My dad claims that even as toddlers, my sister and I knew which toys to play with. For example, I would always pick up toy guns, Action Man, and other similar toys. She would always pick up Barbie. He also claims that this happened while we were very young, around 2 years old, before having been exposed to advertising and social biases. Is there any evidence that boys behave like stereotypical boys and girls behave like stereotypical girls absent social conditioning?
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22Interesting question, the only thing I would like to note is that "not been exposed to social biases" is very hard to achieve in reality. Toddlers notice our reactions (body languange, smiles, eye reactions) and even subconscious reactions on parents side may have strong effect. – Suma Aug 05 '11 at 11:44
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15I've noticed that this can be a very touchy subject these days (at least in North America). +1 for having the courage to post this **excellent question** in this politically-charged era. – Randolf Richardson Aug 05 '11 at 13:44
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14The Clever Hans effect, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans, suggests that your dad unknowingly might have influenced you and your sister to choose the "correct" toys in his eyes, by, for example, smile more while you were playing with the gender-appripriate toys. – Per Alexandersson Aug 09 '11 at 10:24
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You may also be interested in the PDF that I linked in my answer to ["Can men mentally rotate images better than women?"](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6271/can-men-mentally-rotate-images-better-than-women) It doesn't discuss toddlers, but does examine the differences in genders of many different primates, with an emphasis on humans. – oosterwal Jun 24 '12 at 05:38
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I know it's only a single data point and is therefore statistically insignificant but my 2 year old daughter loves playing with balls. She rejects dolls, but treats her blanket as a baby. Her *play* seems stereotypical even if her *toys* aren't. The one toy we tried to bond her with was a blue mouse cuddle toy, which slept with her from birth. As soon as she was old enough she was completely disinterested. Each child is different even if overall patterns suggest gender preferences. – Stephen Jun 06 '17 at 06:14
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3I would point out that it was less than a hundred years ago that pink was a color for boys and blue was a color for girls and you can probably find studies showing that girls prefer pink and boys prefer blue. http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-used-to-be-boys-colour-and-blue-girls-heres-why-that-changed-2017-10 – Joe W Jul 02 '18 at 19:46
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Give a girl with no toys a plastic sword, and she'll wrap it in a blanket and call it her baby. Give a boy a doll and he'll hold it by the legs and sword-fight with it. – EvilSnack Apr 18 '19 at 04:55
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This has been studied in 2002 and 2009 at Texas A&M on monkeys and toddlers respectively, and the findings were that boys are genetically programmed to like trucks and girls to like dolls.
Findings from another study at Emory University, Atlanta in 2008 on monkeys also concluded the same.
The technique in the 2002 study on vervet monkeys was criticized by the Emory team (2008) who chose a different approach on rhesus monkeys.
The Texas team measured individual time spent with masculine and feminine toys shown to the subjects separately while the Emory team showed them masculine and feminine toys together and left the monkeys to choose between them
I have some original references to the mentioned studies and some media reports so far.
2009 study on humans From:
Alexander, G. M., Wilcox, T., & Woods, R.* (2009). Sex differences in infants’ visual interest in toys. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 427-433.
In the research project funded by the National Science Foundation, psychology professor Gerianne Alexander used technology to track the eye movements of 30 infants ranging in age from 3 months to 8 months old. Alexander’s team set a doll and a truck in a puppet theater-styled box several feet in front of the babies, who were in car seats. The subjects couldn’t verbalize their preferences for the toys, but visual tracking monitors measured how long they fixated their attention on particular toys during two 10-second intervals. The girls favored the dolls, while the boys preferred the toy trucks.
“The existence of these innate preferences for object features coupled with well-documented social influences may explain why toy preferences are one of the earliest known manifestations of sex-linked social behavior,” Alexander explains in a paper titled “Sex Differences in Infants’ Visual Interest in Toys,” published in the journal "Archives of Sexual Behavior."
2002 study on vervet monkeys titled Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus) from Evolution and Human Behaviour Volume 23, Issue 6, Pages 467-479 (November 2002)
Abstract
Sex differences in children's toy preferences are thought by many to arise from gender socialization. However, evidence from patients with endocrine disorders suggests that biological factors during early development (e.g., levels of androgens) are influential. In this study, we found that vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus) show sex differences in toy preferences similar to those documented previously in children. The percent of contact time with toys typically preferred by boys (a car and a ball) was greater in male vervets (n=33) than in female vervets (n=30) (P<.05), whereas the percent of contact time with toys typically preferred by girls (a doll and a pot) was greater in female vervets than in male vervets (P<.01). In contrast, contact time with toys preferred equally by boys and girls (a picture book and a stuffed dog) was comparable in male and female vervets. 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.
In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys.
The original 2002 studies were tried on rhesus monkeys in 2008 by a different team which also concluded that when given a choice between stereotypically male “wheeled toys” and stereotypically female “plush toys”, male rhesus monkeys show strong and significant preference for the masculine toys.
Horm Behav. 2008 August; 54(3): 359–364.
Janice M. Hassett, Erin R. Siebert, and Kim Wallen, of Emory University
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
Socialization processes, parents, or peers encouraging play with gender specific toys are thought to be the primary force shaping sex differences in toy preference. A contrast in view is that toy preferences reflect biologically determined preferences for specific activities facilitated by specific toys We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females
We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.
Criticism of the 2002 study by the Emory team (2008) and alternate approach as below
The one previous study of nonhuman primates’ interactions with human toys did not make subjects choose between masculine and feminine toys simultaneously available and thus could not directly measure preference. Instead they compared the relative proportion of interaction times with singly presented toys as a proxy for preference (Alexander and Hines, 2002). Comparisons between sexes found that the proportion of males’ toy interactions directed to masculine toys was greater than the proportion of females’ interactions directed to masculine toys.A similar, but opposite, difference was found for the proportion of interactions directed towards feminine toys, suggesting clear between-sex differences in preference for masculine and feminine toys similar to that seen in humans.
We investigated toy preferences in rhesus monkeys living in a 135 member long-term stable outdoor group by presenting the group with multiple trials of simultaneous access to different two toy combinations of multiple toys: one putatively masculine and one putatively feminine. We present here striking evidence of a sex difference in rhesus monkey preference for human gender-stereotyped toys paralleling that reported in humans, suggesting that gender differences in toy choice may reflect evolved sex differences in activity preferences not primarily resulting from socialization processes.
JoseK
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10Great idea to study monkeys instead of humans, as this more or less avoids the issue of possible social bias. Still, a methodology check is needed: was the study blind? (How were the toys shown and the reactios measured? Was it by a human? If it was, did the human know the sex of the subject?) – Suma Aug 05 '11 at 11:47
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1@Suma: I can only see an abstract of the Texas study but the Emory study left the monkeys to choose from available masculine and feminine toys. See my update. To answer your question on data collection - Monkeys were released into an open outdoor area containing toys and videotaped – JoseK Aug 05 '11 at 12:00
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@JoseK: Hopefully they monkeys weren't wearing "pink tags for girls" and "blue tags for boys" as this might introduce a bias too. ;-) – Randolf Richardson Aug 05 '11 at 13:37
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25Girls preferring dolls, I can understand. Boys preferring cars, I can’t. A genetical influence here is highly implausible (evolution doesn’t work in a span of just 100 years on either humans or monkeys) and it would need much more direct evidence to convince me. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 05 '11 at 14:20
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@Konrad: Perhaps the children/monkeys have seen cars before, and recognize them as (powerful) tools. Or perhaps they just prefer toys that move. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Aug 05 '11 at 14:32
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16@Konrad Rudolph: Cars are, essentially, noisy machines (which are also practical tools, and can even potentially be used as weapons). You can't put fancy shoes and a pretty dress on a car (as far as I know, heheh), and it doesn't have any hair to brush. Young boys often find mechanical things very interesting, and seem to have a tendency to like to build, fix, and invent "stuff." When I was a child me and my friends would build go-carts, play with toy guns, and watch builders tear down houses. The girls were never interested in this stuff, but liked babies, and played "family" with dolls. – Randolf Richardson Aug 05 '11 at 14:35
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5@kon: it's fair to say that girls take care of toys and boys use toys to interact with the environment. Girl toys are then toys that need to be taken care of, like dolls, and boy toys are tool-like toys with moving parts or that "do something". – Sklivvz Aug 05 '11 at 14:40
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1@Konrad Rudolph: These differences were very obvious back then, and generally haven't changed much from what I see with my own children and their friends today (even computer games chosen by pre-teen children tend to reflect these assumedly built-in "preferences"). Although I agree with your point about evolution, it seems to me that anything that looks like it could be mechanical "under-the-hood" (so-to-speak) would naturally be more interesting to boys due to their apparent nature. – Randolf Richardson Aug 05 '11 at 14:41
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31@Randolf, Sklivvz All of this needs rather a lot of cultural knowledge to be deduced. If the question is solely after *genetic* factors then I don’t see how a car a priori interacts more with its environment than a doll. That’s an argument from lack of imagination. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 05 '11 at 14:44
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4@Randolf And just to counter anecdote with anecdote, I didn’t have such prejudices as a child. I played with doll houses and mechanical toys alike. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 05 '11 at 14:46
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And did they try seeing if the various toddlers would distinguish between dolls and figurines/action figures? – JAB Aug 05 '11 at 14:49
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2@Konrad Rudolph (+1): You make an interesting point about "prejudices" -- occasionally there was a boy who liked to play with dolls, and the rest of us would give him a bit of a hard time about it, but it was soon forgotten and we were all still friends playing war, racing, etc. Once in a while a girl would join us, and after she "proved herself worthy of playing war (or whatever)" we were just fine with that too (and her friends also gave her a hard time for it, although I remember this usually ended up with a fighting and crying from teasing that would go on for weeks). – Randolf Richardson Aug 05 '11 at 15:01
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3@Randolf: Female monkeys want to dress their dolls with shoes, brush their hair? And female monkeys don't use toys or weapons? – user unknown Aug 06 '11 at 18:30
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@Randolf: But the experiment with the car was performed on monkeys. So what are you talking about, if not about the cited experiment? – user unknown Aug 07 '11 at 22:04
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1@user unknown: Konrad Rudolph and I were exchanging anecdotes in reference to human behaviour. If you have a specific question about monkey behaviour, this probably isn't the best place to ask -- a more suitable Q&A community site can probably be found on this page: http://stackexchange.com/sites – Randolf Richardson Aug 07 '11 at 22:16
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1If you like the argument or not - I can't imagine female monkeys which prefer dolls, because they can dress them. If you don't want to discuss this argument, it's not my problem. – user unknown Aug 07 '11 at 23:02
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PDF of 2002 A&M study: http://www.x-gender.net/biogender/alexander-etal-02.pdf – Jivlain Sep 15 '11 at 23:51
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I think similar experiments were also done that showed similar sex related preferences for colours in toddlers. Can't find references though. – jwenting Nov 04 '11 at 07:06
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3@KonradRudolph My take on that is that male monkeys don't chose cars, they chose "not dolls". What puts dolls apart is that they (more or less crudely) mimic humanoids : girls and female monkeys like that because maternal instinct is a thing in most (if not all) mammals, while boys and male monkeys seem to prefer the rest (be it cars, or whatever). As an aside, I think boys prefer action figures over dolls because there are all those mechanical parts that males generally like. – Shautieh Jun 07 '17 at 02:46
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2@jwenting That would actually make this more suspect to me (in terms of the claimed genetic influence), since color preferences have changed with time and are different in different cultures. Rather than genetics, it makes it sound like infants have a greater ability to pick up on culture than we think. – called2voyage Jul 02 '18 at 12:53
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5How can a study on fully socialized individuals NOT be socially biased? A male monkey selecting a masculine toy might do so solely because of his social role. - From the answer I cannot conclude that this was accounted for. So the studies cannot possibly be able to distinguish between genetic and social influences. – I'm with Monica Jul 02 '18 at 14:42
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Scientists from Cambridge University found that boys and girls are different (sexual dimorphism) even from day one. They exposed infants one day old to a thing and a face, and measured differences in interest (looking time). Neither the test person nor the timer knew which sex each infant was.
The abstract from the 2000 study, "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception", reads:
Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or sociocultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321
Brythan
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Frank Bark
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3Here is the [text of the article](http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/docs/papers/2001_connellan_etal.pdf). I haven't much experience with neonates - the implicit claim that they have learnt to control their eye direction and focus after 36 hours (mean age of subjects) surprises me. Anyone with more experience able to confirm that is a reasonable claim? – Oddthinking Jun 23 '12 at 15:55
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3Based solely on the text that you are questioning, if there was no ability to control direction, focus, and most particularly the end of attentiveness, then you'd wind up with effectively random response. Indeed, the capacity of neonates to become bored or surprised has been used to great effect in studying, for example: intuitive physics in neonates. Pinker's "Blank Slate" and "How the Mind Works" contain copious references to what is by now a pretty standard protocol. – msw Jun 27 '12 at 03:22
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1Note that you don't need perfect focus, nor even great ocular motor control to make a difference between paying attention and not. Indeed, neonates are almost certainly wiring up their whole visual cortex by the minute. What good is 25% of a visual system? Infinitely better than none. [citation needed] throughout, but this was an appeal to your intuitive question – msw Jun 27 '12 at 03:27
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@Oddthinking It depends on what you mean by control. They can't really control it _willingly_ as far as I'm aware, because they haven't learnt to, but there are tons of factors in eye movements that are not directly consciously controlled. – sgf Feb 02 '17 at 19:25
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@msw Well if evolutionary science is to be believed, eyesight evolved from light-receptive cells, which I imagine are far less than 25% of a human's visual system. Yet it was enough of an evolutionary advantage to be selected for. – Stephen Jun 06 '17 at 06:24
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1@Stephen my slightly sarcastic [citation needed](https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/) was stolen from the comic strip artist Randall Munroe as linked. He uses that when, for example, claiming that "Falling from great heights is dangerous" and flags that self-evidently true empirical statement as warranting citation. The other part of my whimsy was provided by Dawkins on "what good is 5% of an eye" in which he intuitively demonstrates that 5% is vastly better than none. In short, I agree with you completely and don't fault you for missing my abstruse humor. – msw Jun 08 '17 at 00:04
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The BBC produced a programme called "No More Boys and Girls", where they tried to do the opposite of most studies which attempt to measure the amount of gendered behaviour in infants or monkeys.
The programme included the opinions of experts in the field, who suggested that while male and female brains are different from birth the differences are relatively minor. Furthermore, many masculine and feminine attributes attributed to biological sex are in fact either due to environmental factors or simply don't exist.
Examples included "spacial awareness", which experts and experimental evidence suggested was more due to girls not getting as much practice during play than any genetic factors. Later the physical strength of boys and girls aged 7 was shown to be equal (accounting for size), only diverging with the onset of puberty, despite almost everyone assuming it exists from birth.
Another interesting experiment had child care workers being told that infants were the opposite gender to their biological sex. Naturally they guided play towards toys they associated with the gender they had been told, and the children played with them happily with no visible signs of being instinctively drawn to the toys "matching" their true gender.
Overall the programme and experts interviewed concluded that genetic differences, while having some influence, were generally very minor and the vast majority of human behaviour is influenced by social factors.
This idea came up again when James Damore wrote his now infamous memo. Wired interviewed the authors of the science he cited as evidence to back up his claims, and they largely refuted his conclusions on the same grounds as the BBC found - that nurture and social influences are vastly greater than very minor genetic ones.
In conclusion, yes there is some evidence but it only demonstrates a very minor influence, and there is a great deal of evidence also showing that right from birth social influences are primary influence.
dont_shog_me_bro
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3Could you add direct citations for the examples you mention? Peer-reviewed articles would be ideal, if possible. – JAB Jul 02 '18 at 21:03
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@JAB try emailing the BBC and asking for their sources, or watch the programme and look up the academics they interviewed. – dont_shog_me_bro Jul 03 '18 at 07:56
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@JAB on second thoughts you could use the references from Damore's memo. Just remember that the authors stated that his conclusions were wrong, so be careful not to make the same mistake he did. – dont_shog_me_bro Jul 03 '18 at 08:26
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1That [Wired article](https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/) doesn't seem to cite any actual information. For example, they claim to interview Richard Lippa, quoting him as saying **"_On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large_"**. This seems compatible with Damore's claim in the memo that **"_women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas._"**. [...] – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 13:56
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The Wired article continues, **"_But trying to use that data to explain gender disparities in the workplace is irrelevant at best. “I would assume that women in technical positions at Google are more thing-oriented than the average woman,” Lippa says. “But then an interesting question is, are they more thing-oriented than the average male Google employee? I don’t know the answer to that.”_"**. However, that opening line seems to be the Wired authors claiming irrelevance; what Lippa actually says is that he'd be interested in something else, without refuting Damore's point. – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 14:00
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1Then the Wired writers go on to claim that the scientists are refuting Damore's points, which doesn't seem to happen; the closest thing to a refutation they seem to mention is Lippa saying that he, personally, is interested in a related topic. – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 14:04
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Read the bit about incoherence. It's not just that they reject Damore's interpretation, they basically accuse him of cherry picking studies that confirm his theory. – dont_shog_me_bro Jul 04 '18 at 15:00
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The bit about incoherence is itself just an editorial rant by the Wired writers and not anything from scientists much less studies. They do quote an email from a scientist that points out that biological factors accounted for only 10% of one observed effect, though since that's entirely inline with Damore wrote in the memo, there's no contradiction there, nor does the scientist that they quote claim there to be. But more to the point, in terms of SE.Skeptics standards, the linked Wired article is just an opinion-piece; it references unrelated scientific claims, but it's not science. – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 15:26
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Read it more carefully. Here's a relevant quote: "what sociologist Duncan Watts has called an “incoherency problem.”" – dont_shog_me_bro Jul 05 '18 at 08:14
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In addition to the answers already given, there is also the tragic case of David Reimer, who was born a boy in 1965 but suffered a botched circumcision and was subsequently given gender reassignment surgery and raised as a girl. The psychologist John Money claimed that Reimer was successfully being raised as a girl and was exhibiting stereotypical female behavior such as being happy to wear girls clothes and preferring to play with dolls rather than toy trucks. He presented this as evidence to support the theory that behaviour differences between girls and boys are the result of socialisation rather than being innate.
However in 1997 Reimer went public with his own story. He denied that he had ever enjoyed playing with dolls, stated that he had never felt like a girl, and that Money had ignored or suppressed all evidence that was counter to his socialisation theory.
While this is only one case, it does strongly suggest that the behaviour differences between boys and girls are innate rather than socialised.
The reference I gave above is to a Wikipedia page on the case, but the page has plenty of references to primary literature, and I think its better to point people there rather than try to duplicate it here.
Paul Johnson
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While Reimer's story seems like a potentially helpful case study, it has trouble standing on its own. I mean, without other supporting evidence, there's always the possibility that Reimer's social conditioning (or brain washing, at the despicable level it seems to have been applied) didn't work out due to individual factors. Please feel free to add in content from my answer [to this question](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39232/); it has a larger group of cases like Reimer's in which the conditioning generally failed to take. There may be more studies too. – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 16:37
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Then I'd suggest explaining the framing a bit. The studies in the current top-voted answer largely focus on determining if there's a sex-difference in an apparent absence of social causation. Here, you seem to be attacking the question from another angle, exploring if social factors in the reverse direction could overpower any potential biological causation. Either approach by itself, if done well enough, would seem to address the question asked, but it's always nice to have evidence from other angles like this. – Nat Jul 04 '18 at 16:44