Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

It's a genetic problem. Women are hardwired to smile more in front of people, even if they're unhappy (1). They're more polite, right from the moment they begin to speak (2). They try much harder than men to avoid conflict (3).

1 Cole - Children's spontaneous control of facial expressions - Child Development (1986), Saarni - An observational study of children's attempts to monitor their expressive behavior - Child Development (1984)

2 Politeness: Some universals in language usage (1987), Leaper and Ayres: A meta-analytic review of gender variations in adults' language use, Personality and Psychology Review (2007)

3 Campbell - Staying Alive: Evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999)

View on HN

What? How on Earth do you know that "women are hardwired to smile more" instead of "women are culturally conditioned to smile more." Considering women are told to smile by complete strangers on the street you can't just go ahead and disregard cultural conditioning.

https://news.yale.edu/2003/03/18/women-smile-more-men-differ...

> Considering women are told to smile by complete strangers on the street you can't just go ahead and disregard cultural conditioning.

As a dude, I get told to smile pretty frequently. I don't think this has anything to do with sex most of the time (though there are sexists, obvs).

Your assertion that it is a genetic problem and it lies within women takes it as a given that mistreating people who smile more or are more polite is perfectly A-Okay and they brought it on themselves. I will suggest that even if women are genetically predisposed to smile more (and I see no reason to believe this is actually genetically determined) there is something very wrong with a culture that essentially punishes a pro-social behavior with abusive treatment of the nice person.

I don't have citations at hand, but I have seen some studies that suggest that adults treat boy babies and girl babies differently from the get go. So just because the behavior can be traced to infancy does not prove it is genetic.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-parents-may-cause-gender-differe...

>In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture

cited research aside this is asinine. let's pretend we could regress "did smile" on "genetics" and "culture" and inspected the coefficients of the covariates (i.e. investigate treatment effect). we would find that the effect of culture was much much much stronger than genetics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com