Study finds negative association between empathizing and calculation ability | Hacker News Reader

Study finds negative association between empathizing and calculation ability

nature.com

189 pointsrandomname271 comments

Curious to see no mention (in the paper or comments here) of previous neuro-imaging experiments that showed that brain networks associated with empathy and those associated with logical thought are antagonists, and it does not appear to be possible to have both active at the same time:

http://blog.case.edu/think/2012/10/30/empathy_represses_anal...

There's a long pop-science suspicion of this, dating back to Jungian psychology (where Thinking vs. Feeling was considered a primitive dichotomy). It's enshrined in many of our stereotypes about socially awkward nerds, and also in the structure of the tech industry (which has separate departments for sales vs. engineering, and common wisdom that you need a hustler & a hacker for startups).

This seems much more likely, as an explanation, than ideas that poor math performance may be transmitted socially, although of course it'd need to be rigorously tested in an experiment to be proven.

The idea that it's a social thing rather than a biological thing feels like a weaker claim. At the risk of sounding a bit reactionary, it seems a bit like claims relating to sex or race: there's a lot of pressure not to discover "natural" rather than socially-constructed differences.

I love how the discovery that humans are not all the same species has been completely glossed over. Humans are at least three separate genetic lineages (maybe more) comprising of Africans, African and Neanderthal hybrids (all non-Africans), and a third hybrid made up of African/Neanderthals/Denosovians (Melanesians).

For what definition of "species" is this true? (The definition I know is, a male A and a female B belong to the same species if B can give birth to A's children who can then themselves reproduce. By this definition, all humans are the same species. This is not to say that there aren't significant genetic differences between groups of humans coming from different lineages, just that it doesn't make them different species according to the definition I know.)

The definition of a species is not limited to being able to produce offspring or even fertile offspring. Lions and tigers can have offspring (ligers) who are sometimes fertile yet I doubt anyone would consider them the same species.

More fundamentally even if we decide that all homo lineages are the one species, it is the ignoring of all these lineages and the interbreeding between them that is the interesting observation. We now know that Neanderthals did not become extinct yet this is total ignored.

That assumes facts not in evidence - namely, that the Empathy/Logic split is set and unchangeable. Specifically, that

a) the split is not influenced by societal pressures b) the split is fixed, neither math nor social skills are learnable beyond some innate abilities. c) it is indeed impossible to have both abilities and merely utilize them in a mutually exclusive way.

While this _is_ a very interesting finding, it's in no way saying anything about the nature vs. nurture debate. In fact, the paper quotes several sources on the fact that "This is, in part, due to the fact that there is little evidence of significant gender differences in math performance in elementary school"

- which still somewhat strongly implies social factors.

Fact of the matter is, we don't know. We do know that society currently discourages girls from pursuing "math-y" things. It'd be nice if we stopped that.

That doesn't mean that all girls should now pursue STEM careers, but it'd be good if we were open to that idea.

It doesn't actually assume those facts - the study I linked to showed that empathy and logic cannot be active at the same time. Indeed, it concludes with the suggestion that healthy adults tend to cycle rapidly between the empathic and logical brain networks, and that pathologies like autism or Williams Syndrome occur when people get "stuck" in one neural network or the other.

It does have implications to how we might address poor math performance or poor social skills (if this theory is correct, which still isn't proven yet), notably by training people to recognize when one skillset is called for or the other, and encourage them to concentrate on the task at hand regardless of whether the other skillset may be more natural for them.

The study from the original post didn't find evidence of the E-S split. It's possible their SQ test was flawed. It's also possible practicing math causes your social skills to atrophy.

The conclusion of the authors could be accurate, but we definitely don't really know the whole picture yet.

My role involves both analysis and creativity (marketing). I personally find I can't shift from tasks heavy in one to the other multiple times through the day and offer my best work at both. If I need to be creative I try and make my day creative and vice versa for data analysis. I imagine if you consistently stay in one state you get an element of burn-in that makes shifting harder.

This is my struggle! I write fiction and it is excrutiating switching to analytical intensive tasks while managing to be sociable.

I have the exact same issue. I've done well with trying to structure my days similarly, but there are inevitably times where something needs to be done immediately and of course it's never in tune with how I planned the day heh. Trying to explain exactly how disruptive task-switching across domains is for me personally is not something I've been able to communicate effectively to non-technical peers and superiors.

Sure, I can switch from programming to InDesign today! I didn't want to finish that this week anyway. (I exaggerate for effect, but not by much.)

Would be very interesting to see how this affects live poker. Like do the good players cycle as mentioned elsewhere? Or maybe using both networks at once is learnable? Or maybe they learn to pick up empathetic cues with other networks (the logical ones)? Or do they just disregard empathy?

Looks to me mostly like a cluster of kids with very high “calculation skills” and relatively low “empathizing quotient” is skewing their result. If you remove that group, the remaining data looks pretty uncorrelated at a glance: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23011/figures/1

“Math Fluency is a measure of speeded application of arithmetic procedures. Problems included a mix of addition, subtraction, and multiplication with operands up to 10. Children were given 3 minutes to complete as many as possible. We computed a Calculation Skills composite measure, which combines the Calculation and Math Fluency subtests, in order to have a single measure capturing arithmetic ability.

“The primary guardian of each child completed the Combined Empathy Quotient-Child (EQ-C) and Systemizing Quotient-Child (SQ-C). The questionnaire was designed to be parent-report in order to avoid variance associated with children’s reading and comprehension abilities.”

Alternative summary: “Out of 112 children, among the bottom 105 children when ranked by arithmetic calculation speed, there’s no statistically significant correlation between arithmetic calculation speed and parental assessment of child empathy. The parents of the top 7 performers by arithmetic calculation speed uniformly think their kids have below-average empathy.”

"If we remove the samples that we don't like, we get the result we want!"

Note: I'm not a fan of reading too much into studies, but come on.

I am glad it was noted. I don't really have time to read this (edit: and the comment by jacobolus saves me the effort). I have good empathy and social skills and innate math ability. My ex husband and our oldest son both suck at all three of those.

I think it is entirely fair to say that some oddball subgroup is skewing the results. It is no different from discussing mean, median and mode in real estate data.

Ever heard of the book "How to lie with statistics"?

I don't see how you can discredit the study by citing three data points. The plural of anecdote is not data.

You are completely misinterpreting my remark. I in no way was discrediting the study based on three data points. I was interested in reading it because of three data points, but I don't really have the time for it. Fortunately, someone else read it and found a glaring flaw and that is sufficient for my personal level of interest at this time, thus I won't be wasting my limited time on this today.

"thus I won't be wasting my limited time on this today"

That seems debatable as you have taken the time to comment on this story multiple times. I guess we all have opinions though.

My opinion about how I choose to use my time and what I have time for is the only one that counts. It isn't open to debate. You are basically engaging in a personal attack, for no apparent reason. Attacking me personally in no way adds to the discussion here. Do you have something to say about whether or not the original article has merit/is worth actually reading/etc?

If not, it would be extremely nice if more people followed not only the letter of the guidelines here but also the spirit and didn't engage in ad hominems or other smear campaigns.

@jacobolus is correct IMO, according to these data, empathy can't be described as predictor of math ability.

See http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23011/figures/1

An outlier group of mathy kids turn out to have poor (but not the poorest) empathy skills. The rest of the cohort isn't skewed, at all.

Even if you remove those, look at the bottom of the data, across the horizontal axis. There is still a downward trend, although that is an eye judgement as well. That is, if you bin the kids according to empathy (x-axis), the lowest math achiever in each bin is worse as emphathy increases. The max in each bin doesn't seem to get better, however. The slope would definitely be milder if those offending points were removed.

Moral of the story: higher N is always better.

> Moral of the story: higher N is always better.

This is true in a way, but finding and studying larger effects is often a better strategy. To some extent, why talk about something that needs huge N to get above the noise?

There's also a cluster if kids with very low “calculation skills” (<85) and relatively high “empathizing quotient" (>30)

those combine into a trend. Look at the gap in the lower-right corner.

Of course, it could be bias where parents feel a need to pick a strength for their low-performing child.

>could be bias where parents feel a need to pick a strength for their low-performing child

Agreed. Even a small skew in that direction could cause most of this effect.

Yeah, but why would you do that? What would warrant considering that it would just be pure coincidence that the 7 best performers happen to have below average empathy scores? Of course there will be outliers in data. You must consider that there are also outliers on the bottom end of the math scale who seem to score above average on empathy.

What if the math group would have been up in the upper right hand corner? Would you then have made the same observation?

I don't really buy the "my children aren't good at everything but not bad at everything either so lets pick one", which was mentioned earlier. The questionnaire considered both SQ-C and EQ-C, and correlation was found between only one of them. You'd think both would have then been found to correlate.

"The questionnaire was designed to be parent-report in order to avoid variance associated with children’s reading and comprehension abilities.”

That seems to be as removing smaller variables by introducing a bigger one, which seems counter to current standards. When a child is being diagnosed, the physiologist always talk with the child, as its very easy to get the wrong conclusion by hearing the child being described. Its not uncommon for a diagnose to be first suspected from the descriptions that the parents gives, and then be reverted after just a short interview with the child.

After reading the article, I also wonder what correlation there is with high math achievements and being a victim of bullying, and how bullying effects the perceived social and empathy skills of a child.

There can be causation in the opposite direction, too. One of the reasons I was so driven to excel as a child was to prove that I was superior to those who bullied me.

The parent-report thing is definitely problematic here. Parents will never say "my child is bad at everything", and will often avoid saysing "my child is good at everything", especially if they have other kids. So they will generally pick one trait the kid is good at, and say he or she is bad at the other one. Usually math (and other school subjects) are much easier to measure, so "social skills" just get thrown around to compensate.

For example, I am very good at math, and have been told my entire life that I'm not "real-life smart" or that I have high IQ but low EQ. But now that I'm older I found that I'm pretty good at emphatizing, understanding and predicting other people reactions.

Then again, quantifying empathy is hard, and I'm pretty sure that parents would often get it wrong even without the bias. Some kids are sad when a character in a book/movie dies, but will never show it.

They seem to be hypothesizing that the mechanism causing this result is that math anxiety can be transmitted like a disease, and lower empathy individuals are somewhat immune.

It would be worthwhile to figure out what makes math anxiety transmittable, and what other attitudes might be transmitted by a similar mechanism and lead to measurable impact.

That's one hypothesis, although they hypothesized this is true for the girls, at least specifically picking up cues from math anxious teachers. However, the social awareness isn't as strong in boys as they say, which lend more evidence to the hypothesis that it's most a "social distraction" thing. Also, they specifically found that Math Anxeity didn't explain the correlation between lack of empathizing and math achievement in their sample set.

Altogether, this seems to violate intuition on multiple levels. One hypothesis they push is that more social children are more easily distracted?

Another potential explanation is that kids with high empathy spend more time socializing, which is partly why they have higher empathy. And kids with lower empathy spend less time socializing, and more time on subjects they can do themselves, like math.

Note that the effect of socializing -> higher empathy -> better at socializing -> enjoys socializing is a feedback loop.

empathy != extroversion

Empathic introverts will spend a lot of time on their own because being hyper-aware of other people's emotions is draining.

In this case, “empathy quotient” = how the parent answers the following questionnaire:

• My child likes to look after other people. • My child often doesn’t understand why some things upset other people so much. • My child would not cry or get upset if a character in a film died. • My child is quick to notice when people are joking. • My child enjoys cutting up worms, or pulling the legs off insects. • My child has stolen something they wanted from their sibling or friend. • My child has trouble forming friendships. • When playing with other children, my child spontaneously takes turns and shares toys. • My child can be blunt giving their opinions, even when these may upset someone. • My child would enjoy looking after a pet. • My child is often rude or impolite without realising it. • My child has been in trouble for physical bullying. • At school, when my child understands something they can easily explain it clearly to others. • My child has one or two close friends, as well as several other friends. • My child listens to others’ opinions, even when different from their own. • My child shows concern when others are upset. • My child can seem so preoccupied with their own thoughts that they don’t notice others getting bored. • My child blames other children for things that they themselves have done. • My child gets very upset if they see an animal in pain. • My child sometimes pushes or pinches someone if they are annoying them. • My child can easily tell when another person wants to enter into conversation with them. • My child is good at negotiating for what they want. • My child would worry about how another child would feel if they weren’t invited to a party. • My child gets upset at seeing others crying or in pain. • My child likes to help new children integrate in class. • My child has been in trouble for name-calling or teasing. • My child tends to resort to physical aggression to get what they want.

(For each question, answer is a choice among “strongly agree”, “slightly agree”, “slightly disagree”, and “strongly disagree”. In each case, the “more empathetic” side of the answers is scored either 1 for the “slightly” answer or 2 for the “strongly” answer, whereas both answers on the “less empathetic” side are scored zero. Overall EQ score is the sum of those.)

So it's basically a waste of everyone's time?

Interesting if anyone is researching about "humanities anxiety"...

if this hypothesis is true then does that cast a shadow of doubt on their method which involved using a questionnaire given to the parents of the children to rate their empathy and systematizing ability. if social bias can hurt children's math ability then surely it can also contaminate the survey results.

They hypothesized this, tested for it in the experiment, and found no effect. Math anxiety was correlated with calculation skills (i.e. people who were bad at calculating were more anxious about math), but uncorrelated with empathy.

The hypothesis they brought up in the conclusion was that stereotype threat may be transmitted socially, and higher-empathy individuals are more susceptible. Stereotype threat is a known psychological effect where if people are members of a group that is believed to be bad at something, then their performance on tests of that will suffer, particularly if they are made aware of either the stereotype or their membership in this group before the task. It makes sense that higher empathy would make your more susceptible to this, but like the conclusion says, this requires further research to establish definitively.

Alas, it's not even clear that stereotype threat even exists.

These days it seems the only thing that clearly exists in the psychology field is the psychology field itself :/.

A couple of years ago the inverse concept was claimed - that those who were told that they were good at a subject would do worse in a later test. The supposed mechanism was anxiety over living up to the expected outcome.

The conclusions drawn concerned praising students for effort and never for comparative achievement.

So, if you tell someone they need to try harder, ie they're underachieving then stereotyping makes them worse, but if you tell someone they're good then anxiety reduces their performance??

If both of these are true it suggests the best performance can be achieved by never giving students tests ... which sounds like a good outcome for fallacious reasoning.

As a note to people fearful of indulging past the abstract, from what I understand, Scientific Reports are meant to be read across a field of science, so it should be somewhat approachable compared to your average research paper. I found it readable and interesting with only a few confusing moments that didn't distract from the main point.

To be more accurate, Scientific Reports is a second tier "open access" journal where papers are evaluated for scientific validity, but not for scientific impact/importance. So not to be confused with the actual Nature journal.

"No widely accepted cognitive theory explains savants' combination of talent and deficit. It has been suggested that individuals with autism are biased towards detail-focused processing and that this cognitive style predisposes individuals either with or without autism to savant talents. Another hypothesis is that savants hyper-systemize, thereby giving an impression of talent. Hyper-systemizing is an extreme state in the empathizing–systemizing theory that classifies people based on their skills in empathizing with others versus systemizing facts about the external world. Also, the attention to detail of savants is a consequence of enhanced perception or sensory hypersensitivity in these unique individuals." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome)

I am very fascinated by the semantics vs. syntax of empathy. Suppose you have a savant who is good at systematic identification of literary characters, or criminal profiling or DSM-IV case files; in another words, he or she is very good at reading people and classifying them into logical/hierarchical systems of mental, historical and social backgrounds; and miming their behavior when interacting with them, just as a savant with photographic memory can "mime" the Manhattan skyline in drawing.

Would we classify such a person as empathetic or sociopathic? If their empathy comes not from a human emotional instinct but from logical deduction?

I suspect that would depend upon whether they "cared" for the welfare of the individual they could read or if they "used" that info against them.

I personally don't think there is a clear line between those two things. I have known many people with natural social skills who routinely used them to influence social settings to their personal benefit, often without being particularly noticed by most of the people involved. I think it is more complicated than a simple binary choice.

As I understand it, sociopaths/psychopaths are entirely inner directed. They either don't notice the damage they're doing or they power trip on it.

They literally don't see other people as people at all - they see other people as resources they can play with and consume.

Empaths may be manipulative, but it's hard to be a master of manipulation when you're aware your actions are making someone else unhappy and this makes you unhappy too.

When I took an Intro to Psychology class, I realized that my then husband had five of the six traits typical of serial killers (this includes high intelligence -- they are not all negative traits). My oldest son likely has the same five traits. He was quite the challenge to raise.

So, this is a problem space I have read some about, studied a hair formally, and that hits quite close to home. I managed to raise a decent human being, in spite of his innate wiring. Thus, I am convinced that it is far more complicated than you are making it out to be. There is innate wiring. There is upbringing. There are many factors here.

You can take someone with empathy who is very kind and put them through hell and break them of some of their excessive niceness. You can raise a sociopath with a model of enlightened self interest.

I think it is a fascinating area, but I no way believe it boils down to a singular personality trait.

Really interesting question! Considering this sort of trade-off, I wonder if maybe the two talent regimes are actually using the same neurological resources, so that if large portions of available time/energy/nodes/etc are consumed in systematizing only small amounts will remain for empathizing, and vice versa. Then your question gets really thorny: if a "literary" savant is using the same resource to perform the same function, but in a seemingly qualitatively different way than the empath, neurology may not offer much explanation.

I think a large part of empathy is being able to actually feel (to varying degrees) the mental state of another person, and not just being able to construct a logical framework of their thoughts and feelings.

For those like me who were curious about the contents of the Empathy/Systemizing Quotient test itself I believe I found it as well as the scoring key for both the child and adult version (in case you want to know where you yourself fall on the scale)

These links are to Google Docs previews of .doc files listed at http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc_tests

-------------------------------------------------

Combined Empathy/Systemizing Quotient - Child

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

Scoring Key

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

-------------------------------------------------

Empathy Quotient - Adult

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

Scoring Key

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

-------------------------------------------------

Systemizing Quotient - Adult

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

Scoring Key

https://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http://docs...

If I'm reading this correctly, calculation skills are what suffer with increased empathizing, rather than ability to solve applied math problems. Is that right? Are there examples of what constitutes calculation vs. applied problem solving for the purposes of this study?

EDIT: Looks like calculations are straight up calculations, and applied problems are story problems. http://achievement-test.com/testing-options/woodcock-johnson...

No surprise there....testosterone probably plays a role. https://youtu.be/p5LRdW8xw70?t=1311

So are kids with higher empathy bad at math, leading to the environment where being bad at math makes you more popular?

Or is that those kids realize being bad at math makes them more popular, thus intentionally neglect or even pretend to be bad at math?

I think this has to do with abstract reasoning skills. If you can abstract shapes and numbers well, you can abstract people well. You begin to see people as numbers and objects.

Empathic individuals tend act from a position of deep understanding. If given a menial task that has no deep connection to their reality, i.e. no purpose they can connect with, then they'll just ignore it. Their brain will not even touch it.

A deeply empathic person can calculate, and more generally think and intuit, better than an emotionally detached person as long as they can emotionally connect with the task being given to them.

>A deeply empathic person can calculate, and more generally think and intuit, better than an emotionally detached person as long as they can emotionally connect with the task being given to them.

Do you have good numbers to back that up?

Edit: It's important to note though that this might be just another attempt by psychologists to paint technical folk as lacking empathy. Usually people who make such claims lack empathy themselves.

What @ilostmykeys is saying is probably based on personal experience, which matches up with my own. Similarly I've found low empathetic people are much more likely to enjoy calculation-based tasks, not just pure mathematics but video games, and video games like "The Witness," min-maxing and competitive numbers games like starcraft, dota, league of legends, etc. A high-empathetic person can have great difficulty initially understanding why anyone would enjoy playing these games, it's difficult to explain, but when compared with real life video games/simulations feel like a void, there's very little to actually connect with, and in effect it feels like you are doing very little (even if you are making great efforts).

Like many of the others here, I'm not terribly surprised by this. I learned the distinction by watching the original Star Trek as a kid. Vulcans represented the logical, calculating race, while humans were characterized as the emotional, sometimes illogical race. Spock, of course, represented the complex balance between the two.

Good thing we have computers to augment our calculation abilities. Maybe they can augment our empathy, too (http://www.amednews.com/article/20111206/profession/31206999...).

That's why good profs don't do spontaneous calculations at the board.

They need to be done in the privacy of one's own home.

And empathizing is? Measured in?

I'm going to read the rest of this paper, but it looks like the title here is misleading. The last sentence of the abstract:

> These results identify empathy, and social skills more generally, as previously unknown predictors of mathematical achievement.

Edit: added:

> Contrary to our hypothesis, we found no relationship between systemizing and math achievement after controlling for domain general abilities and no relationship between the systemizing brain type (greater discrepancy between systemizing and empathizing) and math achievement.

More edits:

The "negative correlation" turns out to be only for "calculation" and the values are r=-0.22, p=0.02, with a sample size of around a hundred individuals. This is a negligible effect by any stretch of the imagination. Sounds like the authors did their diligence in writing this up, and it's the submitter's fault for the linkbait headline.

Later in the results section you have:

>There was a negative correlation between EQ-C and the Calculation Skills composite score with greater empathizing predicting lower math achievement

Edit: A "previously unknown predictor" can both be a positive or negative predictor.

From the conclusion section:

"We found no evidence for a relationship between systemizing and math achievement after accounting for general cognitive and reading abilities. There was, however, a negative association between empathizing and calculation ability that was more pronounced in girls."

The title is correct. That sentence just means that they're predictors, not necessarily that they're positive predictors. As in, if you know one you can predict the other.

In the results section:

> There was a negative correlation between EQ-C and the Calculation Skills composite score with greater empathizing predicting lower math achievement (r(110) = −0.22, p = 0.02).

A correlation of 0.2 is negligible. Especially with a sample size on the order of 100. I'm glad you pointed this out.

Yeah, it seems weak. In figure 1 it is obvious that a spike of 7 students carry the negative correlation. Without them it would disappear.

Considering that the sample questionnaires have to be administered by hand to each child, how would you scale the sample size for a study in this space?

It looks like the study that introduced the EQ-C and SQ-C in 2009 was only run on 1256 "parents of typically developing children" and 265 "children with Autism".[0]

[0] http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2009_Auyeung_eta...

[0 (alternate)] http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-009-0772-x

Correlation of 0.2 is negligible with any sample size. The potential for invalid inferences is only pronounced by a small sample size. A samples size of a thousand is much better. But with n=100, r=0.2 there is a bigger chance that local factors influence the result than that the observed association says anything about human nature.

Submitted title was "Empathy and social skills found to be negative predictors of mathematical ability". We've changed that to a quote from the abstract. I'm not sure the two are different enough to justify calling the first one linkbait, but it's better to stick to language from the article.

Empathizing is dumb.

Calculation ability is smart.

Surprise is where?

Empathizing is why people give $10 to a local kids soccer team but let kids die in poor countries missing vaccines.

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