From the APA Convention, Post 2: The Social Lives of Men and Women

A second very interesting talk I attended at this year's APA convention was Dr. Roy Baumeister's talk Is There Anything Good about Men? I've blogged before about Baumeister's work on evil. Happily for all, Dr. Baumeister has posted a transcript of his talk online. It can be found here.

I'd just like to abstract a bit of Baumeister's talk. The title of the talk is a half-joke. In today's world few good things are said about men. We tend to come off as shallow, antisocial, and violent. All the likable traits tend to get associated with women.

Baumeister wades into this milieu by suggesting that we need to get past good versus bad attributions when discussing the traits of men and women. Rather, we need to think in terms of tradeoffs, with each trait good for some things and bad for others.

For example, women are often considered to be more sociable and relational than men. But Baumeister notes that men are very sociable, they are just sociable in a different way. Specifically, women tend to excel in the dyadic, one-to-one relationship. Men, in contrast, tend to create large networks of less intimate associations. In language I've blogged about before, women excel in the strong tie while men excel in the weak tie.

The point is that men and women express different social natures. Each has its strong point. Strong ties are great at creating nurturing and intimate relationships while weak ties are excellent for transmitting information and linking different groups of people.

For the purposes of this blog, what is of interest here is that churches tend to send the tacit message that only strong ties are of value. Intimacy is king. But perhaps the weak tie is performing a valuable function in church. Maybe the superficial interactions at church, which many often lament, possess a value we are overlooking.