Fighting the Neurotrash industry

[AskBasil]

Perfect term for it.

Professor Gina Rippon

Yeah, but how well conducted are these studies? Did the researchers double-blind the trial so they didn't know which were the males and which were the females while they were observing them? Did they use as large a number of animals as they could to gain a representative sample of monkeys? Were these monkeys zoo animals, lab animals or wild and in the jungle? Did they inject them with any hormones to see if this did indeed influence the animals' choice of plaything? Did they take a careful inventory of confounding factors in the environment in which the monkeys played? And last but not least, who funded the study?....There are many, many traps in this sort of 'research' which makes it incredibly difficult to draw clear and unbiased conclusions. The study of sex differences in behaviour is often as far away from proper neuroscience in the lab as astrology is from astronomy.

It is not terribly difficult to look up the studies in question and answer your own questions, I would image.

Assuming that your goal is to satisfy your curiosity rather than discredit studies that contradict your views, of course.

Cordelia Fine debunks those studies. As she says for every 1 study that shows a difference in gender there are about 20 that don't.

The monkey studies were done in 2002 and 2008. Fine discusses them in her 2010 book.

Actually the links in that Huffington Post article don't refer back to the studies but to potted press releases summaries that don't include references, so from that it's hard to evaluate the merit of the research. I'm inclined to be wary, as there's so much bad science around in this area.

Comprehensive paper commenting on the results of toy preference studies (human & monkey) here. It quotes the studies it comments on, for those of you who would like to check methodology.

I don't think there is much doubt that males & females have different behaviour/choices in this respect except possibly among the ideologically motivated . It doesn't mean that one is inferior to the other, just that their brains work in slightly different ways.

Interesting. Maybe rhesus monkey parents also socialise their male babies to prefer trucks, in the same way as human parents unconsciously do?

Yes CaptChaos that could well be the case. Fine talks about differences in social group dynamics even between the same species of monkeys. So, for example rhesus monkeys in Borneo display different social orders to groups of rhesus monkeys in Africa.*

But of course we aren't rhesus monkeys. We know that behaviour can be influenced by social factors. Why people don't want to believe that boys playing with trucks can be socially influenced I'm not sure.

*Disclaimer: I have no idea whether rhesus monkeys live in Borneo or Africa. I just used them as an example as I can't remember off the.top of my head what examples Fine used.

Show us something new. Lazy.

"Why people don't want to believe that boys playing with trucks can be socially influenced I'm not sure"

It isn't an either/or situation imho.

Yes, there are social influences, but there is also a biological component. Ignoring this does not strengthen the feminist case. It weakens it.

Everyone on this thread needs to read the paper I linked to before. There are some very interesting conclusions there about the male/female toy choices as well as various cognitive differences. There are also links to myriad studies, for the hard-to-convince among us.

Not much of a biological component then if "females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys". (From your link)

So female monkeys like trucks too it would seem. If we're going to make the leap from monkey to human as you obviously think we should then we would expect girls to be playing with trucks half the time.

Yet they're not. I wonder why!

"So while yes, clearly there are biological and hormonal differences, why these should lead automatically to a preference for vehicular based toys, well, I remain unconvinced."

Should has nothing to do with it.

It is, or it isn't.

"Not much of a biological component then if "females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys". (From your link)"

You would understand the "biological component" (of the difference) if you had managed to read the next few sentences before rushing to come back here to dismiss it.

As shown in their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time with the “male” toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). Therefore, one key difference between males and females in these studies is that males actually show a toy preference while females do not

In other words, there is a difference.

Moving on to the paragraph below:

We know of at least two other examples of male–female cognitive differences that resemble the interesting pattern that appears in the toy choice data of Hassett et al. (2008): visual recognition memory (McGivern et al., 1997) and spatial navigation (e.g., Sandstrom et al., 1998; Williams et al., 1990;Williams and Meck, 1991). In both of these cognitive domains, females appear to process information comprehensively, while males appear to select and respond to only certain types of information.

Is this difference in male & female brain more acceptable from a feminist viewpoint because it shows women in a better light?

Some women drive cars
Some men drive cars
Some women are mothers
Some men are fathers
Many women and men both drive and are parents

(I wonder if the subset of women who drive but aren't mothers is bigger or smaller than the subset of women who are mothers but don't drive.)

Could it possibly be that "getting around" and "producing offspring" are important to both sexes?

I didn't say anything about infallibility, Buffy. Of course we are all aware that scientists can also make mistakes.

My point was that either differences exist or they don't. Body of evidence has been piling up in the "differences exist" camp for quite a while now. Any one study can be badly constructed & may have arrived at a wrong conclusion. But all of them? You would have to believe in a conspiracy of the patriarchy, I suppose.

What I am trying to say is that "differences exist" does not mean that women are inferior. We are different in some ways and (to me, at least) pretending to be identical to men in every respect seems an untenable position.

Garth - I don't know what you are talking about or why you think that is relevant to our discussion.

OK supposing by some bizarre act of biology that was in existence before cars were that boys do prefer trucks, so what? What does that mean? They like trucks. Woo hoo!

It's not like girls don't like trucks or boys don't like dolls either. No study, even the ones with exceptionally dodgy methodology have found that.

Oh and we still aren't rhesus monkeys. I don't think.

Thanks for being so patronising but I didn't need to read the studies because I've already done so sweetie...

So, some things you might want to know:

Melissa Hines (author of many of the studies in your link) has spoken several times of the need to reduce society's influence with regards to gender stereotyping. She bases this on her findings that boys were more likely to play with a variety of toys when their parents weren't in the room. She knows society matters.

The monkey study was criticised for being subjective in its interpretation. Cooking pans were regarded as a girl's toy and the female monkeys' preference for them used to back their theory. How can a cooking pan be classified as a girls toy when monkeys don't cook?

And if you'd read my words you would have seen that I had said "not much of a biological component". Doesn't mean that I think there isn't one, just not a big one, certainly not enough to merit the about of pidgeon holing that goes on in society.

Back to my original assertion - if we take the toy choices of female monkeys to be an indicator of girls' nature, girls are obviously being heavily socialised away from their true nature. You should focus your energy on that rather than banging your "it's hard-wired" drum. Cos who gives a crap about that anyway?

Biology may well have an effect, sure. We can't know how much of one. What we do know is that society certainly does because countless studies have also proved that. But you ignore that because it doesnt fit in with your viewpoint.

As for the "feminists don't want to believe it" argument. Nonsense. I'd be happy to believe in "Different but Equal" as it's a much better situation than what we have now. But it's simply not true and the real situation is a lot more complex with a lot more overlap that you would like to believe.

I think we are all aware that we are not rhesus monkeys

The point you missed is the significance of male & female monkeys acting in a similar fashion to male & female humans, suggesting that tendency re toy preference in childhood is not a social construct - since no such social pressure exists in their society, and they have never even seen a toy truck or a doll before.

"What does that mean?"

It means Professor Gina Rippon is wrong when she says that neurologically male and female brains are not different.