Everyone knows that women are better than men at putting themselves in other people’s shoes, but now science proves it. Empathy—the ability to understand, imagine, or share emotions others may be feeling—is an important trait to have in almost all walks of life, especially in business.
Empathy helped leaders become more successful in promoting their business, and a workplace that encourages empathetic relationships has even proven to be a more effective. Longtime economist and political adviser Jeremy Rifkin even wrote a the whole book about it, in which he describes empathy as “the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization.” Now there’s evidence that men everywhere have a lot to learn from women about understanding other people’s feelings.
There are different types of empathy. Affective empathy, for example, is a measure of a person’s ability to share another person’s feelings and feel what they feel, think feeling sad when a friend tells you a painful story. sad. Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the extent to which a person is able to understand another person’s feelings and accept their point of view in order to appreciate something that makes them feel that way.
On average, women scored significantly higher on perceived empathy scores than men regardless of nationality, spoken language, and age, a big new point. learn published on Mondays in the magazine PNAS establish.
The study, led by neuroscientists and psychologists at the University of Cambridge in the UK, Harvard University in the US, the IMT School of Advanced Study in Italy, the University of Bar-Ilan and the University of Haifa in Israel, used Use an online study. test to assess the empathic responses of more than 300,000 16- to 70-year-olds from 57 countries around the world.
Women, perhaps unsurprisingly, did a lot better. Women scored higher on cognitive empathy than men in every country in the test, and in 36 of them, women received much higher scores than men.
“Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon—that women are generally more empathetic than men—is present in many countries around the globe. David Greenberg, psychologist and social neuroscientist at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and lead author of the study, said: speak of its findings.
The test used in the study is called the “Mind-In-Eye Reading” test, and it shows users a static image of people’s eyes before asking test-takers to identify the emotion they feel. each image is showing. the test is first development in the UK in 1997 and has since become one of the most widely used tests in the field of psychology known as the “theory of mind”, which seeks to better understand the ability to perception feeling.
The new study builds on existing research showing Women are more cognitively empathetic than men. A 2011 study even showed that women are on average more empathetic than men for animals and will most likely support animal rights movements.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist and author of the latest study, leads another study in 2001 discovered a significant “trend towards gender difference” in favor of women when it comes to cognitive empathy.
The researchers were unable to pinpoint why women are so much better equipped to understand the emotions of others than men. They suggest that this ability has as much to do with education and the environment as with biology, recommending that future research focus on the difference.
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