PhiloPsycho Freedom

It's all too common that we hear these words bitterly uttered: "Guys are just stupid", "Girls just don't make sense" etc. Simply put, everyone is stupid at times.

What has been incorrectly derived from this for so many years has been the "Men are form Mars; Women are from Venus" sentiment that we are completely different and will never understand each other. It's true; Men and Women are different. But, what is failed to take into consideration is that there is greater variance within a gender than there is between them. That is to say, the best man and the best woman in a category will perform generally the same; neither party will have a huge advantage over the other on any given skill.

What I propose to be the difference - and this is neither my idea, nor is it entirely original, but is still worth mentioning - is that it's the nature of interdependence and not the gender that causes the clash and frustration that often comes with a relationship. It's the fact that we must open up and depend on someone that can cause the clash, leading us to be more ready to generalize it onto the entire out-group (a group that is not part of our in-group) than to consider that it may be a problem between each persons interpersonal dependence.

Another point to consider is how homosexuals handle this issue. If it was simply a case of different groups interacting for clashing interests, there would be few problems within their relationships. Obviously, this is not the case. Men clash with men; Women clash with women. We are vying for our own self-interests while attempting to connect and satisfy another's interests that conflict with our own. This is consistent with a theory called "Risk Regulation".

Risk regulation states that in a relationship we have those two competing interests, as mentioned above. What it also includes is that people take into consideration the regard we perceive our partner to give us. Simply put, if we perceive high-regard from our partner, we are more likely to commit and open up; If we perceive low-regard, we withdraw and move more on the self-focus defense. In other words, if we think our partner respects us and views us as a competent, good person, we will disclose more information and put more of their needs ahead of our own.

All in all, we should keep this message in mind when we're ready to attribute someone's actions to an out-group: Everyone does stupid things at times, but we need to give their associated group the benefit of the doubt and not attribute one's stupid actions to the whole's behaviour.