Sex, Brains and Hands Critique - Article Example

Halpern (96) has begun her article by pointing out that the public has continuously been misinformed about sex differences by the media and even she has been misquote on several occasions. She (Halpern, 97) has admitted that when she started her research on this topic, she had “planned to show the weakness of the evidence in support of biological bases for any claimed cognitive differences between sexes.” But she (Halpern, 97) had found out “that the differences are sometimes large and that some of the biological data used to explain the differences were too strong and too consistent to ignore.” This is the premise in which she began to go deeply into her inquiries and came up with an interesting finding that there is some connection between “one’s sex and one’s preferred hand”, that is right or left handed-ness. Halpern (97) has further made it clear that as we assume, right or left handed-ness is “really a continuous variable that extends over many different indices of left or right sidedness.” But Halpern (97) has been cautious about her findings and has realized that by admitting that there are “sex and laterality differences in cognitive abilities”, one is opening a Pandora’s box. This is because, she (Halpern, 97), has said, such ideas might be misused “to justify discrimination, and or or affirmative action based on one’s sex and preferred hand.” Halpern (98) has also been aware of the fact that by projecting the differences between men and women, there is the danger of “ignoring the multitude of similarities” between these two genders. But still, she is of the opinion that such considerations should not hamper the attempts to carry out scientific research in this field. And what Halpern has emphasized is that it is only differences that she has been talking about, and not deficiencies (98). And she (Halpern, 98) has made it clear that “the study of sex differences, like any of the other individual or group differences that psychologists study, is not a zero-sum game where one group gains only at the expense of another.” The questions that have ben addressed by Halpern (98) on this topic include, the possibility of sex differences in cognitive abilities, if differences are there, whether they appear throughout an individual’s life, whether they are statistically prominent so that they cannot be ignored, whether these differences are biological or social or both, and what should be the practical use of the answers to all these questions. Halpern (99) has reviewed the existing literature in this area and has seen that almost all os these research works had studied sex differences in “three cognitive domains: verbal, visual-spatial and quantitative abilities.” And she (Halpern, 99) pointed out that these three cognitive domains are not at all “unitary.” For example, she (Halpern 99) has taken the case of verbal abilities and have scrutinized the methods used by earlier researchers to prove that though all these methods had involved language as a unifying factor, they were not addressing the “same sort of skills.” Halpern (99-100) has also elaborated on the methodologies of these previous research works to show that like verbal cognition, visual-spatial and quantitative abilities are also not heterogeneous and hence, the findings arrived at, using different methods of verbal, visual-spatial and quantitative abilities cannot be correlated. The studied opinion of Halpern (100) has been that “sex differences are most reliably found in the tail ends of mental ability distribution.” She (halpern, 100) has refuted the assumption by many researchers that males excel more in mathematical abilities as compared to females. Halpern (100) has argued that as we do not have similar statistics on the differences in verbal abilities, and as verbal ability is the basis for cognition even in the field of mathematics, these data are incomplete scientifically. She (Halpern, 100) has also added that, of the stutterers of a given population, “there are three to four times more male stutterers than there are female stutterers.” By revealing these data, Halpern (100) has exposed the contradiction in the assumption that men and left handed persons have more mathematical ability. Similarly, Halpern (101) has shown that dyslexia, which is a cognitive disorder is found to be more among males than females. But Halpern (101) has been cautious to remind that, “these data demonstrate strong sex-related differences, but we need to keep in mind that differences are much smaller for the vast majority of the population that does not fall into the tails of the distribution.” Another aspect of gender differences in cognitive abilities is related to the moment in life span when they appear. Halpern (101) has pointed out that no research has been able to prove development of such differences in an less than 6-7 years, which in turn, gives space to the possibility of environmental influences to play a role. Another interesting finding of Halpern (101) has been that girls have been found to excel in computational arithmetic at elementary school level, but this ability has been found to reverse in the mid-adoloscence level. Halpern (102) has also clearly suggested that “reports of very large effects on spatial-temporal tasks favoring males, and tests of associational fluency favoring females” are prevalent. It is also observed that “tasks in which females tend to excel and exhibit large differences involve generating synonyms, producing language fluently, and computing and solving anagrams (Halpern, 102). And Halpern (102) has conclusively suggested that these differences are caused by socio-cultural factors and has substantiated this argument by pointing out the differences in the variations in the data from different countries which have different “culturally determined sex roles.” By analyzing the great quantity of research done in the field of laterality, Halpern (102) studied the common conclusion that “the right hemisphere tends to be more dominant for nonlinguistic spatial tasks, and the left hemisphere more specialized for verbal tasks.” What she (Halpern, 103) has concluded is that hand preference is “an imperfect indicator of brain organization.” And Halpern (103) has revealed the flaw in the way of correlating sex differences and laterality just because these two phenomena are associated with the right and left hemispheres of the brain. She (Halpern 103) has observed that, such an attempt would be nothing but a short leap. The conclusion that Halpern (103-105) has arrived at is that “explanations of cognitive sex differences are much more complex than some single point along a continuum with biological at one end and psychosocial at the other.” By citing the example of very low performance of 12th and 8th graders of United States, as compared to the students of other industrialized nations, Halpern(105) has also concluded that a variety of complex factors go into such phenomena and to reduce the causes to biological factors alone would simply be biological determinism. Works Cited Halpern, Diane, “Sex, Brains & Hands: Gender Differences in Cognitive Abilities”, Skeptic, Vol.2, No.3, pp.96-103. Read More