Do Women Have an Empathic Accuracy Advantage? Empathic Accuracy – Hybrid Offspring of Interpersonal Accuracy and Empathy Concentrate Only on a Narrow Segment of Interpersonal Accuracy, Looking Exclusively at Accuracy Motivation Made for a Woman

Our local newspaper recently printed a cartoon in which one teenage female character asked her young adult brother why he's glum and he responds ―It's nuthin'.‖ In the next frame, with only his laconic answer to go on, she summarizes his current career, social and romantic woes. In the final frame, he asks ―How do you DO that?‖ to which she responds with a shrug, ―I'm female.‖ The funny pages and aphorisms are full of stereotypes about women's ―intuition‖ and what seems at times, perhaps particularly to men, women's uncanny ability to read others' thoughts. This chapter asks whether this reputation is deserved, and if so, wherein lies the source of women's skill. Greater aptitude? Greater motivation? Or some combination of the two? Two paradigm for measuring empathic accuracy–the ability to accurately infer other people's thoughts and feelings – has provided quite a bit of empirical data that address this question. The results of this research, however, have not been generous in providing simple answers. A rich mix of motivation and gender role expectations, combined with a messy set of outcomes that defy simple clarity, must be considered to understand women's ―sometimes‖ advantage at empathic accuracy. No wonder ―women's intuition‖ has a gauzy mystique to it. When we pull back the veil on empathic accuracy, the female advantage is considerably less impressive than the stereotypes would have us believe. And yet, as it turns out, there is something to the myth. After reviewing the literature linking women and empathic accuracy in order to write this chapter, our conclusions, which (spoiler alert!) we will give away up front and later elaborate upon, have been whittled down to three qualified statements: 1. Questioning or challenging a person's interpersonal sensitivity motivates greater empathic accuracy from women, but not from men, which sets this particular manipulation apart from other incentives that seem more gender-neutral. 2. Communion, the habitual motivation to attend to and make connections with others that is a central feature of the feminine gender role, is predictive of empathic accuracy—but only some of the time. That lukewarm endorsement gets a slight boost when one notes that communion is one of few individual difference variables whose ability to predict empathic accuracy has been replicated. On the other hand, as often as not, there is no discernible effect of communion—and even when there is, it is very small. 3. Even in the absence of …