I almost titled this “Once More Into The Breach, Part Deux” in reference to my Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends post from last week, which criticized the way in which conversations about gender disparity in professional Philosophy continue to be framed by concept-distorting and argument-disfiguring gender essentialism. My targets today are not “philosophers” proper– though they’re close– but their mistake under consideration in what follows is identical to that of many philosophers. I’m talking about cognitive scientists and neuroscientists who are something like the first cousins of philosophers (philosophers of science and philosophers of mind, in particular), only with far better funding and far more expensive toys. I sometimes jokingly say of the whole lot (philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists) that they tend to fall into one of two categories: (1) those that do interesting research and say interesting things about the relationship between our material brains and whatever it is that we call “mind” or “consciousness,” and (2) those that want to look at pretty pictures of brains and then speculate wildly. This distinction has been made clear, I think, by a recently published a study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Sex differences in the structural connections of the human brain,” which has been widely hurrahed and a little-less-widely harrumphed since its appearance in a Guardian article, a Telegraph article and (on this side of the pond) a Los Angeles Times article earlier this week.
Count me among the harrumph-ers.
[Disclaimer: I haven’t read the whole report (which is behind an academic access-wall) and I’m neither a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist nor a philosopher of mind. Even after looking it up, I’m still not sure that I have a real, substantive understanding of what diffuse tensor imaging (DTI) is or is meant to measure.]
[Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I am, however, a philosopher. I am trained to recognize the difference between stronger and weaker propositional claims and arguments. I’m also a philosopher trained in recognizing the sorts of implicit biases that often make weak propositional claims and arguments appear strong.]
Some who are significantly more-in-the-know than I, including Berit Brogaard at newAPPS, have argued that we should blame the reporters, not the researchers, for the uptake of this study. That is, the reports of this study’s findings are misleading, according to Brogaard, and those reports rely on a fundamental misreading of the study itself. Brogaard’s more sympathetic reading of the study points out that its researchers’ claims do not, in fact, extend as far as the popular media accounts of them do. Rather, on Brogaard’s reading, the study merely “confirmed pronounced sex differences… in individuals between 12 and 14 years of age” BUT, importantly, “did not show that the changes in connectivity in the 14-22 age group will last beyond the twentysecond year” and also that “gender differences aren’t very significant until the early teen years… during which the brain undergoes massive pruning, and the activities
children engage in at least partially modulate this pruning of neural
connections.” In sum, Brogaard argues, the research does not purport to have found hard-wired gender differences in brain connectivity, but precisely the opposite. He writes:
So, the study simply doesn’t reveal “strong hard-wired differences”
in men and women. Quite on the contrary. The findings seem to be
inconsistent with genetic determinism as well as connectome determinism
and consistent with the theory that if there is a pronounced and
long-lasting difference in brain connectivity between men and women,
then it is plausibly fostered by our societal norms.
So, how did this study get so grossly misreported? Surely I’m not the only one wondering such. Just take a look at the titles of the popular media reports of this study: the article in The Guardian was titled “Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal”, the Telegraph’s was “Brains of men and women poles apart”, the Los Angeles Times’ was “Brains of men and women show hard-wired differences.” If Brogaard is right, if those titles report something “quite the contrary” to the study’s actual findings, how did that happen?