – too little white matter, an unspecialised brain, too rapacious a corpus callosum – doomed to join the same garbage heap as measures of snout elongation, cephalic index and brain fibre delicacy? Will future generations look back on early twenty-first-century interpretations of imaging data with the same shocked amusement with which we regard early twentieth-century speculations about the relevance of sex differences in spinal cord size? I suspect they will, although only time will tell. But to any scientist considering trying to relate sex differences in the brain to complex psychological functions … well, let’s just say, ‘Remember Dr. Charles Dana’. And it is important to remember him. For as we’ll see in the next chapter, the speculations of a few scientists quickly evolve into the colourful fabrications of popular neurosexism – the subspecialty within the larger discipline of neurononsense to which we now turn.
Giusto per dare un'idea di quanto sia complesso l'argomento e del perché le semplificazioni vadano oltremodo rifuggite (come con tante altre cose del resto). I numeri che vedi inseriti di tanto in tanto tra una frase e l'altra rimandano tutti a note bibliografiche corredate da edizione e pagina/e specifica/e della fonte. Il lavoro di ricerca, condensazione e discussione della Fine ne è disseminato con una frequenza fittissima. Il suo invito è quello di osservare con occhio critico i tanti studi che fioccano nella comunità scientifica a questo proposito. Il suo impegno e il suo obiettivo sono parzialmente introdotti da (riporto testualmente):
These days, we have rather more of an inkling of the complexity of the brain. It’s undeniable that by moving into the realm of the brain itself, rather than its outer casing, scientific advance was made. It was certainly an important moment when a forward-thinking nineteenth-century scientist, fingering his tape measure with the tense distraction of one who suspects that his analysis has left certain important details unpenetrated, said thoughtfully, ‘Pass me that brain and those scales, will you?’ But even the untrained twenty-first-century layperson can see that this brought scientists only a little closer to understanding the mystery of how brain cells create the engine of the mind, and can sense the unfortunate hastiness of the conclusion that women’s cognitive inferiority to men could be weighed in ounces. It may seem like the same sort of prejudice couldn’t possibly creep into the contemporary debate because now we are all so enlightened; perhaps even … overenlightened? Writers who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness. Yet claims of ‘essential differences’ between the two sexes simply reflect – and give scientific authority to – what I suspect is really a majority opinion.37 If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science. This is the aim of Delusions of Gender. At the core of the first part of this book, ‘“Half-Changed World”, Half-Changed Minds’, is the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them.’38 We tend not to think about ourselves this way, and it’s easy to underestimate the impact of what is outside the mind on what takes place inside. When we confidently compare the ‘female mind’ and the ‘male mind’, we think of something stable inside the head of the person, the product of a ‘female’ or ‘male’ brain. But such a tidily isolated data processor is not the mind that social and cultural psychologists are getting to know with ever more intimacy. As Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji puts it, there is no ‘bright line separating self from culture’, and the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a ‘deep reach’ into our minds.39 It’s for this reason that we can’t understand gender differences in female and male minds – the minds that are the source of our thoughts, feelings, abilities, motivations, and behaviour – without understanding how psychologically permeable is the skull that separates the mind from the sociocultural context in which it operates. When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think and what you do. And these thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of yours, in turn, become part of the social context. It’s intimate. It’s messy. And it demands a different way of thinking about gender.
Un esempio concreto, preceduto da un'introduzione ai concetti chiave, di quest'ultima parte colorata in azzurro:
When gender is salient in the environment, or we categorise someone as male or female, gender stereotypes are automatically primed. For several years, social psychologists have been investigating how this activation of stereotypes affects our perception of others.14 But more recently, social psychologists have also become interested in the possibility that sometimes we might also perceive our own selves through the lens of an activated stereotype. For, as it turns out, the self-concept is surprisingly malleable. Perhaps, on presenting your psyche to a psychiatrist for analysis, you would fail to see a brightening of the eye, a gleam that anticipates an hour that is more pleasure than work. But even if your personality offers little to hold the interest of a shrink, there is nonetheless plenty in there to fascinate the social psychologist. This is because your self has multiple strings to its bow, it’s a rich, complex web, it has a nuance for every occasion. As Walt Whitman neatly put it, ‘I am large: I contain multitudes.’15 But while a self that runs to the multitudes is certainly a fine thing to own, you can immediately see that it is not ideal to have the entire multitude in charge at the same time. What works better is if, at any one time, just a few self-concept items are plucked out from the giant Wardrobe of Self. Some psychologists refer to whatever self is in current use – the particular self-concept chosen from the multitudes – as the active self.16 As the name implies, this is no passive, sloblike entity that idles unchanging day after day, week after week. Rather, the active self is a dynamic chameleon, changing from moment to moment in response to its social environment. Of course, the mind can only make use of what is available – and for each of us certain portions of the self-concept come more easily to hand than do others. But in all of us, a rather large portion of the Wardrobe of Self is taken up with the stereotypical costumes of the many social identities each person has (New Yorker, father, Hispanic American, vet, squash player, man). Who you are at a particular moment – which part of your self-concept is active – turns out to be very sensitive to context. While sometimes your active self will be personal and idiosyncratic, at other times the context will bring one of your social identities hurtling towards the active self for use. With a particular social identity in place, it would not be surprising if self-perception became more stereotypic as a result. In line with this idea, priming gender seems to have exactly this effect.17 In one study, for example, a group of French high school students was asked to rate the truth of stereotypes about gender difference in talent in maths and the arts before rating their own abilities in these domains. So, for these students, gender stereotypes were very salient as they rated their own ability. Next, they were asked to report their scores in maths and the arts on a very important national standardised test taken about two years earlier. Unlike students in a control condition, those in the stereotype-salient group altered the memory of their own objective achievements to fit the well-known stereotype. The girls remembered doing better than they really had in the arts, while the boys inflated their marks in maths. They gave themselves, on average, almost an extra 3 percent on their real score while the girls subtracted the same amount from their actual maths score. This might not seem like a large effect, but it’s not impossible to imagine two young people considering different occupational paths when, with gender in mind, a boy sees himself as an A student while an equally successful girl thinks she’s only a B.18 If this method of priming gender doesn’t seem very subtle, it’s because it isn’t. Of course that’s not to say that it might not provide a useful proxy for the real world. Gender stereotypes are ubiquitous, sometimes even in settings where they shouldn’t be. When the Scottish Qualifications Authority recently announced a drive to increase the dismally low numbers of senior school girls in subjects like physics, woodworking, and computing, some teachers freely expressed doubt that it was worth the effort. ‘I think it is much better to realise that there are differences between boys and girls, and ways in which they learn’, said a headmaster at a well-known Edinburgh private school. ‘Overall, boys choose subjects to suit their learning style, which is more logic based’.19 He was gracious enough to leave his audience to make the inference that girls’ preferred learning style is an illogical one, rather than making the point explicitly. But importantly, gender identity can also be primed without the help of openly expressed stereotypes. Have you, for example, ever filled in a question on a form that looks something like this? □ Male □ Female Even an innocently neutral question of this kind can prime gender. Researchers asked American university students to rate their mathematical and verbal abilities, but beforehand, some students were asked to note down their gender in a short demographics section, and others to mark their ethnicity.20 The simple process of ticking a box had surprising effects. European American women, for example, felt more confident about their verbal skills when gender was salient (consistent with the prevailing belief that females have the edge when it comes to language skills) and rated their maths ability lower, compared with when they identified themselves as European American. In contrast, European American men rated their maths ability higher when they were thinking of themselves as men (rather than as European Americans), but their verbal ability better when their ethnicity had been made salient. Even stimuli that are so subtle as to be imperceptible can bring about a change in selfperception.
Ritter, as a female interloper in the mostly male domain of medicine, was acutely aware of what today is referred to as stereotype threat (or, sometimes, social identity threat), the ‘real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies’.10 A now-substantial literature shows that, as in the mental rotation examples described earlier, changing the threat level of the context can have a tangible effect on ability.11 One very striking and real-world demonstration of this was provided by City University of New York psychologist Catherine Good and colleagues, who used as their participants more than 100 university students enrolled in a fast and difficult calculus class that was a pipeline to the hard sciences.12 The students were given a calculus test made up of questions from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) Maths test and, to motivate them, were told that they would get extra credit based on their performance. (In reality, everyone received the same credit.) The test packet handed out to each student included some information about the test. Students in the stereotype threat condition were told that the test was designed to measure their maths ability, to try to better understand what makes some people better at maths than others. This kind of statement can on its own create stereotype threat for women, who are well aware of their own stereotyped inferiority in mathematics.13 But added to this, in the nonthreat condition, was the information that despite testing on thousands of students no gender difference had ever been found. So what was the effect of this extra information? The men and women in the two groups had, on average, all received much the same course grades. You’d expect then, given their apparently equivalent ability, that males and females in the threat and nonthreat condition would perform at about the same level on the test. Instead, the researchers found that females performed better in the nonthreat condition, and this was particularly striking among Anglo-American participants, who generally show the greatest sex difference in maths performance. Among these participants, men and women in the threat condition, as well as men in the nonthreat condition, all scored about 19 percent on this very difficult test. But women in the nonthreat group scored an average of 30 percent correct, thus outperforming every other group – including both groups of men. In other words, the standard presentation of a test seemed to suppress women’s ability, but when the same test was presented to women as equally hard for men and women, it ‘unleashed their mathematics potential.’14
Non vedo come ciò possa andare contro la famiglia intesa come nucleo. Per la cronaca, lei se non sbaglio è sposata con marito e due figli.
Comunque non sto neanche dicendo che sono pienamente convinto di tutto ciò che ho letto in quel libro. In aggiunta puntualizzo che, anche in questo caso come in innumerevoli altri, non essendo io un esperto sto pur sempre compiendo, in parte, un atto di fede nei confronti della sua competenza e della sua onestà intellettuale, ma questo atto è incredibilmente (o incommensurabilmente) meno faticoso di quello richiesto dall'articolo che hai postato tu.
