#pratistudy — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Two decades of U.S. data challenge an evolutionary explanation for the gender-equality paradox
Two studies that tracked Americans for two decades or more found that as the United States grew wealthier and more gender-equal, psychological differences between men and women did not grow, and in a few cases they shrank. The findings, published in Social Psychology and Psychological Reports, provide evidence against a popular evolutionary explanation for why such differences appear larger in richer, more egalitarian countries.
The research addresses a phenomenon known as the gender-equality paradox. This concept refers to the observation that differences between men and women in personality, academic strengths, and mental health often appear larger in countries with higher levels of gender equality and economic prosperity.
A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that higher living conditions were associated with larger sex differences in personality and depression across different countries, though differences in math, sexual behavior, and partner preferences were smaller. Similar patterns have been observed in education, with another 2024 study showing that differences in girls’ and boys’ relative academic strengths, with girls relatively stronger in reading and boys in math and science, are consistently larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations.
To explain this paradox, many evolutionary psychologists point to the resource hypothesis, sometimes called the free expression hypothesis. This framework proposes that humans possess innate, sex-specific tendencies rooted in early human evolution, when, according to this view, men and women faced different pressures that shaped different psychological traits.
On this account, when a society meets its citizens’ basic material needs and relaxes strict social rules, individuals are finally free to express their true, biologically driven gender differences. Under this theory, a highly developed country removes the struggle for basic survival, allowing men and women to naturally drift toward distinct, gendered interests and emotional patterns.
“The study was motivated by a long-standing debate about the so-called gender-equality paradox,” Gabriele Prati, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and the author of both studies, told PsyPost.
“The problem is that most of the evidence supporting this explanation comes from comparisons between different countries at a single point in time,” he explained. “Countries differ in many other respects—history, culture, institutions, religion, economic structure, and social norms—so a correlation between gender equality and sex differences does not necessarily tell us what happens when equality or economic resources actually increase.”
A more direct test is to follow what happens within a single society as it changes. Prati did this in two longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over many years, tracking Americans across a period of rising wealth and gender equality.
The first study, published in Social Psychology, analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States project, which included a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults. At the start of the study, participants averaged 46 years old, and 52 percent were women. Prati examined three waves of data collected between the mid-1990s and 2014. During this nearly twenty-year span, the United States experienced documented increases in its gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic prosperity, as well as an overall increase in gender equality.
Participants completed surveys assessing their personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The surveys also measured altruism, trust, negative emotions, and clinical depression. At the start, women scored higher than men on most of these measures, including negative emotions, agreeableness, and neuroticism, while men scored slightly higher on openness. The research aimed to determine whether the psychological gaps between men and women widened as the societal conditions improved, exactly as the resource hypothesis would predict.
The findings did not support the evolutionary resource hypothesis. The gap between men and women in altruism, trust, negative emotions, and all major personality traits remained unchanged over the nearly twenty-year span. For depression, the gender gap actually shrank. Women were still more likely than men to meet the criteria for depression in 2014, but the gap narrowed because women’s odds of depression fell by about 38 percent while men’s did not change.
Prati also tested the hypothesis at the individual level by looking at changes in household income adjusted for household size. Rising income was not followed by growing differences between men and women. The two associations that did emerge ran opposite to the theory’s predictions: higher income was followed by slightly lower conscientiousness among women and, at the edge of statistical significance, a higher likelihood of depression among men.
“The main takeaway is that greater prosperity and gender equality did not make men and women progressively more psychologically different in the way predicted by the resource hypothesis,” Prati said.
“An important broader lesson is that a pattern observed when comparing countries is not necessarily evidence of the mechanism producing that pattern,” he noted. “Following people and societies over time provides a more direct test, and in this study that test did not support the resource hypothesis in its current form.”
To test the hypothesis in a different developmental stage, Prati conducted a second study, published in Psychological Reports, focusing on adolescents and young adults. This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which tracked a nationally representative sample of 6,504 Americans from 1994 to 2018. Over five survey waves, participants grew from middle and high school students into adults in their late thirties. This dataset allowed Prati to examine different outcomes in younger people: math and science grades, scores on a picture vocabulary test, self-reported willingness to take risks, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.
Once again, the results did not support the predictions of the evolutionary framework. Gender differences in math and science grades did not change between the mid-1990s and the end of high school, differences in vocabulary scores did not change between 1994–95 and 2001–02, and differences in willingness to take risks did not change between 1996 and 2018.
Just as in the adult study, the gender differences in depressive symptoms decreased over time. The gap in depressive symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 3, shrank from 0.14 points in 1994–95 to 0.10 points in 2008–09, and the self-esteem gap, in which boys typically score higher, shrank from 0.16 to 0.05 points on a five-point scale by 2001–02. Prati describes these changes as very small to small, but they ran opposite to the theory’s prediction.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Both studies rely on data from a single country, and tracking these changes in countries with different cultural histories or economic structures might yield different patterns.
In addition, because the same people were aging while society changed, the studies cannot fully separate the effects of societal change from ordinary development. The self-esteem gap, for example, tends to narrow as teenagers become adults.
Another detail to keep in mind is the way certain traits were measured. Some, such as risk-taking and trust, were assessed using a single survey question, which might not capture their full complexity. The datasets also lacked some of the measures most central to the theory, such as interest in working with things versus people, so future studies could test whether those show different patterns.
It is also possible that two decades is not long enough to observe deep cultural shifts in how gender differences are expressed. However, Prati notes that the hypothesis does not specify how long these effects should take to emerge, and that there is no clear reason to expect individual income gains to take decades to have an effect.
“We should be cautious about concluding that giving people more economic resources and greater gender equality naturally reveals or amplifies innate psychological differences between women and men,” Prati added. “Differences between women and men are likely shaped by a much more complex combination of social, cultural, environmental, and possibly biological influences.”
The study, “No Evidence for the Evolutionary Resource Hypothesis as an Explanation of the Gender-Equality Paradox: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Sex Differences in the United States,” was authored by Gabriele Prati. The study, “The Gender-Equality Paradox: A Longitudinal Test of the Free Expression or Resource Hypothesis Among Adolescents,” was also authored by Gabriele Prati.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GenderEqualityParadox #NoEvidenceForEvolutionaryHypothesis #LongitudinalStudy #PsychologyResearch #GenderDifferences #EconomicProsperity #SocialPsychology #MentalHealthDifferences #AdolescentsToAdults #PratiStudy
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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Two decades of U.S. data challenge an evolutionary explanation for the gender-equality paradox
Two studies that tracked Americans for two decades or more found that as the United States grew wealthier and more gender-equal, psychological differences between men and women did not grow, and in a few cases they shrank. The findings, published in Social Psychology and Psychological Reports, provide evidence against a popular evolutionary explanation for why such differences appear larger in richer, more egalitarian countries.
The research addresses a phenomenon known as the gender-equality paradox. This concept refers to the observation that differences between men and women in personality, academic strengths, and mental health often appear larger in countries with higher levels of gender equality and economic prosperity.
A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that higher living conditions were associated with larger sex differences in personality and depression across different countries, though differences in math, sexual behavior, and partner preferences were smaller. Similar patterns have been observed in education, with another 2024 study showing that differences in girls’ and boys’ relative academic strengths, with girls relatively stronger in reading and boys in math and science, are consistently larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations.
To explain this paradox, many evolutionary psychologists point to the resource hypothesis, sometimes called the free expression hypothesis. This framework proposes that humans possess innate, sex-specific tendencies rooted in early human evolution, when, according to this view, men and women faced different pressures that shaped different psychological traits.
On this account, when a society meets its citizens’ basic material needs and relaxes strict social rules, individuals are finally free to express their true, biologically driven gender differences. Under this theory, a highly developed country removes the struggle for basic survival, allowing men and women to naturally drift toward distinct, gendered interests and emotional patterns.
“The study was motivated by a long-standing debate about the so-called gender-equality paradox,” Gabriele Prati, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and the author of both studies, told PsyPost.
“The problem is that most of the evidence supporting this explanation comes from comparisons between different countries at a single point in time,” he explained. “Countries differ in many other respects—history, culture, institutions, religion, economic structure, and social norms—so a correlation between gender equality and sex differences does not necessarily tell us what happens when equality or economic resources actually increase.”
A more direct test is to follow what happens within a single society as it changes. Prati did this in two longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over many years, tracking Americans across a period of rising wealth and gender equality.
The first study, published in Social Psychology, analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States project, which included a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults. At the start of the study, participants averaged 46 years old, and 52 percent were women. Prati examined three waves of data collected between the mid-1990s and 2014. During this nearly twenty-year span, the United States experienced documented increases in its gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic prosperity, as well as an overall increase in gender equality.
Participants completed surveys assessing their personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The surveys also measured altruism, trust, negative emotions, and clinical depression. At the start, women scored higher than men on most of these measures, including negative emotions, agreeableness, and neuroticism, while men scored slightly higher on openness. The research aimed to determine whether the psychological gaps between men and women widened as the societal conditions improved, exactly as the resource hypothesis would predict.
The findings did not support the evolutionary resource hypothesis. The gap between men and women in altruism, trust, negative emotions, and all major personality traits remained unchanged over the nearly twenty-year span. For depression, the gender gap actually shrank. Women were still more likely than men to meet the criteria for depression in 2014, but the gap narrowed because women’s odds of depression fell by about 38 percent while men’s did not change.
Prati also tested the hypothesis at the individual level by looking at changes in household income adjusted for household size. Rising income was not followed by growing differences between men and women. The two associations that did emerge ran opposite to the theory’s predictions: higher income was followed by slightly lower conscientiousness among women and, at the edge of statistical significance, a higher likelihood of depression among men.
“The main takeaway is that greater prosperity and gender equality did not make men and women progressively more psychologically different in the way predicted by the resource hypothesis,” Prati said.
“An important broader lesson is that a pattern observed when comparing countries is not necessarily evidence of the mechanism producing that pattern,” he noted. “Following people and societies over time provides a more direct test, and in this study that test did not support the resource hypothesis in its current form.”
To test the hypothesis in a different developmental stage, Prati conducted a second study, published in Psychological Reports, focusing on adolescents and young adults. This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which tracked a nationally representative sample of 6,504 Americans from 1994 to 2018. Over five survey waves, participants grew from middle and high school students into adults in their late thirties. This dataset allowed Prati to examine different outcomes in younger people: math and science grades, scores on a picture vocabulary test, self-reported willingness to take risks, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.
Once again, the results did not support the predictions of the evolutionary framework. Gender differences in math and science grades did not change between the mid-1990s and the end of high school, differences in vocabulary scores did not change between 1994–95 and 2001–02, and differences in willingness to take risks did not change between 1996 and 2018.
Just as in the adult study, the gender differences in depressive symptoms decreased over time. The gap in depressive symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 3, shrank from 0.14 points in 1994–95 to 0.10 points in 2008–09, and the self-esteem gap, in which boys typically score higher, shrank from 0.16 to 0.05 points on a five-point scale by 2001–02. Prati describes these changes as very small to small, but they ran opposite to the theory’s prediction.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Both studies rely on data from a single country, and tracking these changes in countries with different cultural histories or economic structures might yield different patterns.
In addition, because the same people were aging while society changed, the studies cannot fully separate the effects of societal change from ordinary development. The self-esteem gap, for example, tends to narrow as teenagers become adults.
Another detail to keep in mind is the way certain traits were measured. Some, such as risk-taking and trust, were assessed using a single survey question, which might not capture their full complexity. The datasets also lacked some of the measures most central to the theory, such as interest in working with things versus people, so future studies could test whether those show different patterns.
It is also possible that two decades is not long enough to observe deep cultural shifts in how gender differences are expressed. However, Prati notes that the hypothesis does not specify how long these effects should take to emerge, and that there is no clear reason to expect individual income gains to take decades to have an effect.
“We should be cautious about concluding that giving people more economic resources and greater gender equality naturally reveals or amplifies innate psychological differences between women and men,” Prati added. “Differences between women and men are likely shaped by a much more complex combination of social, cultural, environmental, and possibly biological influences.”
The study, “No Evidence for the Evolutionary Resource Hypothesis as an Explanation of the Gender-Equality Paradox: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Sex Differences in the United States,” was authored by Gabriele Prati. The study, “The Gender-Equality Paradox: A Longitudinal Test of the Free Expression or Resource Hypothesis Among Adolescents,” was also authored by Gabriele Prati.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GenderEqualityParadox #NoEvidenceForEvolutionaryHypothesis #LongitudinalStudy #PsychologyResearch #GenderDifferences #EconomicProsperity #SocialPsychology #MentalHealthDifferences #AdolescentsToAdults #PratiStudy
-
DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Two decades of U.S. data challenge an evolutionary explanation for the gender-equality paradox
Two studies that tracked Americans for two decades or more found that as the United States grew wealthier and more gender-equal, psychological differences between men and women did not grow, and in a few cases they shrank. The findings, published in Social Psychology and Psychological Reports, provide evidence against a popular evolutionary explanation for why such differences appear larger in richer, more egalitarian countries.
The research addresses a phenomenon known as the gender-equality paradox. This concept refers to the observation that differences between men and women in personality, academic strengths, and mental health often appear larger in countries with higher levels of gender equality and economic prosperity.
A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that higher living conditions were associated with larger sex differences in personality and depression across different countries, though differences in math, sexual behavior, and partner preferences were smaller. Similar patterns have been observed in education, with another 2024 study showing that differences in girls’ and boys’ relative academic strengths, with girls relatively stronger in reading and boys in math and science, are consistently larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations.
To explain this paradox, many evolutionary psychologists point to the resource hypothesis, sometimes called the free expression hypothesis. This framework proposes that humans possess innate, sex-specific tendencies rooted in early human evolution, when, according to this view, men and women faced different pressures that shaped different psychological traits.
On this account, when a society meets its citizens’ basic material needs and relaxes strict social rules, individuals are finally free to express their true, biologically driven gender differences. Under this theory, a highly developed country removes the struggle for basic survival, allowing men and women to naturally drift toward distinct, gendered interests and emotional patterns.
“The study was motivated by a long-standing debate about the so-called gender-equality paradox,” Gabriele Prati, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and the author of both studies, told PsyPost.
“The problem is that most of the evidence supporting this explanation comes from comparisons between different countries at a single point in time,” he explained. “Countries differ in many other respects—history, culture, institutions, religion, economic structure, and social norms—so a correlation between gender equality and sex differences does not necessarily tell us what happens when equality or economic resources actually increase.”
A more direct test is to follow what happens within a single society as it changes. Prati did this in two longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over many years, tracking Americans across a period of rising wealth and gender equality.
The first study, published in Social Psychology, analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States project, which included a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults. At the start of the study, participants averaged 46 years old, and 52 percent were women. Prati examined three waves of data collected between the mid-1990s and 2014. During this nearly twenty-year span, the United States experienced documented increases in its gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic prosperity, as well as an overall increase in gender equality.
Participants completed surveys assessing their personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The surveys also measured altruism, trust, negative emotions, and clinical depression. At the start, women scored higher than men on most of these measures, including negative emotions, agreeableness, and neuroticism, while men scored slightly higher on openness. The research aimed to determine whether the psychological gaps between men and women widened as the societal conditions improved, exactly as the resource hypothesis would predict.
The findings did not support the evolutionary resource hypothesis. The gap between men and women in altruism, trust, negative emotions, and all major personality traits remained unchanged over the nearly twenty-year span. For depression, the gender gap actually shrank. Women were still more likely than men to meet the criteria for depression in 2014, but the gap narrowed because women’s odds of depression fell by about 38 percent while men’s did not change.
Prati also tested the hypothesis at the individual level by looking at changes in household income adjusted for household size. Rising income was not followed by growing differences between men and women. The two associations that did emerge ran opposite to the theory’s predictions: higher income was followed by slightly lower conscientiousness among women and, at the edge of statistical significance, a higher likelihood of depression among men.
“The main takeaway is that greater prosperity and gender equality did not make men and women progressively more psychologically different in the way predicted by the resource hypothesis,” Prati said.
“An important broader lesson is that a pattern observed when comparing countries is not necessarily evidence of the mechanism producing that pattern,” he noted. “Following people and societies over time provides a more direct test, and in this study that test did not support the resource hypothesis in its current form.”
To test the hypothesis in a different developmental stage, Prati conducted a second study, published in Psychological Reports, focusing on adolescents and young adults. This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which tracked a nationally representative sample of 6,504 Americans from 1994 to 2018. Over five survey waves, participants grew from middle and high school students into adults in their late thirties. This dataset allowed Prati to examine different outcomes in younger people: math and science grades, scores on a picture vocabulary test, self-reported willingness to take risks, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.
Once again, the results did not support the predictions of the evolutionary framework. Gender differences in math and science grades did not change between the mid-1990s and the end of high school, differences in vocabulary scores did not change between 1994–95 and 2001–02, and differences in willingness to take risks did not change between 1996 and 2018.
Just as in the adult study, the gender differences in depressive symptoms decreased over time. The gap in depressive symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 3, shrank from 0.14 points in 1994–95 to 0.10 points in 2008–09, and the self-esteem gap, in which boys typically score higher, shrank from 0.16 to 0.05 points on a five-point scale by 2001–02. Prati describes these changes as very small to small, but they ran opposite to the theory’s prediction.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Both studies rely on data from a single country, and tracking these changes in countries with different cultural histories or economic structures might yield different patterns.
In addition, because the same people were aging while society changed, the studies cannot fully separate the effects of societal change from ordinary development. The self-esteem gap, for example, tends to narrow as teenagers become adults.
Another detail to keep in mind is the way certain traits were measured. Some, such as risk-taking and trust, were assessed using a single survey question, which might not capture their full complexity. The datasets also lacked some of the measures most central to the theory, such as interest in working with things versus people, so future studies could test whether those show different patterns.
It is also possible that two decades is not long enough to observe deep cultural shifts in how gender differences are expressed. However, Prati notes that the hypothesis does not specify how long these effects should take to emerge, and that there is no clear reason to expect individual income gains to take decades to have an effect.
“We should be cautious about concluding that giving people more economic resources and greater gender equality naturally reveals or amplifies innate psychological differences between women and men,” Prati added. “Differences between women and men are likely shaped by a much more complex combination of social, cultural, environmental, and possibly biological influences.”
The study, “No Evidence for the Evolutionary Resource Hypothesis as an Explanation of the Gender-Equality Paradox: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Sex Differences in the United States,” was authored by Gabriele Prati. The study, “The Gender-Equality Paradox: A Longitudinal Test of the Free Expression or Resource Hypothesis Among Adolescents,” was also authored by Gabriele Prati.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GenderEqualityParadox #NoEvidenceForEvolutionaryHypothesis #LongitudinalStudy #PsychologyResearch #GenderDifferences #EconomicProsperity #SocialPsychology #MentalHealthDifferences #AdolescentsToAdults #PratiStudy