charlesduhigg.com — Imagine, for a moment, that a friend comes to your desk and asks for advice: they want to change their smoking and exercise habits. What should they do?
Would your habit advice be different if they were a woman than if they were a man?
For the last 30 years, the traditional answer has been no. But as we learn more about how the brain works, we’re learning that the best therapies often differ between genders.
Feb 6, 2012 View in Crawl 4
mirandolinaFeb 6, 2012Submitter
C&P
elainia says:
February 1, 2012 at 7:53 pm
I wonder, among those participants, which gender is better at following directions. After reading this information I remembered hearing about the work being done educating women in Afghanistan. Educated women are far less likely to allow their sons join the Taliban…a son must have permission from his mother first, evidently. I am curious about what it is about information in and of itself does to the process of decision making in women. The education of women is also cited in Freakonomics as the highest factor of influence on their children.
An interesting topic, indeed.
Reply
cduhigg says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Hey Elainia,
Thanks for your note – that’s a really good question. I think one of the reasons that educating women has such influence is because it’s such a different avenue of influence. I worked for a while in adult literacy where there was a feeling that training men to read offered relatively little reward. But training women to read had huge impacts, because it was a channel of influence with relatively little competition.
texascopywriterFeb 6, 2012
We have to ask this question?