> In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that “in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus.”
This is an odd hypothesis and you know, I’ve read a little bit of enough about postmodernism/critical theory and its influence on hypertext to feel like this take is down right saditty.
The need to try to sow conflict between “patriarchy” and “xetriarchy” by depicting one style of curiosity as more virtuous than the other dampens what looks like an otherwise interesting study.
And it doesn’t help that the authors don’t appear to list or accessibly depict which countries were more inclined toward one style as opposed to the other.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn3268
If anyone can decipher the sophistry in the actual study, please let me know what’s going on here, especially in figure 8.