Male Monkeys Prefer Boys' Toys

[Ordr]

Source: New Scientist

It's thought of as a sexual stereotype: boys tend to play with toy cars and diggers, while girls like dolls. But male monkeys, suggests research, are no different.

This could mean that males, whether human or monkey, have a biological predisposition to certain toys, says Kim Wallen, a psychologist at Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read more: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

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Fascinating.

[Xipe Totec]

1. It's pressure from their mother

Fossey can be such a demanding bitch sometimes...

:sarcasm:

[C_U_L8R]

2. Goes to prove

we're all monkeys : - )))

[SteinbachMB]

3. Duh!

If you watch a group of kids play for any length of time, it pretty much writes itself.

[skooooo]

5. not always...

[SteinbachMB]

7. Of course "not always"

But psychological science doesn't deal with "always." It deals with tendancies.

[SteinbachMB]

8. Of course "not always"

But psychological science doesn't deal with "always." It deals with tendencies.

[varelse]

4. I'm having trouble accepting this hypothesis

and without it, their speculations about human males has no real foundation

His team reasoned that the choices of the monkeys wouldn't be determined by social pressures. Most of the study animals were juvenile (age one to four years), but some sub-adult and adult monkeys were included.

"They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement," Wallen says.

Being that these animals are social, this premise is a shaky one, imo.

[Rosemary2205]

14. I thought the same thing

though you put it better than I though it. :)

[BearSquirrel2]

19. There is no gender stereotype ...

The enforcement of gender roles comes from parents and older children. These Chimps had never been exposed to these toys so there is no way to gender stereotype.

Translation: Girls statistically prefer soft shapes that emulate nurturing behavior. Boys statistically prefer gadgets: things with wheels, joints and angles, and of course ... weaponry. Note that I said statistically. This is not stereotyping all members of the groups. It just says a majority.

[varelse]

30. You're making a couple of assumptions that I don't believe are justified

These animals have a distinct social structure and hierarchy. Like most social primates, they probably learn from older animals (usually of the same gender, because the social group in many primates is divided along gender lines) and take their cues from the dominant ones of their own gender. If the older males are interested in any object, it will become an object of interest to the younger ones lower down in the social structure. Likewise with the females. If they'd wanted to avoid this affect, they could have done so easily by isolating each young animal from cues given not only by the other animals but also inadvertently passed to them by human observers.

Also, humans and rhesus monkeys are both primates, but to make the claim that what applies to a rhesus monkey population would also apply to a human group is quite a stretch.

That is why I was (and still am) skeptical of their interpretation of the results.

[TheCowsCameHome]

6. Bush plays with himself. What does that indicate?

[Harry Monroe]

11. But...does he fling shit at visitors in the Oval Office??

[Rosemary2205]

15. Supposedly he does

there's been some scuttlebutt from time to time over the years about his full on fits that include tearing up the decor and Laura has had to run for her own sanity to a local luxury hotel.

[DBoon]

20. No he flings bombs at Middle Eastern countries

giving a monkey access to the world's most powerful military is a very bad thing

[NYC Liberal]

21. Yes, it comes out of his mouth. nt

[jedr]

9. My Friend had 3 girls then a boy;

Had a large box of wooden blocks and never knew that that the blocks made the sound of a motor until the boy started playing with them. There's more difference than just the plumbing!

[fshrink]

10. So?

- There can be dozens of explanations for the same results.

- Monkeys are not humans. Yes, that makes a big difference (except perhaps at the White House.)

- A "successful" study is one that comes up with a statistically significant difference between something and something else. It's not like *all* male monkeys chose the truck. Do I hear about the male monkeys who did not choose the truck? Those who chose the doll, like, to try to screw it. Or those who didn't choose anything because they were depressed to be in captivity? Nope.

I'm so fed up with those asinine studies. "Research shows that hammer strike on toe produces pain in Chilean Chinchilla." Results, if confirmed and replicated, could be extended to humans. Research shows that "Being old and poor increases odds of illness."

And it makes psychologists look like asses, which I don't like 'cause I'm one.

[varelse]

31. I needed this

I'm so fed up with those asinine studies. "Research shows that hammer strike on toe produces pain in Chilean Chinchilla." Results, if confirmed and replicated, could be extended to humans. Research shows that "Being old and poor increases odds of illness."

:rofl:

[Warpy]

12. Remember the push in the late 60s and early 70s

to raise children free of sexual stereotyping? Friends who tried that invariably had boys who would hold Barbie by her feet and yell "BANG!" while girls would wrap the model truck in a blanket and put it to bed.

Gender is a lot more complicated than just early childhood stereotyping.

[Lorien]

23. I was one of those kids. I hated dolls and would rather play with the

toy tractor. I never knew of a little girl that would wrap a truck in a blanket-most of my friends were tomboys. My sister and I collected Hot Wheels and Star Wars action figures. I never once owned a baby doll or Barbie as a child and never wanted one!

[Warpy]

29. I'm talking general rules, not exceptions.

I know everyone who posts on DU is exceptional.

[Emillereid]

13. I got to admit I gave my daughters an equal mix of so called girl and boy toys and they

pretty much ignored the boy stuff. Their boy friends however would gravitate immediately to the boy stuff.

[Venceremos]

16. Could be color....

or a number of different factors that have nothing to do with gender. Even the article admits this near the bottom "but other toy characteristics, such as size or colour, might explain the male's behaviour".

I'm a female and I always played with Fort Apache. It was my favorite toy, but I hated dolls.

[girl gone mad]

17. I never got into dolls.

I would rather play with puzzles, blocks, video games, read books... anything but dolls. I thought Barbie was the most boring toy in the world and i couldn't figure out what you were supposed to do with the damn thing until I went over my neighbor Lisa's house one day. She had the Barbie dream house and Ken and a convertible. I could get into the house and the car, but I still thought Barbie was just plain irritating.

I wasn't the only one who felt this way. One day me and a girl that lived on the end of the street took Lisa's Barbies, threw them in the pool and pretended they were drowning and couldn't be saved. Then we fled the scene of the crime on our bicycles and built a fort out of abandoned construction materials in the woods behind our street. No boys and no Barbies allowed. :)

[Lorien]

22. I was the same way as a child

I never liked dolls. Frankly, I thought that they were not only boring, but creepy. I preferred some plastic farm and zoo sets that I had, games, puzzles, magic tricks, crafts, coloring books, and all sorts of reading materials. My little sister also had Hot Wheels and a garage play set that she loved. When our grandmother gave her a Barbie she turned it into a punk prostitute. Maybe we were just weird. Who knows? :shrug:

[BearSquirrel2]

24. There are women with "male" brains ...

Science now knows that development plays a very serious role in conjunction with genetics. There are serious differences between a "male" brain and a "female" brain. We can so name them because most males possess a "male" brain and most females possess "female" brains. Exposure to testosterone in utero during different developmental stages can cause differences in brain functioning.

The lack of testosterone exposure to males (via maternal suppression) can likewise produce effeminate males either in their cognitive or sexual disposition. An overexposure to females at various stages can produce similar but opposite effects.

We all have things we seem to gravitate to. Why does it seem odd that boys would prefer a certain set of manipulatives vs. girls?

[girl gone mad]

28. Whatever.

I'm all woman and I never liked dolls. I don't have a "male" brain.

[Firespirit]

32. Same here, I mutilated dolls actually

My grandmother finally stopped giving me Barbies when she kept seeing them naked and enclosed in the jaws of a dinosaur model (which might be wearing the Barbie's clothes), or with their hair cut off, extra holes punched in their heads for piercings, tattoos from permanent ink, arms broken and taped back together with red ink on the tape to resemble blood... I think it disturbed my parents for awhile, but they didn't press it.

On the other hand, I grew up in a family that had personal computers from the very beginning, and I was getting into the code of old BASIC games and changing things to cheat... heh... I was a destructive little b*tch.

But I most assuredly do not have a male brain.

[FightTheRight89]

18. No surprise.

Men and women are different. Stereotypes don't just come out of nowhere.

[DeSwiss]

25. Meh.

First of all, just because someone dons a lab coat doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. Particularly when we're speaking of a single study. Second, media types (even scientific magazines), tend to "dumb-down" research language because the onus is on increasing readership which is directly tied to adverti$ing. And third, in this case:

From the article:
"Wallen's team looked at 11 male and 23 female rhesus monkeys. In general the males preferred to play with wheeled toys, such as dumper trucks, over plush dolls, while female monkeys played with both kinds of toys."

So the reactions of the female rhesus monkeys would in my view throw the whole contention that males seek "boy-toys" as a result of some unknown male tendency into the crapper since it can't be seen as a gender-wide phenomenon.

Other than that, interesting.....

[trthnd4jstc]

26. This explains Bush even Further!

Ha, Ha, Ho, Ho, Ho!

[MilesColtrane]

27. C'mon.

Just because female rhesus monkeys prefer the Malibu Zira to the G.I. General Ursus is no reason to jump to stereotypical conclusions.

[woo me with science]

33. Do female monkeys prefer girls' toys?

Maybe the toys for boys are just more interesting.

[varelse]

34. Maybe the toys for boys are just more interesting.

I think we have a winner here :P

My sisters and I preferred to play with whatever wasn't nailed down or strictly forbidden to us, including but not limited to other kids, dolls, blocks, dishes, Mom's shoes, balloons, jacks, playing cards, a little red wagon, pans, rocks, mud, branches, sticks, pens, pencils, paint, and on at least one memorable occasion for each of the four of us... the time tested traditional metal object+electrical socket combo (once was enough for me). There wasn't enough $$ in our household budget for a large assortment of toys, which typically are packaged and marketed to parents as gender-specific items, so we tended to find them in the surrounding environment.

When we weren't inventing new games for the neighborhood kids to play (because I absolutely would not play "house" or "cowboys and indians") I could also be found reading anything that wasn't hidden and locked away from me. Our parents had a full on wall o' books that they outright owned and library trips were done weekly.

I still remember when my sister won a toy model volkswagon at a raffle of some kind (teh COOL!!), and we were extremely stoked on this... right up until our mother traded it in for a tea set. We never let her live that down :eyes:

My point?

Stereotypes just plain suck, and studies designed to reaffirm them suck even more. Thanks for reading.

Peace

[atommom]

35. That's what I suspect. The colors are brighter, and the toys themselves

are just more interesting. I wouldn't really expect a monkey to be interested in fashion, housework, or shopping, which seem to be the main themes in girls' toys.