The essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain

Simon Baron-Cohen
(Penguin) $39.95 HB

As a psychological thesis this is very light-weight, but as general Sunday afternoon reading, it is really thought-provoking. Cohen makes many gestures towards scientific method, but his concepts and arguments are mostly quite vague, and even occasionally contradictory, if you can be bothered reading into the details. But the topic is compelling, and Cohen's view of it will probably help us to understand it more deeply.

Cohen proposes that there are two basic brain-types: the more empathic brain and the more systematic brain. The empathic brain is that which understands human emotions, motivations, and social interaction; the systematic brain is that which analyses the systems of rules governing non-human phenomena. Cohen claims that a higher aptitude in either one of these capacities is usually accompanied by lower aptitude in the other (though there are a few people who excel in both), and that statistically males are more likely to have a systematic brain, while females are more likely to be empathic. He also argues that these different brain-types are at least somewhat 'essential' - that is to say, based on our biological makeup, with social and cultural factors having only a later, secondary influence. Autism and Asperger's Syndrome are the subject of the last few chapters, where Cohen proposes that these conditions are manifestations of the systematic (male) brain in extremis.

Cohen's views on the infamous nature/nurture debate are refreshingly plausible, especially when compared to the absolute anti-essentialism which some of us are now force-fed at university. Men's and women's faces are different, their chests are different, their hands and feet are different, their bums are different, the bits between their legs are different. so why is it so shocking a proposal that their brains might be different? However, much more delicacy, and much more suspicion of traditional prejudices, should be exercised in discussing what exactly the differences might be - and it is here that Cohen's claims can be a bit lacking. There is very little reflection on the validity of his concepts, methods, or presumptions, while his analysis of sex-differences slides casually between psychological research and good old-fashioned gender clichés (for example, that women talk about each others' appearance, while men talk about the comparative advantages of different highway routes). An extreme example of how boldly Cohen makes his claims, without questioning his assumptions, is the following

My colleagues [names various] and I recently completed an emotion taxonomy (an encyclopedia of emotions, if you like), and discovered that there are 412 discrete (mutually exclusive, semantically distinct) human emotions.

This claim is really quite mind-boggling. Is there any possibility that I might have a new emotion, number 413? What about experiencing a mixture of two or more from among the 412? Can there be two different emotions with the same name, or an emotion with no name? How did Cohen & Co. decide when their taxonomy was 'complete'? For anyone else who finds the idea of a 'complete emotional taxonomy' completely incredible, further information can be found at www.human-emotions.com

The book presents a range of intriguing results drawn from the author's own statistical research, though these results are fitted rather too conveniently into his own theoretical framework of empathic vs. systematic. In a postive sense, this makes The Essential Difference an enjoyable book to read and disagree with. The basic distinction on which the book rests is itself open to questioning, since Cohen avoids any technical explanation of what exactly he considers to be the 'essential difference' between empathic and systematic thought-processes. There might be more overlap than he allows. Cohen casually sweeps thought-processes such as car maintenance into the 'systemising' basket, but why can't these activities also be seen as a kind of empathy? And he repeatedly insists that social empathy, the key characteristic of the 'female brain', is somehow exclusive to anything that might be called systematic; but aren't there systems of thought at work in socialising, too? Cohen presents plenty of evidence that there is some kind of difference between men's and women's brains (the book includes a good chapter on links between hormone-levels and various mental aptitudes), but it would take a much denser book than this to convincingly describe that difference. His arguments and research methods may well be more rigorous in his academic writings - Cohen is a Cambridge professor, and the recipient of various psychologists' awards, so he must have something going for him - but in this piece of writing he gives us a rather dumbed-down, uncritical version of his theory.

The four appendices on the end of the book are good fun. Each is one of Cohen's own psychological surveys, testing your ability to read emotions from the look in peoples' eyes, your empathic ability, your propensity for systemising, and your rating on the Autism Spectrum. Taking these tests was absolutely irresistable, and I look forward to subjecting as many of my friends as possible to the same. Once again, I couldn't help but question Cohen's methods - for example, on the multiple-choice eye-reading test, how was it decided which was the correct interpretation for each pair of eyes? Maybe I was just resentful because I rated as a below-average eye-reader.

Review by John Mansfield