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Comment by sandstrom | Hacker News Reader

This is a well-studied area, and the preferences are clearly biological.

Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies.

For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively).

https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...

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For this to be biological and not cultural we would need to see evidence that this happens before baby/infant primates are old enough to observe their parents performing similar behaviors, or when raised in isolation. The only citation here that matches that is the first one, and even then the experimenter was a part of the experiment and not blinded to infant sex, so there is a major possible source of bias there, and more recent papers appear to contradict this effect [1]. Rather than cite one-off studies from the 2000s this is a situation where a meta-analysis or review would be ideal, but I don't see one in a quick search. If you are aware of one that would be helpful to better understand this claim.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002209651...

Infants exhibit preferences consistent with their biological sex before they know which sex they are.

Boys raised by single mothers with no male role model do not exhibit unusual female behavior.

The differences between male and female infants are consistent with the well studied effects of sex hormones in adults.

It happens cross culturally which goes most of the way to answering this

I cited the 2000 study because it was the first one doing this type of experiment at a very early age (the babies were 36 hours! old).

No, that's wrong, it was properly blinded:

  The videotapes were coded by two judges who were blind to the infant’s sex, to calculate the number of seconds 
  the infants looked at each stimulus. A second observer (independent of the first pair and also blind 
  to the infants’ sex) was trained to use the same coding technique for 20 randomly selected 
  infants to establish reliability.

If you want more, here is another one on newborn macaques:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19669

Or this one, where adding testosterone to rhesus monkeys causes their female offspring to be "masculinized':

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146061/

I'm not convinced. The fact that young male monkeys choose firetrucks over dolls rather strongly indicates that the study is bogus and there is some (unconscious) influence from the experimenter. How can monkeys instinctively know what a fire truck is? The explanation about females preferring faces is just a post-hoc rationalisation.

But surely if there is a clear difference in the data, we should be looking for an explanation, right? Of course it's possible for experimental methods to be flawed, but as the results from multiple studies pile up, that becomes less and less plausible as an explanation.

Read Berger(1966). This is reification in it's most basic form.

Could you clarify 'what' is the example of reification here?

A firetruck is not a face. How wouldn't a monkey know what a face is?

Human babies don't know what a fire truck is either.

To what degree does a monkey know what a fire truck is, compared to a child? Yes the child might even understand that it's a vehicle, but as far as being a toy is concerned, it's a block with wheels, as long as the monkey is not pretending firefighters come and go from the fire truck (which children also don't do, unless it explicitly included small figurines, functional doors etc) I really don't see the problem.

They don’t know what it is, they know what it is not:

a baby.

What specifically are you not convinced of?

Because one is a verifiable unusual and complex object (things) and another is seen as another of the same or similar species, activating the temporal lobe more (people).

You don't have to comprehend or understand a firetruck to see it is a very different environmental object to another being.

That people need a study to know these differences exist is the real head scratcher.

If you are hung up on the firetruck, here is another one on newborn macaques preferring faces:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19669

Or this one, where adding testosterone to rhesus monkeys causes their female offspring to be "masculinized':

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146061/

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