Dr. Jed Diamond points out that most men, like most women, are trustworthy.
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I’ve been helping men and the people who love them for more than 40 years. One of the most important areas of health and well-being is “trust.” Without trust we can’t have good relationships at home, at work, or in the world. We’re living in a world where many believe we can’t trust our government, we can’t trust big business, and many believe we can’t trust men. I counsel many men and women who have major concerns about trusting men.
“I’ve been burned too many times,” one woman told me.“My last husband had multiple affairs. We’re now divorced and I don’t know whether I can ever trust a man again.” Of course I hear similar things from some of my male clients who have been betrayed by a woman in their lives and are having a difficult time trusting again.
Clearly there are trustworthy men as well as trustworthy women and there are those who we should all be wary of trusting. Yet, we have to ask, “Is there something about being male that makes us less trustworthy?” This is an important question since trust is so vitally important in all of our relationships.
Dr. John Gottman may know more about how to have a successful (or unsuccessful) relationship than anyone else in the world. Gottman has spent decades observing the communication styles, thought patterns, and behaviors of thousands and thousands of couples in his famous “Love Lab.” In his book, What Makes Love Last: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal he offers down-to earth advice about how to assess trust, how to develop and deepen it in our relationships, and how to trust again after we’ve been burned.
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Are Males Less Trustworthy Than Females?
In this world of gender equality, it isn’t popular to suggest there may be some inherent differences (beyond the obvious biological ones) between men and women. But new research from the emerging field of gender-specific medicine suggests that there are significant differences between males and females. We now know that there are differences in everything from rheumatoid arthritis to Alzheimer’s. In his book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male & Female Brain, sex and gender researcher Simon Baron-Cohen offers a clear and concise statement about the male and female brain.
“The female brain,” says Baron-Cohen, “is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.” Being able to empathize with others makes it much easier to trust others and in turn engage in behaviors that make us more trustworthy. Baron-Cohen points out that he’s not talking about all men or all women. We’re talking about averages. We can say that most women have brains that make it easier for them to empathize and most men have brains that make it easier for them to work well with systems. But we all know men who are much more empathic than many women and women who are much better with system building than many men.
Our sex-specific brains also influence the kinds of hormones that males and females possess, which in turn can influence how easy it is for us to trust and be trust worthy. Oxytocin is a hormone secreted in the pituitary gland in the brain. According to Theresa Crenshaw, M.D. author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust: Discovering Our Sex Hormones and How They Determine Who We Love, When We Love, and How Often We Love, “oxytocin is involved with the birth process and breastfeeding, promotes touching and bonding between mates and between parents and children. The hormone estrogen enhances the effect of oxytocin while testosterone blocks it.” So, based on brain structure and hormonal balance, males, on average, are not as primed for trust as are females.
Neuroscientist Paul J. Zak, Ph.D. has done extensive work on oxytocin and how it impacts trust in men and women. We may not like it, but women, as a group, produce more oxytocin than men and that has a profound impact on our trust levels. “For every experiment I’ve run,” says Zak, “women release more oxytocin than men do and they are consequently more generous, more trustworthy, and more empathic. This is a major reason why women are nicer than men and connect more easily to others.”
Not only do males have less oxytocin to start with, but that quintessentially male hormone, testosterone, blocks the effect of oxytocin. We’re all familiar with the way in which testosterone (remember it’s highest in young males and decreases as we get older) affects our behavior. “It’s testosterone,” says Zak, “that prompts male risk-taking behavior, male violence, as well as the gender’s most characteristic behavior, the reckless pursuit of sex, regardless of consequences.”
So why would a social species like human beings have evolved over the last 2 million years if one half of the species, the males, are less able to empathize and trust? Think of it this way. There is a time when empathy and trust are good, but not always. If man the hunter, with his connection to wild animals, was too empathic he wouldn’t want to go out hunting. When men went on long hunts they had to leave their families. If a man was too empathic, he might want to stay at home and the tribe would lose the benefit of the meat he would bring home. Finally, in a world where hostile tribes might attack the camp, it was good to have males who would be distrustful and on the lookout for danger.
“Over millions of years of evolution,” says Zak, “what emerged was a two-pronged approach to keeping the species alive. Either gender was capable of violence and aggression, as well as bonding and compassion, but men (high in testosterone) were hormonally predisposed to take the lead on the former, while women (releasing high levels of oxytocin in response to stimuli) were hormonally predisposed to take the lead on the latter.”
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So, can we trust men? Here are my thoughts. We’re rarely interested in whether men as a group are more trustworthy than women as a group (Unless we’re scientists doing research studies). We’re really interested in whether we can trust a particular man. The best way to decide is to be smart about our trust. Most men, like most women, are trustworthy. If we believe in trust and trust others, we’re likely to get trust in return. If we lead with suspicion we’ll get distrust in return.
The really good news is that regardless of our present level of trust or trustworthiness, we can improve with practice. But we have to begin by accepting who we are and where we are on the trust continuum. If we’ve been burned in the past, it may take us longer to open our hearts to taking the risk to try again. If we’re male, we may have to work a bit harder. But it’s worth it. Learning how to be smart about trust can make our lives more wonderful, then either being overly trusting and naïve or being overly suspicious and fearful.
In their book, Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World, Stephen Covey and Greg Link say, “Smart Trust is judgment. It’s a competency and a process that enables us to operate with high trust in a low-trust world. It minimizes risk and maximizes possibilities.” They go on to say that we can lead with trust, then analyze the situation and see if our trust is being reciprocated. These are skills we can all learn.
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Photo:by vagawi/Flickr
Hi I’m a neuroscientist myself. Of the whole institute I worked at, no ones believed in this biologistic explanations. As for the quoted sources I recommended Cordelia Fine’s book “Delusions of Gender”. The data and the theory by Cohen for instance have some major flaws. If anything, we know that the human brain is highly plastic, and even the hormonal level changes as a result of our actions (so it is not exclusively the other way round!), something which has been shown for instance the risk affine behavior (raises the level of testosterone). Testosterone btw has shown to raise empathy… Read more »
Thanks for the note. I’m always interesting in learning more about sex and gender. If you have new information about testosterone and other ways in which similarities and differences play out I’d enjoy the reference.
Not a neuroscientist or endocrinologist, but I imagine that hormonal interactions and are inherently complex and unpredictable. Plus I wonder at the use of Oxytocin as an exclusive measure of empathy. It begs a lot of very basic questions, like how you define something so intangible as empathy. Is there a conventional agreement on its characteristics of expression in both behavior and biochemistry? Empathic (empathetic?) behavior can be a result of rational choice as well as hormonal effect. Very interesting, though.
Hi Jed
Thanks for an interesting article with lots of links to further reading.