Boys Be Ambitious

Boys, Be Independent!

The Asch studies (Asch, 1956) have been replicated in different cultures (See Bond and Smith, 1996, for a review.) However, only a few studies have been carried out to examine the development of conformity, mostly because of the technical limitation regarding the availability of good child confederates. Costanzo & Shaw (1966) conducted a developmental study of conformity using the Crutchfield p...

Boys Will Be Girls, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross Gender Roles in Opera

An exhibit focusing on the high-voiced male castrato singers and on " pants roles, " in which women sing male roles.

Why girls want to be boys.

The mechanisms by which sex is genetically determined are bewilderingly diverse and appear to change rapidly during evolution.(1) What makes the sex-determining process so prone to perturbations? Two recent articles(2,3) explore theoretically the role of genetic conflict in sex determination evolution. Both studies use the idea that selection on sex-determining genes may act differently in pare...

2 Ambitious Two - Dimensionalism

Boys will be boys; cows will be cows: children's essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species.

Two studies (N = 456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these 2 domains. In contrast, 10-year-olds and adults treate...