[wahern]

If talking about a topic made one skilled at or reflected skill, millions of men would be star quarterbacks.

At a macro scale men and women often have different interests. They often cluster around different skillsets because their interests channel them into different activities. But emotional self-awareness isn't an activity, it's an aptitude that fundamentally both men and women exercise (or don't exercise) with similar frequency in day-to-day life. But because women tend to pursue more interpersonal relationships and discussions, they are more adept at the vocabulary, the way men know the vocabulary and rules around football. But, again, it doesn't follow that talking about something makes one more skilled at it. You can juggle tons of relationships and engage in endless discourse about emotional and mental health without having much if any meaningful emotional self-awareness. People with vulnerable-type NPD do this, and at the extreme end the condition is basically predicated on lacking the capacity for a self-awareness most other people, including isolated men, take for granted.

Relatedly, after adjusting for income and social status, it's notable that not even psychologists and therapists have significantly lower divorce rates. That really highlights in my mind that not even an in-depth, systematic, rigorous study of something necessarily makes one more adept at it's exercise, nor, apparently, more likely to meaningfully pursue and develop the skill. Though, presumably they're more adept at judging and analyzing others' emotional awareness and skill given it's the skill they actually apply in their occupation.

[jmcqk6]

I don't see how we are disagreeing. Emotional self-awareness is an aptitude, one that is fundamentally experiential, and so talking about it is inherently difficult. I agree that many people who talk about it are not necessarily experiencing it, including therapists and psychologists, especially if they are using lots of abstractions.

I'm a man who has worked on my own emotional health very intentionally as an adult. I've found there are lots of ways to understand and engage with your own emotions, and they can seem contradictory if you're not thinking experientially.

But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences. They can talk about it very differently from other people. There is a huge multidimensional possibility space for that.

[wahern]

> But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences.

There's potential selection bias here, though. It's more difficult to identify people high in self-awareness who aren't inclined to discuss their own emotional experiences, unless you happen to have frequent, close interactions with them. It's like when people assume learning languages is easy based on their experience meeting people from around the world who speak their language. But you're much less likely to interact with immigrants and travelers who don't speak your own language, if only because those people aren't inclined to engage with people with whom they can't or aren't interested in communicating.

My experience (often unfortunate) tells me that there are many behaviors that masquerade as self-awareness and other reflections of inner state, but don't actually reflect what we presume it does. For example, the stereotype is that women are naturally more nurturing. Nurturing is a concept that encompasses many dimensions, and it conflates internal motivations and feelings with outward behaviors and practice. We presume nurturing implies empathy and selflessness, but there are of mothers who by all appearances (and in fact) are great nurturers, but whose internal mental experience is bereft of those qualities. They're good nurturers because ultimately we can only judge nurturing by the outcome, and it's easy to presume a naturally patient person adept at applying good parenting practices possess the inner state we associate with nurturing. Even children of such people may not realize this, depending on their own capacity for emotional discernment.

Concepts like empathy, guilt, etc, are tricky. Is a person quick to apologize driven by guilty feelings and concern for other's internal state, or are they merely adept and eager at identifying social cues and applying social norms?

In principle women could be, as a group, more likely to possess a greater capacity for and to develop self-awareness. But history and feminism and racism tells me to be highly skeptical of something like this. While biologically it's possible (and I wouldn't at all be surprised), it's not self-evident to me that self-awareness is any more valuable a skill evolutionarily for women than for men, just like intelligence isn't likely to be more valuable a skill for some ethnic groups over another. For example, generally speaking, and from an evolutionary perspective, analytical intelligence is no less an asset for a group performing less stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. hunting) than for a group centered around stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. accounting).