It's All In Her Head

Dr Reiss said women seemed to analyse the cartoons more before rating them funny, because they were not necessarily expecting them to be as rewarding as men.

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punchline of the cartoon," said Dr Reiss."So when they got to the joke's punchline, they were more pleased about it." The funnier the cartoon, the more women's reward centres were activated.

This was not the case for men, who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the start.

Reiss's causal hypothesis seems clear enough: women's lower expectation of reward explains both why they analyse the joke more than men do (thus the greater prefrontal activity) and why they experience more of a pleasant surprise at the punchline (thus the greater mesolimbic activity). But notice what Reiss then goes on to conclude:

Dr Reiss said this had implications for the treatment of depression in women -- if their reward centres are more sensitive to emotional stimuli, it may help explain why depression strikes twice as many women as men.

Clearly Reiss is assuming that these differences in brain activity between men and women are the factors that explain the psychological and behavioural differences. If women have lower expectations of reward, or get depressed more easily than men do, it's just because the reward centers of their brains are"more sensitive" than men's -- a fact about their biology, not about their circumstances.

Yet consider how odd it would be for differing expectations of reward to be hardwired by our biology. We identify mental states -- beliefs, desires, feelings, expectations -- largely in terms of the role they play in our lives and activities. Part (only part -- I'm not advocating functionalism) of what it means for something to be a"desire to eat X," for example, is that it leads to pursuit of X, that together with the belief that Y is a means to getting X it generates a desire for Y, that it decreases in response to the information that X is poisonous, and so forth. A mental state that didn't interact with other mental states and with overt behaviour in something like these ways simply wouldn't count as a desire to eat X. Likewise then, an"expectation" that was invariant across changing experiences, that was immune to this sort of feedback, not strengthening with positive evidence or weakening with negative, would hardly count as an"expectation" at all; it would be a mere tropism. And this places a limit on the sorts of explanations of human behaviour we can regard as intelligible while still applying psychological concepts to it.

Suppose it's true that women enjoy the punchlines of jokes more than men do. (I have no idea whether that's true, but I'm happy to grant it for the sake of argument.) And suppose that Reiss's proposed explanation is correct -- that it's because women have less expectation of reward. (I likewise have no idea whether that's the correct explanation, but hey, I'll play along.) Why on earth should we infer that it's differences between men's and women's brains, rather than differences in their social circumstances, that explain these results? Might not women's lower expectation of reward owe something to the fact that in our society women receive fewer rewards than men -- that they bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid labour such as housework, that they earn less than men in the job market, that they are less likely to be credited for their accomplishments, that they are socialised to be nurturing and other-directed, etc.?

Now if women and men do have differing expectations of reward when they read cartoons, it's hardly surprising that this difference is correlated with a difference in brain activity; we are embodied beings, after all. But it would be a mistake to infer that the difference must therefore be innate rather than acquired; surely acquired psychological characteristics have neurophysiological correlates just as much as innate ones do. (The alternative would be rather weird, no?)

Likewise, if women are more depression-prone than men, no doubt this psychological fact is correlated with some neurophysiological fact about women's brains. I think it would be rather odd, though, to talk about this neurophysiological fact as the cause of the psychological fact; rather it just is the physical side of the psychological fact, the matter in which the form of depression-proneness is realised. At any rate, the correlation should not be taken as a license to disregard the possible (probable, surely) sociological causes of women's greater liability to depression. If this liability corresponds to greater mesolimbic sensitivity, that hardly settles the question of whether greater mesolimbic sensitivity itself has sociological causes. I worry that these studies'"implications for the treatment of depression in women" will be interpreted, mistakenly, as justifying a still greater emphasis on medicative rather than agentive approaches to therapy.

Neurophysiological determinism is bad philosophy -- and it's also bad politics. Placing the cause of women's depression-proneness and lower expectation of reward in their neurophysiology rather than in their social circumstances provides a convenient excuse for neglecting or denying the need for any change in those circumstances. This is how power structures reinforce themselves -- by generating their own ideological rationalisations.

I'm not making the silly charge that Dr. Reiss and the other scientists who produced this study are evil sexists deliberately plotting to perpetuate women's subjection. What I am saying is that the conceptual tools we use to analyse the societies in which we live are also the products of those societies and will often share their shortcomings. Facts that challenge the dominant paradigm tend to become invisible, not because anybody is actively covering them up (though of course that sometimes happens) but because the dominant paradigm determines what is salient.