Slashdot Mirror
Girls Wired To Fear Dangerous Animals
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?"
i.e. mice
Trollus Slashdottus?
Foot in mouth is right. The title and the summary contradict.
Will game designers use this information to tweak video games for gender, either to make the games more or less frightening?
Tweak video games for gender? You mean like Sims 4 with the man-eating toilet seat?
Wow. I just freaked myself out.
What if you had HUNDREDS of scientists objectively judging facial expressions of HUNDREDS of infants?
British scientists have uncovered why little girls like pink toys. "Women are hardwired to like pink," says Professor Gene Hunt of the University of Metro, "because their cavewoman foremothers spent their days gathering red leaves and berries amongst the trees." Later, women needed to notice red-faced babies and blushing boyfriends. Men are attracted to blue because of the colour of the sky as seen when hunting.
Women are also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace and cry in the boardroom, just like the social structures in the cave population as extrapolated from two bone needles. Being too successful will increase women's testosterone, giving them hairy nipples and male-pattern baldness. Females joining the hunt may also explain the end of the Neanderthals.
IQ test studies show that women have lower IQs on average than men, undoubtedly from lesser need for environmental variation while taking care of the cave. Tests on little boys prove that testosterone correlates with a sense of humour, so women naturally can't take a joke. Housework has been shown to cut the risk of several fatal diseases, and dressing up nicely around the house is psychologically healthy as it uses the Homo erectus clan maintenance abilities of the female of the tribe.
Men are naturally predisposed to sleep with as many women as possible, as proven by lions, whereas women are naturally predisposed to stay loyal to their man and their spawn. Women who sleep around are at increased risk of parasites and death, as proven by cheetahs, who are a pack of catty sluts.
In a final crowning achievement, the team has shown that daily fellatio greatly reduces the incidence of breast cancer. Furthermore, regular sexual intercourse is essential to feminine health, but may be injurious if prolonged for more than two minutes or conducted while the man is sober.
"In conclusion," says Professor Hunt, "all of this is top-notch science that you can absolutely rely on. Now get your knickers back on and make me a cuppa."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
It seems foolish to base a scientific study off of some scientist's ability to objectively judge facial expressions in infants.
That's not what the study measured. It used quantifiable criteria. The conclusions are debatable, but you have to read the study before you're entitled to an opinion.
That's not science.
That's not reading.
Actually I've noticed a HUMAN aversion to mice. A couple of mice in a room will often make a 250lb flanel-wearing truck driver hop up on the table to get away.
I'll admit, they freak me out too. I went into the shed in my back yard to clean up a good while back. I had some scraps of carpet stashed in there that were left over from when I'd built a speaker box for my car. I picked up the pile and mice - dozens of them, just scattered everywhere. I'll admit, I shrieked like a girl and ran for mah life . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I always thought the mice thing was a construction of television, much like the toilet seat wars. I've never once seen a girl who reacts to a mouse with anything other than "Awwwwwwwwwwww, look at the mouse".
I've seen a girl jump on a chair and shriek when a mouse scurried through the room. I've also been berated for leaving the toilet seat in the wrong configuration. Your anecdotal experience completely goes against my anecdotal experience, and guess whose anecdotal experience I tend to trust more?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
No reason to believe it? I mean sure it is kind of speculative, but over the whole of history, that's been the way it's been done for the vast majority of civilizations. What you're suggesting is probably even more speculative than that. Men being typically larger and stronger clearly doesn't indicate anything, neither does anything about the distribution of brain mass. On top of that, for organisms that have live young, it would be decidedly inconvenient for the primary hunter to be largely out of commission for the better part of a year before giving birth. Yes pregnant women can do a lot, but it's not a good step evolutionarily for the hunter to also be with child.
Yes it's pretty speculative, but suggesting that it's a blind guess requires real ignorance of both history and biology.
Congratulations, you've just told us what every little boy already knew.
The main attraction of toads, frogs, worms, and bugs is the fascinating effect they have on girls.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
My daughter used to pick up spiders with her bare hands when she was 3, as well as dance on shelves 11 feet off the ground and climb out of second story windows. I had to intentionally terrify her a few times to teach her fear, but now I've trained her not to touch spiders. She still has no problem handling garter snakes. Her mother, coming from a part of the world where many venomous snakes are found, is so terrified of all snakes that she cannot even bear to see them on TV. So are all her relatives, so we have had the situation where an adult male refused to hold a garter snake I caught in the yard, but a 6-year old girl didn't have any problem with it. (By the way, garter snakes actually are venomous, but their venom teeth are in the back of their mouth and there are no known incidents of them biting people.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I find it rather humorous that it is considered so taboo to say that maybe, just MAYBE, men are discrimnated against as well. Don't believe me? As a male, also kinda a large guy I'm 6'3" and 220, I also happen to LOVE kids. And not in the have some candy and get in my van way, in the oh my God have candy and a pony and if you smile I might just steal a space shuttle and go to the moon to get you moon rocks, kinda way. Living in America if I so much as "Oooh, awwww" over a small child, especially if it is female, I am treated as a pervert. Not just sometimes, but 99% of the time. I found a lost crying child in Wal*Mart and I bought her a sucker and put her in a stroller going aisle to aisle to find her parents. I was tackled from behing by security with no verbal warning what so EVER. It hurt like hell and busted my nose. I am now terrified to so much as smile at a child, even my own small cousins. The thing is that every male habit is viewed as bad from the get go and we have to fight to prove it is useful. I work two jobs, my father is dying of cancer, my mothers mill was outsourced, and neither of them graduated High School. I support me, my parents, my ex wife, putting my oldest cousin through ACC, while taking guardianship of his sister while she completes school because both of her parents are now in jail. I come home, I cook, I clean, make sure everyone is okay, laundry is done, homework is done, medication is taken. If I decide to spend two hours shoving bayonets in the throats of other dudes in Call of Duty what right do you have to say I shouldn't? It is a stress reliever. Am I addicted? It depends, it doesn't interfer with my life so I would say no, but I do enjoy it very much. It is time to put aside our "beliefs" about what is male and what is female and look at it from a completely open point of view. Let us start all over with new ideas and create a new comprehensive study using double blind standards, then find out is it male/female, is it race, religion, upbringing, or does it simply vary wildly from person to person? I am thinking it is the latter, I find demographics studies to be prebiased and largely absurd.
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.
Not a legend, your link just separates them out as not being major rabies carriers. Here in New Mexico, we get cases of hantavirus every year, which certainly is carries by mice and rats. We also typically get several cases of plague every year. And, while the little rodents don't directly communicate the disease to humans, they make a pretty efficient transport device for the critters that do.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
How many 300-pound solid-muscle women do you see making millions of dollars a year in the NFL?
Why did that hermaphrodite from South Africa get stopped from racing as a woman?
Women and men ARE DIFFERENT.
That's reality. All the claptrap from "womyn" loons can't change it. Get over it.
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. ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
That may be; however, I've *trained* women to fear ME.
Bukakekekekeke
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Except it's not that clear at all, so, yes, _I_ will call it blind guesses.
For a start, the evolution of the homo species has involved _reducing_ sexual dimorphism. All along the line we moved from disproportionately larger males than females and males with born natural weapons (e.g., bigger teeth and jaws) to something more gender-equal than any other ape. Clearly there wasn't as big a need for big males protecting weak females.
Also, if you're actually looking at primitive cultures, you must be looking through tinted glasses. Because it never was a case where females sit in the cave and just take care of the babies. In hunter-gathering cultures, the males were the hunters, yes, but the females were the gatherers. Obviously we lived with their being out of commission while pregnant just fine.
Furthermore, the actual roles in those cultures aren't anything like the modern stereotype in western culture. Women aren't the weaklings jumping on a chair when they see a mouse, and men aren't the stereotypical testosterone-poisoned idiots.
Women out gathering must be able to take care of themselves. Sure, they won't go wrestle tigers, but they must out-wit, out-run or out-climb any dangers they may meet.
And most importantly, they have to somehow finish gathering food for their family and come back even if they see a spider or a snake. Jumping on some branch and shrieking every time you see either, won't get you too far. There is no guy around who'll bravely come and kill the snake for you, because the guys are out hunting.
There are no guys on escort duty for the women gathering berries. If they need to save their skin, they must do it themselves.
But most importantly the guys in those cultures aren't the kind who'll think with his dick and wrestle tigers to impress the girls either. The role of the men is to hunt some antelope or whatever is available, but try to avoid the predators just like the women do. There is no way a lone bushman hunter will take on the lions, and even a group has nothing to gain and everything to lose from trying to. So he'll just try to avoid them.
Basically _both_ genders' roles were to avoid danger in as much as possible.
Yes, all cultures tried to give their women slightly less risky jobs, but
1. that doesn't really mean more than that they were protecting their pussy supply, to be blunt. For most of human history, the life expectancy for women was lower than for men. Because of birth-related death and complications. As modern civilizations as Old Kingdom Egypt had the median of life expectancy, if you got past the peak of infant mortality, in the 20's for women and the 30's for men. _That_ disproportionate. Warfare to capture women was a stapple all the way to late Roman republic at the very least.
So, yes, those guys tried to protect what was a limited supply of nookie, because demand always outstripped supply. It doesn't have to mean any different wiring or natural handicap or anything.
2. "that's the way it's been done" isn't really proving anything. Equally slavery was the way things were done for millenia, and nobody would still argue like Aristotle that some people were born to be slaves.
3. Even gathering was only marginally less risky, and was still a vastly more risky job than any moder woman will ever have to do. (Unless she's a tiger tamer or something.) Or than most modern men will.
What people are trying to apply to modern jobs and tasks, was actually the difference between (A) might have to outrun a tiger attracted by that freshly hunted antelope, and (B) slightly lower chances to meet the same tiger, but is good enough to save her skin if she does. Stupid "eeek, a mouse!" acts don't even come close to be justified by that ancient division of labour. If one of those gatherer women even heard of someone making a fuss over a mouse or bug -- when, again, they actually had to somehow deal with actual predators -- they'd probably be pretty perplexed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Women are wired to fear ME.
Hey, my mom's first laptop had ME installed on it - and I'd say fear was a completely reasonable reaction.
#DeleteChrome
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?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Oh yeah? Well I've seen an NFL linebacker jump five feet straight up when he saw a mouse. Then a woman grabbed it with her bare hand and bit off its head. Then she looked right at me and said "That's what'll happen to you if you leave the seat up again."
guess whose anecdotal experience I tend to trust more?
Probably not the anecdotal experience that was obviously just made up... for shame.
The enemies of Democracy are
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 ;-)
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
True that! It doesn't really matter if some other women are afraid of mice or not or if they don't care about toilet seats if the one you're with threatens to cut your junk off in your sleep if they fall into the toilet, or if you look at other women, or try to leave. (please help).
The enemies of Democracy are
I am no fan of mice. I once woke up in the middle of the night to notice a mouse sitting on my foot and eating the skin from my toes. I spent the rest of the night sitting in the dark in the middle of my apartment with a pellet gun and a flashlight. Every time I heard it scurry I would spot light it. The first time it was in front of my computer. The second time it was in front of some glass dishes. The third time I cought it in the open, and took a shot as it jumped jumped 3 feet towards some shelves. I managed to hit it center of mass from about 10 feet.
Women are wired to fear ME.
Hey, my mom's first laptop had ME installed on it
My Mom's laptop had ME and My siblings installed on it. One by one, we were uninstalled at birth.
Send him a link to this article.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It's good Feng Shui to leave both seat and lid down. That way all the good energy in the house doesn't go down the toilet ;) ITS TRUE!