Read Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do for Free Online Page A

they want different things, they are good at different things, and they behave in different ways. While everybody may know that men and women are different, they may not know why . Or they may think they do, but they might be wrong.
    The prevailing explanation in the Standard Social Science Model, popular among academic social scientists and the general population alike, is gender socialization . According to this explanation, men and women (and boys and girls) think and behave differently because they have been socialized differently by their culture and society. Recall that the Standard Social Science Model contends that human nature is a blank slate (principle 3). Male and female babies are born identical except for a few anatomical differences, but these anatomical differences do not include the brain (principle 2). Since the day of their birth, boys and girls are treated differently and socialized either as boys or girls. Boys are encouraged to be aggressive and violent (by being given toy trucks and toy guns), while girls are taught to be caring and nurturing (by being given dolls and tea sets). Gender socialization permeates every aspect of culture and society (it is done not only by the parents but by educational, religious, political, and economic institutions and the media) and continues throughout the life course, and its effects are cumulative. By the time boys and girls grow up to be men and women, they think and behave differently because “society” expects them to, and the sex differences are apparently permanent. However, the Standard Social Science Model contends that if parents and “society” provide gender-neutral, androgynous socialization to children, then boys and girls will not behave differently, and men and women will be the same in their behavior, cognition, values, and preferences.
    An overwhelming amount of evidence now available from science unambiguously demonstrates that this view is false. We will discuss only two recent studies here, and refer interested readers to more comprehensive reviews. 1
    Sex Differences Appear on the First Day of Life
    University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his associates have conducted a careful experiment with one-day-old babies. 2 They simultaneously presented a picture of a woman’s face and a mechanical mobile to 102 newborn babies (44 boys and 58 girls, but the researchers themselves were blind to the sex of these babies until after the experiment was finished). They videotaped the babies to mea sure which object they paid more attention to. Their analysis showed that more boys preferred to look at the mechanical mobiles, and boys on average gazed at them longer. In contrast, more girls preferred to look at the human face, and girls on average gazed at it longer. Everybody knows that boys and men tend to have greater interest in machines and other mechanical objects, and girls and women tend to be more social and express greater interest in relationships with others. If these sex differences are mostly the outcome of lifelong gender socialization, as the Standard Social Science Model claims, how can newborn babies who are just twenty-four hours old exhibit the same sex difference? Not even the most ardent supporters of the Standard Social Science Model would contend that twenty-four hours is enough for gender socialization.
    Sex Differences Are Shared by Monkeys
    In a very ingenious experiment, Gerianne M. Alexander and Melissa Hines gave two stereo typically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereo typically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. 3 They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for each toy by mea suring how much time they spent with each. Their statistical analysis demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet