Indeed, sex differences are typically absent in relevant experimental tasks and physiological measures. While this evidence seems to reveal sex differences in both empathy and moral judgment, it stems from instruments likely to bias responses towards gender-role stereotypes. Similarly, results from self-administered measures have motivated the view that women are more care-oriented than men in moral reasoning. Supporting evidence for gender stereotypes has been obtained through self-report empathy questionnaires, which may be strongly biased by gender-relevant social expectations. Throughout, the term “gender” is used to refer to “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex”, while the term “sex” refers to a person’s biological status. These and other gender stereotypes have perpetuated the notion that women are more empathetic and caring than men. “Boys will be boys”, “girls are emotional and sensitive”, “men don’t cry, women do”. įunding: This work was partially supported by grants from CONICET, CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1170010), FONCyT-PICT 2012-0412, FONCyT-PICT 2012-1309, FONDAP 15150012, and the INECO Foundation.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data are available from. Received: JanuAccepted: Published: June 20, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Baez et al. Pavlova, Universitatsklinikum Tubingen, GERMANY (2017) Men, women…who cares? A population-based study on sex differences and gender roles in empathy and moral cognition. Awareness of the role of measurement instruments in this field may hone our understanding of the links between empathy, sex differences, and gender roles.Ĭitation: Baez S, Flichtentrei D, Prats M, Mastandueno R, García AM, Cetkovich M, et al. In particular, self-reports may induce biases leading individuals to assume gender-role stereotypes. These findings suggest that sex differences in empathy are highly driven by the assessment measure. In addition, utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas were less frequent in women, although these differences also had small effect sizes. Conversely, women did portray themselves as more empathic through self-reports. Results showed some sex differences in the experimental paradigm, but with minuscule effect sizes. In the second study, a subsample ( n = 334) completed a self-report empathy questionnaire. Moreover, we investigated the relationship between empathy and moral judgment. First, we examined whether sex differences emerge in a large population-based sample ( n = 10,802) when empathy is measured with an experimental empathy-for-pain paradigm. To elucidate the issue, we conducted two large-scale studies.

However, available results mainly come from separate populations with relatively small samples, which may inflate effect sizes and hinder comparability between both empirical corpora. Whereas experimental and neuropsychological measures show no consistent sex effect, self-report data consistently indicates greater empathy in women. Research on sex differences in empathy has revealed mixed findings.

Empathetic listening men or women