BEST DEBATE STILL FALLS SHORT.Let's let's Contraction of let us. say, for argument's sake, that you're very good at reasoning things through and also at expressing yourself. You should win more than your share of debates and disagreements, right? Not if you're a woman. After a 10-year study of the way men and women argue, Elizabeth Mapstone, a British psychologist psy·chol·o·gist n. A person trained and educated to perform psychological research, testing, and therapy. psychologist , has concluded that the most important factor in who wins is not what you say, but your sex. The research consisted of a diary study in which more than 700 people in Britain and North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. kept diaries in which they recorded the details of every argument they had. Focus groups and interviews expanded on the information. ``I was surprised and depressed,'' Mapstone said. ``What I expected to be able to show was that really there were no differences between men and women. What I discovered was that it mattered terribly who the other person was in the argument, and most especially it mattered what gender the other person was.'' Mapstone was especially shocked at what she called the ``cultural stereotypes'' that men and women used in their argument diaries. ``When I analyzed an·a·lyze tr.v. an·a·lyzed, an·a·lyz·ing, an·a·lyz·es 1. To examine methodically by separating into parts and studying their interrelations. 2. Chemistry To make a chemical analysis of. 3. what people were saying, the hair started to stand up on the back of my neck. Men would say, `But of course she was letting her emotions run away with her, she was just making an emotional stance, you couldn't really argue with her.' ``Women claimed that they had been rational, cool and logical and that if they hadn't got their point across, it was the man's fault because he hadn't really been listening, he didn't care, he didn't want to know. When I examined the men further it became clear that the men really didn't want to know, they weren't even attempting to understand.'' Mapstone found that women use all kinds of strategies to avoid being stereotyped: They lower their voice pitch, control hand movements, straighten body posture posture /pos·ture/ (pos´choor) the attitude of the body.pos´tural pos·ture n. 1. A position of the body or of body parts. 2. . Despite all this, Mapstone found that at work and in the home women are ``considered and described as irrational ir·ra·tion·al adj. Not rational; marked by a lack of accord with reason or sound judgment. irrational adjective Unreasonable, illogical and emotional.'' A report on Mapstone's research was published in the British Journal of Social Psychology British Journal of Social Psychology is a journal published by the British Psychological Society (BPS). It publishes original papers on subjects like social cognition, attitudes, group processes, social influence, intergroup relations, self and identity, nonverbal communication, . |
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