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The trouble with these kinds of studies is that there is a global culture of male and female behavior in everything from movies to product design. Given the per

The trouble with these kinds of studies is that there is a global culture of male and female behavior in everything from movies to product design. Given the pervasive importance we put on gender, there is no supprise it would have a globally detectable effect on personality tests. The aim of course is to study the biological cognitive difference between sexes, not the cultural cognitive difference. But since there's no ethical double blind study we could run, there's no way to completely separate cultural differences from biology. If there was a way to do a personality study of the last uncontacted tribes we might be able to get somewhere, but even then the physical difference between the sexes is going to lead to a cultural difference between the sexes and therefore a psychological difference between the sexes. So, sure there's a measurable difference, but it's probably impossible to learn exactly what creates the difference.

HideousKojima 6y ago
Effects have been observed in one day old children as well: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068.42663.ce https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068.... Also other primate infants show the same toy preferences as human infants (i.e. male monkey infants prefering trucks, females prefering dolls, etc.)
- dougmwne 6y ago
  I'm not even sure how that makes sense. What is a truck to a monkey and how does it have anything to do with gender? How sensitive could this test be to the bias of the researchers? The abstract you posted says nothing about a difference in vision in day old children. At 13 weeks there's plenty of time for differences in environment to have already taken hold between males and females. I'm very unconvinced we could even measure such a cognitive difference divorced from environment.
d0100 6y ago
> The aim of course is to study the biological cognitive difference between sexes, not the cultural cognitive difference. I am not convinced that culture cognitive differences are even half as strong as biological cognitive difference There is no way that societies collectively decided by comitee to be patriarchal and hierarchical, rather it is a much simpler explanation that biology played a much more important role in making the world so patriarchal Cultural-constructivism is way out there

HideousKojima 6y ago

Effects have been observed in one day old children as well: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068.42663.ce https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068.... Also other primate infants show the same toy preferences as human infants (i.e. male monkey infants prefering trucks, females prefering dolls, etc.)

dougmwne 6y ago
I'm not even sure how that makes sense. What is a truck to a monkey and how does it have anything to do with gender? How sensitive could this test be to the bias of the researchers? The abstract you posted says nothing about a difference in vision in day old children. At 13 weeks there's plenty of time for differences in environment to have already taken hold between males and females. I'm very unconvinced we could even measure such a cognitive difference divorced from environment.

d0100 6y ago

> The aim of course is to study the biological cognitive difference between sexes, not the cultural cognitive difference. I am not convinced that culture cognitive differences are even half as strong as biological cognitive difference There is no way that societies collectively decided by comitee to be patriarchal and hierarchical, rather it is a much simpler explanation that biology played a much more important role in making the world so patriarchal Cultural-constructivism is way out there