Men Still Terrible at Detecting Subtle Emotional Cues From Women
LatestNEW STUDY SAYS: Men aren’t so great at guessing your emotions, but they can read dudes like they were separated at birth with the exact same ball sack. Is it because you’re a master bluffer with dead eyes, or because they are biologically hard-wired to put bros before hos? It’s both! It’s neither! What it is is dumb.
But first, the study: 22 men ranging in age from 21 to 52 were left alone with their penises and asked to look at 36 pairs of human eyes. Some of the eyes belonged to women, and some belonged to men, but the penises were never up for grabs.
Dicks in pants, they were asked to choose actual words to describe the emotions behind the eyes they were peeping. And then the dumb: Neither age nor penis helped them decipher the emotional state of the vagina-owned eyes they gazed into very well. But give them a set of eyes they could call their own and it’s as if there were some discerning evolutionary advantage at work:
In addition, their brains showed different activation when looking at men versus women’s eyes. Men’s amygdala — a brain region tied to emotions, empathy, and fear — activated more strongly in response to men’s eyes. In addition, other brain regions tied to emotion and behavior didn’t activate as much when the men looked at women’s eyes.
The findings suggest that men are worse at reading women’s emotions. This “theory of mind” is one of the foundations for empathy, so the deficit could lead men to have less empathy for women relative to men, the researchers write.
But exactly why this happens isn’t clear. While men could be culturally conditioned to pay less attention to women’s emotional cues, another possibility is that their differential response is hard-wired by humans’ evolutionary past.
“As men were more involved in hunting and territory fights, it would have been important for them to be able to predict and foresee the intentions and actions of their male rivals,” the researchers write in the paper.
Ugh, either this is the answer to all the sexism of all time ever, or it’s just a reminder that next time your husband “forgets” to bring you flowers, just remember: He used to have worry about buffalo, OK honey? He’s not good at that yet. Give him another 10 million years?