Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [218]
—Girls are indeed more fearful than boys of mice, snakes, and spiders—but largely because they learn early that it is more permissible for them than for boys to express fear.
—Girls spontaneously play with dolls more than boys do, a fact long taken as evidence that girls are innately more nurturing and helpful. But girls are more often given dolls to play with, a form of social training. Girls’ greater nurturance is at least partly learned.
—Elementary school girls appear to be more compassionate than boys, as judged by such criteria as their greater willingness to write letters to hospitalized children; boys, however, are very ready to be helpful when the activity called for is one they have been taught to think of as properly masculine. At the adult level, women seem readier to help people in distress than men, but chiefly in situations traditionally thought of as calling for female ministrations, such as tending a hurt child; males are readier to help in risky or strenuous situations. In sum, sex differences in helping behavior are partly or largely attributable to social learning.64
For a while, some feminists took the extreme position that virtually all personality and intellectual differences between the sexes are the result of social inequities, pressures, and conditioning. But as research evidence accumulated, it became clear that certain cognitive and personality differences are indeed influenced by biology. For instance:
—Women have become somewhat more aggressive in sports, business, and in experimental laboratory situations. But in social life most of them continue to be much less aggressive than men. The latter commit by far the larger share of family violence, rapes, homicides, and crime in general. The greater aggressiveness of males appears very early in life, well before most social influences come to bear; the findings strongly suggest that social learning, while it plays a large part, acts on and accentuates biologically built-in differences.
—Girls and women have the edge on boys and men in verbal ability, on the average, but are slightly inferior in spatial visualizing ability. The verbal difference appears early and the spatial difference before adolescence, when social influences become most influential; both, therefore, point to some degree of difference in the structure of the brain. A recent review of studies of the brain lists a number of minor differences between the female and the male brain—one such difference, a stronger linking between the two hemispheres in females, has been thought to account for females’ verbal edge over males—but the net conclusion is that “few data are available linking structural differences [in the brain] to functional sex differences.”
—Women are better than men at sensing the meaning of such non-verbal cues to emotion as posture, body movements, and facial expressions. In part this is probably an acquired skill, but some evidence, such as the appearance of these differences in early childhood, points to a biological predisposition produced by evolution. It may have been more important to the survival of the weaker sex to read body language.
—In a painstaking survey of recent data, Melissa Hines, a leading British neuroendocrinologist, reports that there are dramatic differences in “core gender identity” (the sense of oneself as male or female), but that other much-researched differences are quite small. She listed 3-D rotation ability (mental rotation of pictures of objects to see if they are the same as other objects), math ability, verbal fluency, spatial perception, and even rough-and-tumble play and physical aggressiveness. Some of these criteria favored males, some females, but in all cases the differences