10.07.07
vision of men
last month i ran human subject studies in which people worked with a robot to solve a task. as part of the post-experimental debriefing i asked the subjects whether they felt the robot was male or female.
aur being a lamp with no humanoid features, i expected the answer to be somewhat diverse. instead, all but one thought the robot was male.
this might have to do with a number of things, like the fact that i am male and i 'represent' the robot, or the fact that highly powered motorized tools are considered male, or the fact that i designed its motions and they have a male feeling to them.
however, when asked why they thought the robot was male, i almost only received disparaging explanations: 'it's male because it's lazy', 'because it does what you tell it to do', 'because it's like a dog', 'because it's sort of stupid' etc.
it was particularly curious that subjects would tell me (a male stranger) this without embarassment. maybe there's something in the experimenter-subject relationship that makes people be more honest.
this sort of response was true for both male and female subjects, although more so for female ones.
nice to know that our gender is held in such high esteem in this day and age.
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content here by guy hoffman .. as seen times since march 2004
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:03
mmm... maybe because aur is male in Hebrew :)
- ram
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:10
considering the number of hebrew-speaking subjects in my study was exactly one, i doubt that's the reason...
- guy
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:00
About the disparaging explanations, it is simply politically correct.
Try to think which of the following is
more likely to get you in awkward social position:
"I chose male because it is lazy"
"I chose female because it is lazy"
"I chose male because it is efficient"
"I chose female because it is efficient"
- yoad
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:26
but i first asked them what the gender is, and they said 'male', and then when asked for an explanation they could have said something neutral, like: it's blue, it's metal, etc.
instead many chose to say something insulting... which i still find surprising.
- guy
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:13
I would say that if 90% of them first thought : "I thought it's male because it was so efficient" or "I thought it's male because technical stuff seems male related", no one would say that.
In fact, you would get exactly the results you got. This is of course unprovable.
- yoad
Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:12
This is most interesting, but not surprising. Women often control the social dialog, and hence it is politically correct to insult men. It is always amazing to me how often late night talk shows make insulting jokes about men, but an insulting joke about women is very rare. Men are always dogs, sex-obsessed monsters, stupid husbands who can't even find the can opener, or violent bullies.
My suspicion is that they all thought your question was silly, so they were giving you the most obvious and common politically correct answer, as the first thing that popped into their heads.
- Vince