4 ms·

IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where

IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where girls are slightly better. But abilities are not the same as preferences. Regarding preferences: boys and girls show distinct preferences for toys and style of play from an early age (basically, before they could possibly be socialized). Even chimpanzee children show distinct toy preferences by sex (and they match human toy preferences). Speaking anecdotally: I often speculate that the only people who could possibly believe that boys and girls do not have fundamentally different preferences are the childless. I live in Portland, OR. This is one of the most liberal, politically correct subcultures in the entire world. My kids are enrolled in a program at the local park and the person administering the program made sure to specify their gender pronouns. They had a discussion about the gender of a species of worm that is a hermaphrodite. And yet, everywhere I go, the boys are into monster trucks and super heroes and the girls are into dolls and princesses. As the culture wars have heated up over the last few years, I have started asking parents we encounter about how they socialized their kids. Basically ever single one tells the same story: we went out of our way to make everything as non-gendered as possible, but our boy wanted to play with trucks and our girl wanted to play with dolls.

ldiracdelta 9y ago
Even boy and girl _monkeys_ display the same truck vs doll preference that human boys and girls display. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
- alphydan 9y ago
  A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1] Come on! If you actually open the paper, https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-differences-in-rhesus-monkey-toy-preferences-parallel-those-of-children.pdf https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-d... You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why? For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment! Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does. [1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...

ldiracdelta 9y ago

Even boy and girl _monkeys_ display the same truck vs doll preference that human boys and girls display. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...

alphydan 9y ago
A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1] Come on! If you actually open the paper, https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-differences-in-rhesus-monkey-toy-preferences-parallel-those-of-children.pdf https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-d... You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why? For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment! Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does. [1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...