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Gender and Political Cognition: Integrating Evolutionary Biology and Political Science1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Roger D. Masters
Roger D. Masters*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
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Abstract

Although men and women often differ in political attitudes and behavior, there is no widely accepted scientific explanation of such phenomena. After surveying evidence concerning gender differences in the fields of social psychology, ethology, neurology, cultural anthropology, and political science, five hypotheses concerning the way males and females respond to social cues are derived from the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection. The predicted differences in the mode of political cognition are then shown to be consistent with findings from experimental studies of emotional and cognitive reactions to televised facial displays of political leaders.

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , August 1989 , pp. 3 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

Notes

2. Although the words “gender” and “sex” have been given precise definitions (e.g., Schubert, , 1983a), there is continued disagreement and uncertainty about the distinctions between them. While “gender” usually implies an emphasis on socially or culturally defined roles, and whereas “sex” more often refers to physiological differences, the two words will be used without rigid distinction in the current text.Google Scholar

3. Although some feminists deny the existence of “consistent and conclusive evidence of sex differences of any type” (Sapiro, , 1986: 39), perhaps for fear of eliciting discrimination against women, the data show the wisdom of the argument that biologically based differences between women and men can serve as a sounder foundation of feminist claims (Birke, , 1986).Google Scholar

4. In a recent study, a scale of “fantasy empathy” used for the first time in these experiments proved to be an important independent variable predicting psychophysiological arousal when subjects viewed displays of Reagan and Hart (McHugo, , Lanzetta, , and Bush, , 1987). Reanalyzing our prior results, the ratio of hedonic to agonic descriptive scores seems to serve as an individual difference measure with a similar effect (unpublished data).Google Scholar

5. Further evidence from this experiment confirms this interpretation. In addition to asking subjects how they felt about Reagan twenty-four hours after seeing the newscasts, emotional responses to each news story were monitored immediately after it was shown. Since subjects had no idea of the purpose of our study (most presumed that we were concerned with the fairness of network journalism), it is not surprising that these emotions were mainly a response to the substance of the story. To analyze the immediate effects of the silent images edited into the news stories, scale scores for viewers' feelings of joy and anger after each stimulus were studied using a multiple regression model. The emotional response (on a zero to six scale) was taken as the dependent variable, with the difference between anger/threat and happiness/reassurance displays modeled as a dummy variable. To control for prior attitude, an interactive term (modeling the different responses to Reagan's supporters and critics to different displays) was included. The results show significant display effects and interactive effects for male responses of joy, but not for male responses of anger or any emotional responses by females. Males' emotional responses of joy are significantly lower after watching news stories with anger/threat displays than with happy/reassuring displays, but male supporters are significantly more favorable after seeing anger/threat than male critics. For females the main effect of display on emotions of joy is not quite significant (p =. 11) and there is no effect of prior attitude interacting with display. In other words, emotional responses to newscasts show that males' attitudes to Reagan are activated by a silent nonverbal cue in a newscast whereas this does not occur for females.Google Scholar