WOMAN'S INSTINCT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 42, 29 November 1927, Page 3

WOMAN'S INSTINCT.

A LEGEND TESTED. MAN'S QUITE AS GOOD. In the Psychology Section of the British Association' Professor C. W. Valentine dealt a destructive blow at the popular notion that women possess a more acute faculty of intuitive perception than men, states the "Manchester Guardian." The notion is widespread; it is held by the man in the street and by people of eminence. Mr Baldwin, when defending the extension of the franchise to women of 21, said: "I have not a profound confidence in feminine logic, but I have in feminine instinct."

Presumably the suggestion is that in women the intuitive faculty is a happy compensation for inferior reasoning capacity. "If taat be so," said Professor Valentine, dryly, ,U I do not suppose women will be likely to regret it if we demonstrate that this popular idea of their superior intuitions is a myth." At any rate Professor Valentine has recently been carrying out some tests. The nature of the tests would take considerable space to describe, but it may be said that they consisted of charac-ter-readings made by men and women, first from photographs and then from children. Mr St. John Ervine, the well-known dramatist and critic, will be iuterestd to know that his photograph was used in one of the tests. The intuitive faculty of one lady led her to declare that he was "kind and gentle in disposition." According to the instinct of another lady he was "cruel and sarcastic." A third lady felt that he was "modest and effeminate." It was evident that many present know and admire Mr St. John Ervine's vigorous and trenchant performances with the pen for these three intuitive assessments of his character provoked great laughter. Among the photographs were two of confessed murderers. A lady pronounced the photograph of one murderer to be that of "a man of superior moral quality." Professor Valentine admitted that photographs could not, for many reasons, be satisfactory means for making such tests. He therefore devised a number of tests in" which men and women were asked to give their impressions of the characters of a number of school children. When the results of these experiments were collected and examined it was found that the women's intuitions were not more accurate than those of the men. One curious fact about the experiments was that the men and women all said that boys were more easy to read because they "gave themselves away more freely," whereas they actually made the most errors in assessing the characters of the boys.