dmh@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (David Harmon) (10/26/88)
Reading the recent discussions here, I feel moved to comment. Note that my knowledge of psychology is picked up from background reading, low-level classes at Harvard, and observation, and is accordingly strictly amateur. (Despite my E-mail address, I am a CS student at Harvard.) I write with the authoritative voice for convenience -- please remember that this is all just my own observations. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the behavior of the people around me, and, while I do see clear differences between the majorities of men's and women's behavior, most of this seems to be socially determined. Some things to consider: I find that both men and women frequently hide their emotions, but they do so to different ends. Whereas men traditionally hide their emotions to maintain "cool", including stonefacing pain, I find women tending to project amiability, hide dissatisfaction, and (frequently) fake social interest in the person they are talking to. (All these traits, on both sides, tend to drive me up the wall, but that's a complaint for another newsgroup.) I definitely think these are social, and specific to America for that matter. I see no real evidence for the old saw about "women are more emotional". This is not to say that there are no people who show their true emotions -- I know many such people, and tend to prefer being around them, since non-verbal communication is very important to me. With regard to "rational" versus "emotional" versus "intuitive" thought: I consider emotion to be a darn good indicator of my needs at any given time. When my emotion is apparently in opposition to "reason", it usually means that I'm doing something for the wrong reasons, or that I'm stuck in a situation that just plain sucks, or that I have some conflict over a decision which I haven't yet resolved. As for intuition: I am a Computer Science major with a long history in other sciences. If I don't understand an algorithm, etc, intuitively, I don't understand it period. To me, intuition is going from the entire mass of data to a conclusion, instead of putting together individual items logically. It also seems to me that the human brain, male and female, is very much designed for intuition -- that's how we become experts in something. I do suspect that men and women tend to be trained into different value systems (men: profit, status, success; women: life, "emotional" goals, praise), but see no reason for that to be biological. Many of these roles become much less clear cut when Middle or Far Eastern cultures are considered as well as Western cultures. Just my $.02, David Harmon