One of the fun parts of reading old books is that you run into things that everyone knew to be true, but was completely false. Medicine is a great example. The worst thing that could happen to a sick person 200 years ago was that they doctor arrived. Up until very recent, medicine killed more people than it cured. Their medicine looks more like witchcraft than science. Strapping people to a gurney and hitting them with high voltage is pretty much barbarism. In its day, however, everyone was sure it was the peak of scientific reasoning.

That said, much of what gets labeled science today will be looked upon as nutty superstition in not so long. It’s not actually science, of course, but the term is so abused that future people will probably assume everyone agreed that things like sociology and economics were science. Most people have always known that psychology, for example, was quackery, but will future people know we knew that? Or will they just read the old books and assume we were that silly?  Will they know this was considered nonsense?

Within American gender norms is the expectation that women should be modest. We argue that violating this “modesty norm” by boasting about one’s accomplishments causes women to experience uncomfortable situational arousal that leads to lower motivation for and performance on a self-promotion task. We hypothesized that such negative effects could be offset when an external source for their situational arousal was made available. To test hypotheses, 78 women students from a U.S. Northwestern university wrote a scholarship application essay to promote the merits of either the self (modesty norm violated) or another person as a letter of reference (modesty norm not violated). Half were randomly assigned to hear information about a (fake) subliminal noise generator in the room that might cause “discomfort” (misattribution available) and half were told nothing about the generator (normal condition: misattribution not available). Participants rated the task and 44 new naive participants judged how much scholarship money to award each essay. Results confirmed predictions: under normal conditions, violating the modesty norm led to decreased motivation and performance. However, those who violated the modesty norm with a misattribution source reported increased interest, adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals, perceived their own work to be of higher quality, and produced higher quality work. Results suggest that when a situation helps women to escape the discomfort of defying the modesty norm, self-promotion motivation and performance improve. Further implications for enhancing women’s academic and workplace experiences are discussed.

First off, biology makes women modest. There’s a reason we don’t have cultures on this planet where the women are aggressive and rowdy. Humans, like all life, have a primary purpose baked into the software and that’s reproduction. Males and females of our species have different reproduction strategies based in large part on our different roles in reproduction. This has nothing to do with “gender norms” made up by the ridiculous people in the oogily-boogily departments of modern colleges and universities..

Second, this nonsense is funded by tax payer and rate payers. Those future historians will no doubt know this and assume that the people of earth in this age really thought this nonsense was real and worth funding it. The reason we have those old books was because rich people were willing to bankroll their production. What that means is the answer to the question about how we will be viewed by future people is probably the same as we view past people. Future man will wonder why we did not progress very much.