Gender differences in empathy and perspective taking - new article out!

Despite broad interest, experimental evidence for gender differences in social abilities has produced mixed results. A new article by Brennan McDonald and Philipp Kanske sheds light on this issue. Using this naturalistic social task, they demonstrated that women report greater empathy, compassion, and willingness to engage in prosocial giving than men, while no gender differences were found in perspective taking. However, an exploratory novel finding suggests that perspective taking performance may be positively associated with prosocial giving in women but not in men. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of experimental designs that incorporate naturalistic, complex stimuli to better capture the social realities that men and women experience in their everyday lives.

The article can be found here.