Testimonios de cuidadoras: “en sus propias palabras”

According to the second hypothesis of the empathising-systemising theory, people who study sciences have been described as lacking in empathy but outperformed in systemising when compared to people who study humanities (Billington et al., 2007; Focquaert et al., 2007; Manson & Winterbottom, 2012). This hypothesis is firstly examined by a large-scale study among 1761 students from Cambridge, revealing that physical science majors scored significantly lower than those from biological science, social science and humanities fields in the EQ questionnaire but higher in the Systemising Quotient (SQ) questionnaire (Wheelwright et al., 2006). Systemising is defined as the drive to analyse and construct systems by understanding the rules that govern the system (Baron-Cohen, 2002). Participants are asked to rate themselves on statements such as “when I learn a language, I become intrigued by its grammatical rules” (Wheelwright et al., 2006). The differences in empathising-systemising cognitive styles by major subject were later replicated by Manson and Winterbottom (2012) with another 321 Cambridge students. In this study, they also claimed that cognitive style is a better predictor than gender for major selection using logistic regression to compare the predictive power between gender and cognitive style to major choices (Manson &

Winterbottom, 2012). Similar consequences were also found in cross-cultural studies among students from Belgium (Focquaert et al., 2007) and Malaysia (Zeyer et al., 2013).

These studies have made crucial headway in exploring the link between empathy and major selection, but they are still prone to pitfalls and several research gaps exist. First of all, most existing studies are conducted under the framework of the empathising- systemising cognitive style, but it is important to note that empathising has been found largely independent from systemising, therefore there is not necessarily a trade-off between empathising and systemising (Carroll & Chiew, 2006; Lawson et al., 2004). That is to say, even though scientists may be categorised under the label “systemiser” with a relatively higher systemising skill than empathising skill, it does not automatically mean that his or her empathy is absolutely low. Researchers must be aware that it is not the discrepancy between empathising and systemising that determines whether one chooses science majors or not. Given that women and men are compatible with high levels of mathematical ability and achievement, it would be intriguing to focus on the unique role of empathy in major selection.

Secondly, female and male scientists may show different levels of empathy. It has been proposed that women and man may employ different strategies when making major subject decisions (Ceci, Ginther, Kahn, & Williams, 2014). An interesting study conducted by Valla et al. (2010) among 144 undergraduate students revealed that being in a scientific field of study was associated with poor empathising skills in men, but not in women. Moreover, they also found that systemising ability was coupled with sacrifices in empathising abilities in men but not in women and high systemising is associated with science major selection for women but not for men. Based on these findings, Valla et al. (2010) then argue that men's choice of science field of study could more be associated with weakness in empathy regardless of their systemising ability, but women's choice of science could more be associated with their strength in systemising. Among women and men with comparably outstanding mathematical aptitude and achievement, women are more likely to have outstanding empathetic skills

(at least perceived empathy) at the same time (Thomson et al., 2015; Valla et al., 2010). Therefore, empathy and science should definitely not simply be seen as incompatible constructs. Scientists do not necessarily have a higher-systemising-lower-empathising cognitive style, yet they can have both good mathematical ability and interpersonal skills at the same time.

Moreover, variations within the science field should also not be ignored. Though all STEM majors require students to systematically study the natural world through observation and experiment, life science, which requires students to take ethics into consideration, can be more 'people-oriented' than physical science. Performance in subjects like medicine requires high levels of empathy in order to be successful (Hirsch, 2007; Wright, McKendree, Morgan, Allgar, & Brown, 2014). Biology students may have plenty of opportunities to cooperate with their colleagues in labs whereas students majoring in computer science often instead focus on highly independent coding jobs on their own (Diekman, Clark, Johnston, Brown, & Steinberg, 2011). Supporting this claim, Thomson et al.'s (2015) survey of empathy among 404 undergraduates showed equivalent self-report empathy among students in life science and social science. Khorashad et al. (2015) even reported an advantage of medical students over students from all other majors in emotion recognition in Persia.

The final caveat springs from the applied measurements for empathy and calls for extra attention to the interpretations of results. As we saw earlier, the distinct female advantage in empathy captured by self-reports was not that evident in ability tasks and people can over-report or under-report certain behaviours due to their personal bias or social pressure (Zerbe & Paulhus, 1987). Despite a wealth of self-report data supporting the claim that scientists have lower empathy than people from other fields, studies utilising ability tasks revealed mixed findings. For instance, Billington et al. (2007) found a significant advantage in emotion identification task for students studying humanities, but the effect is only marginal in the study carried out by Carroll and Chiew (2006) and did not even exist in a more recent study carried out by Khorashad et al.

(2015). It is possible that science majors underestimate their empathetic ability due to the impact of certain stereotypes about scientists. Related research about stereotyping and image of scientists will be discussed later.

To sum up, existing studies revealed mixed evidence for the claim that scientists are lacking in empathy. Although some studies found that scientists scored lower than other majors in self-report empathy, there is no evidence for a trade-off between scientific ability and empathetic ability in general. Students majoring in life science and medicine even showed some advantage in empathy over other humanities majors. The relations between empathy and science major selection were gender-dependent, for which only certain men may choose to study science due to poor empathetic skills but women in science could have both good interpersonal skills and scientific competence. After all, scientists have shown comparable empathetic ability with people from other fields, but they underestimate their empathy in self-reports. I suspect that scientists' inaccurate perception of their empathy may stem from the stereotypical image of scientists being socially awkward. Therefore, the present study proposed to look at people's stereotypes about empathy in scientists and the potential variations in such stereotypes by gender and major subject.