Girls Wired To Fear Dangerous Animals 224
Foot-in-Mouth writes "New Scientist reports that girls are more "primed" to fear spiders and snakes, compared to boys. Infant boys and girls were shown pairs of images, a fearful and a happy object (such as a spider and a flower), measuring the boys' and girls' dwell times on the images. And in another similar test, normally happy objects (such as a flower) were given a fearful face and fearful objects were given a happy face. The results of these two tests suggested to the researcher that girls are not wired to fear spiders, for example, but rather girls are wired to more quickly learn to fear dangerous animals.
The researcher, David Rakison at CMU, 'attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. An aversion to spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.'
This reminds one of men's obsession with video games. Will game designers use this information to tweak video games for gender, either to make the games more or less frightening?"
Re:Unscientific conclusions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it's pretty speculative, but suggesting that it's a blind guess requires real ignorance of both history and biology.
Re:Nature vs nurture. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you can, though I don't know if this study did so.
Make it more blind. Have volunteers (who can't see the images) classify the infants' reactions to the images.
Whoops, hold on. I just RTFA. They're not evaluating based on the infants' facial expressions--they're evaluating based on how long the infants looked at each image. That's objective--hard to see how the scientists' expectations would be affecting the data. Mind you, "more time looking==more scared" isn't obviously valid, but the difference in times between the tests is still significant. You could question whether the girls are learning fear vs something else, but the test still seems to show that the girls are being trained by the images while the boys aren't.
Re:Dangerous animals (Score:5, Insightful)
Mice bite. Bites get infected and transmit diseases. It makes sense evolutionarily speaking. Boys grow to be men and need to be able to not be afraid (or at least keep that fear in check) while hunting so that they can focus on the kill. Girls and women tended to be more on the gatherer side (why they can see colors better amongst other things) to pick fruit and what-not. Spiders and bugs and slithery things would be more dangerous to them than men since they'd be more likely to encounter them. Screaming when in fear alerts the tribe to danger and the higher pitch of their voices seems like it would travel better than a guttural manly tone.. Makes perfect sense to me.
Re:Nature vs nurture. (Score:1, Insightful)
In principle, you could easily enough prevent bias by appropriate blinding.
Just take the pictures of the infants' reactions, and get some third parties, who don't even know what the experiment is about, to do the scoring. You could probably conscript a bunch of child-development majors to provide assessments of the sample pretty easily.
But if adult humans are hard-wired OR socially conditioned to assume girls are more easily scared, they may be slightly more resistant to considering the baby boys as looking fearful. Therefore there may be a slight bias in that when the infant boys are frightened by the fearful images, the "false negative" rate may be higher than for infant girls. When neither group is particularly scared the false positive/negative rate may be the same. This is a particularly difficult experiment to blind, I suspect, because you have to separate the bias of the observer from the bias of the observee.
Re:mice? (Score:5, Insightful)
No... it's in women's best interest for the men to put the seat up when they go and back down when they're done. Prevents the "them falling in" problem, prevents the "them sitting on a wet seat" problem, and prevents the "them actually having to do something" problem.
Me, I just leave BOTH seats down anymore. Nobody complains and it doesn't look like the toilet is yawning at you when you walk into the room. ;)
Re:Gender discrimination? Say it ain't so. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, most of the "gender differences" we see are primarily nurture, not nature. Even if you don't brainwash your own daughter, trust me, other kids will.
As an adult male, I too find it depressing that I apparently cannot be trusted around children, but my daughter's male teacher and principal can (strange double standard). Unfortunately, I do like kids, in the sense that I want to see them be happy. And, as creepy as I am, little girls adore me. Why? Because, unlike most adults, I actually pay attention to them, and treat them like human beings. Which apparently is something that their paranoid parents are failing to do. I believe giving your kids the time and attention they crave would protect them much better than training them to fear all strangers. The "stranger danger" myth is bullshit - the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by people the parents know, those same school staff and relatives that the parents trust unconditionally.
Except that's the crux of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that seems to me like a very serious flaw. Doing a scientific test when you don't even know what you're measuring or what it means, seems to me incredibly unscientific. If they can't actually prove that "more time looking == more scared", then the whole conclusion isn't really supported by anything.
To see how bogus the whole "more looking == more fear" thing is, a whole other team used "more looking == more attractive" when they tried to prove that there is a hard-wired beauty ideal. If I'm to believe this team's "more looking == more fear", than the other team proved that a hourglass woman figure with big breasts is actually scarier than hell to babies. And viceversa, if I'm to believe the other team's interpretation for "more time looking", then this team showed that girls are attracted to spiders and snakes. (Cue trouser snake jokes;)
But really it shows how bogus it is. Nobody actually knows what "more time looking" actually means in those babies. Two different teams assigned two fundamentally opposite interpretations to it. And neither actually has more than handwaving to support that crucial proposition in their inferrence.
There are ways to see which brain zones are triggered, e.g., MRI. If you see the zone for anxiety triggering on a MRI scan, that's a pretty conclusive "yep, it's fear."
Why don't they do just that, instead of guessing what "more time looking" means?
Re:mice? (Score:3, Insightful)
I always thought the mice thing was a construction of television, much like the toilet seat wars.
I see you've never lived in the same house as a woman. I suggest you get married, try leaving the toilet seat up a few times, and then try your post again. For best results, go to your in-laws' house and leave the toilet seat up there. It won't do any damage. Chances are your mother-in-law doesn't like you anyway ;-)
Re:Dangerous animals (Score:2, Insightful)