BoysToys

[SlowFJH]

We have two boys and a girl (all now teenagers). My daughter was never into dolls and never really liked pink. She was into arts and crafts and loves knitting and sowing. The boys were completely stereotypical (plastic and wooden swords, guns, cars, diggers and tractors, soldiers etc).

We have good feminist friends (with three boys) who banned violent toys for boys. They always gave us the cat's bum face when they visited ours because their boys used to absolutely love playing with my sons' swords and shields. When we went out it for a walk, every stick they found was a gun - despite their parents vocal disapproval.

My friend's boys (now all strapping teenage lads) joke about how their parents banned them from having the toys they always wanted.

We definitely saw differences in toy preferences very early on. My daughter had zero interest in wheeled toys (despite my efforts) but both boys were fascinated by them virtually from day one.

I know my experience is not scientific. But there were some studies several years ago using baby apes (who obviously had not been conditioned by human systems or been exposed to advertising etc). Baby male apes showed a clear preference for mechanical toys over plush toys.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/

I'd love to hear others views on this topic... social conditioning versus biological predispositions.

It would certainly provide more data if you were going to ignore every basic rule of research methodology.

Anecdotal data I agree but an obsevation that had been corroborated by measures of EQ

"In evolutionary terms it could be argued that there is a survival advantage for the sex that gives birth to and suckles offspring to have E>S."

Would it though? I would think a balance of E/S would be more advantageous as both have distinct drawbacks.

"Anecdotal data I agree but an obsevation that had been corroborated by measures of EQ"

What does that even mean? I read it 4 times and still have no idea.

Correlation does not equal causation. Always amazed when scientists of any persuasion don't get this. Obviously there's an extremely high chance women in our society are more likely to have high EQ as we are encouraged to value high EQ in women.
If you're a physiologist slow you must know about the studies on brain plasticity and the visible differences in brain anatomy that develop depending on environment eg the mouse studies on the visual cortex. Also that the same happens in humans too. If you use a skill and practice it, that part of your brain can be even visibly bigger or more active in some cases and smaller if not used.
We also have good evidence that even tiny babies are capable of developing complex patterns of interaction with their parents in aspects that could be seen as gendered such as caring behaving. This occurs well within the first year.
Personally I'm always surprised there aren't even more gendered differences apparent in the population given the vast differences in the way that society treats the sexes and the extreme sponge-like way children absorb and adapt to even very subtle influences.

Agree completely with evolutionary psychology being evobollocks. It fails even the basics as it mostly consistents of wild hypotheses with no actual empirical way of testing those hypotheses.
I wonder how they would have interpreted their results if they'd picked a toy pram rather than a car

"I wonder how they would have interpreted their results if they'd picked a toy pram rather than a car"

I imagine they would have come to the exact same conclusion. Evo-psych seems to be the only 'science' that starts with the conclusion.

Back to my point about both buggies and trucks being wheeled mechanical toys capable of load bearing.

Slow, if you want people to engage with your posts, taking on board what is said about your posting style could be helpful.

And is it that surprising that on a board called Relationships on a site called Mumsnet, it's mostly women discussing relationships?

We end up going back to: even if there are differences at population level, there's still quite a big overlap.

We don't see extremes, as in other mammals of males taking off and the female doing all the caring, or the reverse in some birds, fish or frogs.

I remember something about men's brains and/or hormones also being affected by hormones.

And as anecdotal evidence goes, my granddad was much more caring than my grandmother.

To my knowledge the researchers in the toy study or the E/S study ever claimed to have proven causation. A correlation can still be of scientific interest wouldn't you say?

DrSeuss
taking on board what is said about your posting style would be helpful

Is there a "style guide" (other than the MN guidelines I should be following)?

Muttaburrasaurus
Thanks for the clarification that "Evo-bollocks" refers to evolutionary psychology not the entire study of evolution.

I'm not a psychologist but is it common or acceptable (from a style point of view) to refer to an entire branch of science as "bollocks". We're not talking phrenology or astrology or alchemy here. I am guessing (hoping?) that the people conducting this research have to jump through the same hurdles as every other scientist to get funding, have the design of their studies critiqued, gather data systematically and then be peer reviewed before publishing? Or does that not happen in Evolutionary Psychology? I'm curious.

Muttaburrasaurus and others who would say agree completely with evolutionary psychology being evo-bollocks. Do you believe that evolution doesn't apply to our psychology?

If you look back OP, I was asking a question about your feelings.
Is your original language not English perhaps?

To my knowledge the researchers in the toy study or the E/S study ever claimed to have proven causation.

Back to that abstract again:

The results suggest that sexually differentiated object preferences arose early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. This implies that sexually dimorphic preferences for features (e.g., color, shape, movement) may have evolved from differential selection pressures based on the different behavioral roles of males and females, and that evolved object feature preferences may contribute to present day sexually dimorphic toy preferences in children.

Yep, that's what they're saying - they're saying that their study does indeed suggest that sexually dimorphic object preferences are baked in - ie caused - by our evolution.

I feel bad for the people doing this study - it's not the be all and end all, there are plenty more that are just as dodgy when it comes to this area of study

A quick look at the relationship pages of MN would provide additional data to support the view that more women than men are likely to have a higher EQ than SQ.

Really? I think the relationship board shows the opposite of this to be true.

I take that back. I'm not sure it shows that more men than women are more likely to have a higher EQ than SQ, but I think it shows that lots of women don't have a high EQ.

"but is it common or acceptable (from a style point of view) to refer to an entire branch of science as "bollocks"."

As a scientist.........YES! :-) The phrase 'utter bollocks' though is usually reserved for pseudo-science, astrology, or some parts of the arts..................

The arts/science divide is alive and well, and gives many scientists a few minutes of quiet amusement aimed at their colleagues in other faculties. Although it may cause more than amusement if you find out (as some people at the University of Wales and Bath Spa University did), that a course is being offered in cultural astronomy and astrology. And given that at least one of the tutors: "... also works as a professional astrologer", are you surprised? I think I would safely describe THAT as UTTER bollocks. I could witter on about chemistry departments employing alchemists, but then I would trip up on the inconvenient fact that Newton was also an alchemist................

How does someone/some monkey know a frying pan is for cooking, if they've never been in a human's kitchen, used fire or been shown how to use it? I doubt they picked it up and cracked an egg into it. More likely they'd have banged it and found it made an interesting sound, or if it were new, maybe they noticed reflections in it, or they used it to hit things with or hold things with. But not "get me to a kitchen now!"

I can believe vervet monkeys would think of blue as a male colour, though. The males have strikingly blue genitalia.

"The males have strikingly blue genitalia." Testicles! :-) They really ARE amazingly bright blue! But did they become blue because vervet boy brains already preferred blue? Male mandrills have an even wider range of colours, described as "red, pink, blue, scarlet, and purple"!

I think that all qualifies as utterly amazing bollocks!

But do rhesus monkeys have blue balls too?

And the whole trucks versus dolls thing -- I can accept that a doll, that looks more like an infant monkey, might be more interesting to one sex than another, depending on whether care of infants is shared or not in that particular species, BUT, how do monkeys KNOW what wheels do, or that a wheeled toy is 'active' and 'masculine'? Is it just NOT baby-monkey like (hence interesting to those who sit around scratching their blue balls rather than helping bring up baby), or is it just the colour (since I sadly assume stereotypical masculine toys will tend to be blue rather than pink!).

Blue wheels look like my bollocks? Interesting! My utter bollocks hypothesis! :-)

SomeDyke definitely needing a like button for that post.

'utterly amazing bollocks'. Perfect.

But if they prefer blue because it's like male genitalia...shouldn't blue attract female monkeys?...

Maybe they were gay monkeys.

Still, 100 years ago pink was for boys and blue for girls, in the UK. Reportedly.
Why is it now the reverse?
And why pink and not green or yellow? It looks pretty arbitrary to me.

It's like that joke about a woman asking for something, getting half of what she asked for and being told to share it.

Boys have blue - baby blue to indigo.

Girls don't even get a whole colour, they just get part of red and everything is pasted with it.

Slow- astrology, phrenology and alchemy were all considered perfectly reputable schools of thought in their day and had to jump through all the hoops you describe as do many other psuedosciency things these days. I have no doubt evolutional psychology papers are peer reviewed by other evo-bollockists and published in evobollocks journals and New Scientist. Thats only touching the surface of the larger epistemological questions your post raises but I'm going to leave all that aside I think!
My view is that psychology is likely to be subject in some aspects to evolution but how do you design an experiment to disprove a null hypothesis on anything in it?
Others have already answered your question about correlation and causation - both the study authors and you both in realation to the study and some of your other points are absolutely implying causation based on wild speculation from small numbers, in a small, badly designed study. All this without taking into account the massive and obvious confounding factors and bias the degree and strength of which is 'provable' in a much more satisfactory and robust way.

Muttaburrasaurus
Your words
My view is that psychology is likely to be subject in some aspects to evolution...

Is it safe therefore to infer that it can't all be bollocks? If you believe in evolution as a foundational principle of life, how do you reconcile that it can be selectively applied - some aspects of psychology have evolved..but others haven't? How would that work?