Was that new Science paper hyped and over-interpreted because of its liberal message?

By guest blogger Stuart Ritchie It would be very concerning if “girls as young as six years old believe that brilliance is a male trait”, as The Guardian reported last week, especially if “this view has consequences”, as was argued in The Atlantic. Both stories implied girls’ beliefs about gender could be part of the explanation for why relatively few women are found working in fields such as maths, physics, and philosophy. These news stories, widely shared on social media, were based on a new psychology paper by Lin Bian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues, published in Science, entitled “Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests”. The paper reported four studies, which at first appear to have simple, clear-cut conclusions. But a closer look at the data reveals that the results are rather weak, and the researchers’ interpretation goes far beyond what their studies have shown. In one task in the first study, the children were told about a “really, really smart” person, then asked to choose, from a selection of pictures of males and females, who they thought the description was about. At ages 5, 6, and 7, boys tended to pick a male picture, suggesting they linked being male with being smart (at the three ages, 71 per cent, 65 per cent, and 68 per cent of boys showed this “own-gender” bias, respectively). On the other hand, girls linked being female with being smart 69 pe...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Gender guest blogger Methods Occupational Source Type: blogs