Bear or Man? Explaining the Latest Culture War Controversy
Men take women literally but never seriously. Women never take men literally but always seriously
Social media controversies may be silly but they are also interesting insofar as they provide data for more general theories of human behavior or offer some insight for the same. The latest one, also known as the “bear or man" controversy, speaks to the profound sex differences in semantics, the difference that will always create misunderstandings between men and women. “Semantics” may not be the most appropriate word for what I’m getting at, but let’s leave it at that for now.
For those blissfully unaware of the controversy, here’s the gist of it:
If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man? Answers to that hypothetical question have sparked a debate about why the vast majority say they would feel more comfortable choosing a bear.
The topic has been hotly discussed for weeks as men and women chimed in with their thoughts all over social media.
Screenshot HQ, a TikTok account, started the conversation, asking a group of women whether they would rather run into a man they didn't know or a bear in the forest. Out of the seven women interviewed for the piece, only one picked a man.
"Bear. Man is scary," one of the women responds.
A number of women echoed the responses given in the original video, writing in the comments that they, too, would pick a bear over a man. The hypothetical has people split, with some expressing their sadness over the state of the world and others cracking jokes. Some men were flabbergasted.
Men are getting all crazy on social media citing statistics about bears and men—how violent each of them are—and posting videos showing how aggressive bears can be. “You sure you wanna pick the bear?”
The first thing one needs to understand in order to get the controversy right is that women (I'm talking average tendencies here, ok?) are the more “practical” sex. “Everything” a woman does is instrumental in achieving some practical goal. This is why women are less eager to play chess or less likely to work in number theory, for example, since these activities are not perceived as having much to do with everyday life. Indeed, when women do get into more abstract areas, such as philosophy, there is a strong probability they will end up in research areas that directly concern their group, i.e. more likely to work on women's rights or the ethics of abortion than on philosophy of mathematics or formal logic. Also, being concerned more with real-world implications of scientific research probably explains why women are more inclined toward censorship in science.
Second, and related, women understand words and concepts in more personal terms, while men's “semantics” are more abstract and less personal.
Peter Thiel had a great line about the difference in how Trump's voters vs. the media understand Trump and his words. His voters always take him seriously but never literally, Thiel said, while the media never takes Trump seriously but always literally.
So when his voters hear him saying that “we need to build a wall,” their question is not, “Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?”. They hear him saying that we need a more sensible immigration policy.
How is this relevant for the bear or man controversy you ask?
Well, men take women literally but never seriously. On the other hand, women never take men literally but always seriously.
Women are less prone to treat “man or bear?” as some kind of abstract hypothetical. They treat it in more instrumental and personal terms. In answering whether they would rather like to meet a bear or a man alone in the woods they are (probably unconsciously) substituting a general and abstract question with a more concrete and personal question.
As psychologist Daniel Kahneman said, “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” And since the bear-or-man? is not a dilemma they are likely to be faced with ever in their lives, they can “afford” the “substitution,” as it were.
Some women may answer “bear” as a way of saying that male violence in relationships is a big problem; it's something that concerns them personally, after all. In that sense, drawing attention to relationship violence is instrumental in solving a particular problem.
Other women may answer “bear” as a way of saying that they would never like to meet their ex again, a way of venting their frustration with a particular man. Again, personal content fills in the blanks of the hypothetical question, in a similar way a reader of a literary work of art fills in places of indeterminacy in the text with contents of his own mind, memory and personal history—what Roman Ingarden called concretization.
Or it may be a way of solving or addressing some other social conflict they are involved in.
Who knows.
But one thing in common is that the answer is instrumental while their understanding of the “man” (or “bear,” for that matter) is something personal and concrete; they are not treating a “man” as some kind of abstract category that has certain statistical properties.
This explains why citing real-world statistics about “bears” and “men” will always miss the point from their perspective. These statistics do not address the personal concerns and grievances they may be attempting to solve by answering the hypothetical in a particular way.1
Translating things in more personal and instrumental terms is not unique to women (although I would assume there is a sex difference favoring women in this regard).
The instrumentality or pragmatism of people’s answers in questionnaires manifests in their tendency to provide answers depending on what social consequences they perceive could follow if other people accepted their answers as true if if they were to publicly utter the answer. This is in contrast to giving answers depending on their truth value or evidential strength.2 Drawing attention to relationship violence as a social problem would be one consequence of choosing the bear in the hypothetical.
Hence, the disagreement and the controversy regarding whether one should choose a bear or a man, does not lie at the information level—it's not a problem of ignorance about statistics, i.e. about one group of people having one set of beliefs about bears or men and another group of people having another set of beliefs about bears and men. To the extent that this is the case, facts or statistics will not resolve the disagreement.
Some women might cite arguments and data that supposedly support their "bearish" response, but this does not prove that their response is the result of a deficit of information (about real statistics). Rather, it could be the case that they evoke arguments and data in order to rationalize the answer to the substituted question.
This is a topic I shall explore further in future posts but for now, let me just give one recent example illustrating the point. A person may deny that the research topic of race differences in intelligence is taboo because saying "X is taboo" may imply that the politically correct view regarding X rests on prohibiting and discouraging open investigation of X and hence lacks credibility. Since that conclusion may be a consequence one may wish to avoid, the person may have an incentive to deny what is probably correct, namely that race differences in intelligence is a taboo research topic.