WSJ Blogs

Real-time commentary and analysis from The Wall Street Journal
Ideas Market

It’s Official: Men Don’t Get It

    • Wow, the title IS the article?
      A silly, unrelaistic study, unless it's to test how Middle Eastern men can verify gender by seeing only the eyes. American men can always recognize the gender of the eyes: if they're accompanied by yammering, the person is a woman!

    • 'In a new study, 22 men were subject to brain scans while performing a “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.”'

      no women subjects? maybe women don't get it, either.

      and only 22 subjects? only 22 people is a small sample to generalize from.

    • Like I need this study to convince me. What are we going to study next: whether the sky is blue?

    • Maybe it's because men are more consistent in their behaviours relating to their thoughts.....

    • The study proves men can't read women's minds? Wow!
      Maybe women should improve their verbal communication skills.

    • I agree that the title of this article has a negative connotation, and that the study conducted is incomplete because women were not tested. Communication involves the effort of both participants; therefore, in order for communication to be effective, both participants must understand how the other communicates. Clearly, men and women have different communication styles in general. Men tend to communicate briefly, one topic at a time. Women tend to communicate extensively about numerous topics at the same time. In all honesty, I think men can't read women's minds because the average woman's thoughts continuously scroll at a rate of about 500 wpm (sometimes, she can't even make any sense of it), and women can't read men's minds because more often than not, men aren't thinking of anything at all. Am I right? Woman: "Honey, what are you thinking about?" Man: "Nothing." (smile)

    • Most men don't genuinely care about women. They see them as playing certain roles in life, but beyond that, they don't find them to be very interesting. They don't reads books about or by women. They don't watch Oprah. They don't see chick flicks. Women, on the other hand, study men and consume everything about them. Spend hours wondering what he thought. I am not wrong about this.

    • Woman are all pathological liars. Why would anyone try to care about a sick, lying, false belief mind? And emotuions? They are our primitive communication system that are constantly false and irrelevant. Stop your never ending lying and you'll be amazed how much more you women will matter.

    • Situation 1
      He: What do you want for your birthday?
      She: If you loved me you would already know that.
      He: I'm really sorry, honey, I don't have any idea.

      Situation 2
      He: Here's a

    • Situation 1
      He: What do you want for your birthday?
      She: If you loved me you would already know that.

      Situation 2
      He1: Hi, come on in. Want a beer?
      He2: Thought you'd never ask.

    • "and women can’t read men’s minds because more often than not, men aren’t thinking of anything at all. Am I right? Woman: “Honey, what are you thinking about?” Man: “Nothing.” (smile)"

      In case a man has never told you, when a woman asks 'What are you thinking' and he replies, 'Nothing', it's not that his mind is a blank. It's because he doesn't want to explain what he's thinking about. It could be how hot your friend is to whether or not he should change to oil and rotate the tires. Women buy the 'nothing' excuse, so why bother explaining. It's the path of least resistance and can't get him in trouble.

    • This article does not say if a similar study was done on women to see if they are more successful detecting emotions in men than other women. I wonder if that is true. Without that component, this means nothing....

    • I wrote the book on that. Some time ago. "At eight weeks the zygote. . . blah, blah, blah,"

    • Men can read each other because I have found, generally speaking, that we don't hide our feelings. We wear our attitudes on our face without a thought for deception. IMO, it's quite the opposite for women, who are obviously far more emotional, and because of that, very good at concealing and manipulating their expressions. They are more practiced -- again, generally speaking.


    • I think that's are not good at hiding their emotions, as women are. They seek to prolong things by being opaque and "not tipping their hand until they absolutely have to,'s goes wiith their right to change their minds at any time, on a whim. It's maddening, but wouldn't have it any other way!

    • Funny everyone here is projecting. Final answer is:

      It's not about women not communication, not about men, it's how much INTENT and CONTROL you have over your brain (not others brains) to practice understanding people DIFFERENT from you.

      Study meditation, neuroscience, new subjects, before thinking you understand any study or big-small-data and it's implications.

      Anthropologists, Body-Language Experts, Neuroscience experts, and myself know those who think words or more words are needed to communicate with the opposite sex are wrong - 80% communication is body/para-language. You can learn new body/para-language by recognizing there are other realities out there besides your own.

      Look inward. Good luck! :-)

    • My wife says, if I could actually read her emotions by her eyes, I'd be in an emotional whipsaw every waking hour of the day. You don't want that, she says. I figure men read men's emotions better because the cave man needed to know when he was about to be killed!

    • Clueless journalism. For all we know, "gals" may be equally "clueless" about men. The study says absolutely nothing about women's abilities as compared to those of men. The writer is taking a cheap shot at men for page views.

    • I'd like to see a study seeing how well women understand each other.

    • And of course they have to add a completely useless evolutionary explanation that doesn't actually tell us anything.

    • Who can understand women? They're nutty. So....we men don't care to try and understand "crazy". Meanwhile, back to the ballgames and playing pool where we're content without nagging women around.

Add a Comment


About Ideas Market


    • Ideas Market on Facebook