I hope you don’t mind my piling on. This is one of those things (along with moral foundations theory) where it really frustrates me that people seem to believe it has much better scientific backing than it does.
My concern is that people didn’t start believing in the EQ-SQ theory based on statistical correlations found with Simon Baron-Cohen’s scales. They presumably started believing in it based on fuzzy intuitions arrived at through social experience.
It’s hard to gloss empathizing-systemizing/extreme male brain as a theory that Baron-Cohen himself arrived at in a principled or scientific way.
As presented in The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism (2002), researchers do find apparent sex differences in behavior and cognition. It’s possible to frame many of these as female-empathizing and male-systemizing. Then there are a bunch of other, mostly unrelated studies (and a few citation-free stereotypes) of behavior and cognition in autistic people, which can also be framed as low-empathizing and high-systemizing. The authors draw this figure, classifying brain types by the difference between empathizing and systemizing dimensions in “standard deviations from the mean”:
The authors write, “In this particular case, it was possible to see immediately what combination of EQ and SQ govern the data, but in general this might require using a principal components analysis.” By this they mean the C and D axes (sum and difference of normalized EQ and SQ), writing, “The combination of the normalization steps and the rotation represents a principal components analysis of of this correlated bivariate data set.” This paper doesn’t quote standard deviations of EQ and SQ scores, but it’s “possible to see immediately” that (1) the male-female differences on both axes are much less than two standard deviations (as indicated by the earlier, schematic figure, which also appears in later publications), and (2) the male-female difference in EQ+SQ (C Axis) is insignificant, while the autistic group has much lower C-Axis scores. This should not have passed review.
Clearly, I’m not someone whose mind you’re trying to change, but I think your concern is on target. EQ-SQ is a bad measure, but even taken seriously it provides about as much evidence against the “extreme male brain” idea as it does in favor. I doubt that highlighting more problems with EQ-SQ is going to move people very much.
I hope you don’t mind my piling on. This is one of those things (along with moral foundations theory) where it really frustrates me that people seem to believe it has much better scientific backing than it does.
It’s hard to gloss empathizing-systemizing/extreme male brain as a theory that Baron-Cohen himself arrived at in a principled or scientific way.
As presented in The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism (2002), researchers do find apparent sex differences in behavior and cognition. It’s possible to frame many of these as female-empathizing and male-systemizing. Then there are a bunch of other, mostly unrelated studies (and a few citation-free stereotypes) of behavior and cognition in autistic people, which can also be framed as low-empathizing and high-systemizing. The authors draw this figure, classifying brain types by the difference between empathizing and systemizing dimensions in “standard deviations from the mean”:
But the first, key quantitative paper I’m aware of is Empathizing and Systemizing in Males, Females, and Autism (2005). The actual plot of EQ and SQ looks like this:
The authors write, “In this particular case, it was possible to see immediately what combination of EQ and SQ govern the data, but in general this might require using a principal components analysis.” By this they mean the C and D axes (sum and difference of normalized EQ and SQ), writing, “The combination of the normalization steps and the rotation represents a principal components analysis of of this correlated bivariate data set.” This paper doesn’t quote standard deviations of EQ and SQ scores, but it’s “possible to see immediately” that (1) the male-female differences on both axes are much less than two standard deviations (as indicated by the earlier, schematic figure, which also appears in later publications), and (2) the male-female difference in EQ+SQ (C Axis) is insignificant, while the autistic group has much lower C-Axis scores. This should not have passed review.
Clearly, I’m not someone whose mind you’re trying to change, but I think your concern is on target. EQ-SQ is a bad measure, but even taken seriously it provides about as much evidence against the “extreme male brain” idea as it does in favor. I doubt that highlighting more problems with EQ-SQ is going to move people very much.