Eye Gaze Differences between Females and Males - Is Conservatism an Extreme form of The Male Brain?

Sex, Power, and Partisanship: How Evolutionary Science Makes Sense of Our Political Divide - Hector A. Garcia 2019

Eye Gaze Differences between Females and Males
Is Conservatism an Extreme form of The Male Brain?

An important and highly developed ability in humans is joint attention—the ability to follow another person's eye movement, which allows us to infer things like intention and interest, and to perform other kinds of mindreading. This ability can be observed in the research lab by showing subjects cartoon pictures of faces with averted eyes, and it can be measured by examining how strongly the subjects’ eyes are drawn to the direction of the picture's gaze—known as gaze cuing. Across different kinds of cuing tasks, research finds that men process eye gaze less efficiently than women and do not orient toward gaze as strongly.42 Research has also found stronger joint attention skills in twelve-month-old female infants as compared to twelve-month-old male infants,43 and that overall male infants make less eye contact than female infants.44 Accordingly, those in the autism spectrum, who Baron-Cohen says possess extreme variants of the “male brain,” do poorly at gaze cuing.45