Darwin's
18-Wheeler
Written By Mark Cherrington
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Toying with Psychology
What is it about trucks that make them so appealing to male children? I have two daughters, so I know something about gender-related toys and obsession. Alison and Becky's Bitty Baby, Barbie, and American Girl population is only slightly smaller than that of Bangkok. The basis of the girls' interest in dolls seems obvious enough — an evolutionary drive toward maternity. But where is the parallel in boys' enthrallment with trucks? It suggests an equally fundamental human drive, but most evolutionary drives developed long before people could speak, let alone come up with a double overhead camshaft. Where, then, does it come from?
Hard to say. An enormous amount of research has been done on gender-based toy choice, but almost none of it on, let's call it vehicle adoration. The gender research tends to fall into two categories. The first simply aims to chronicle gender-based toy preferences: counting toy collections in boys' and girls' rooms, surveying toy requests in letters to Santa, watching children playing in groups.
One such study, done in 1985 by Marion O'Brien and Aletha Huston of the University of Kansas, followed children from 14 to 35 months old in a day care facility over the course of 14 months. The children were given a selection of toys: stereotypical boy toys (tools, a train, a truck), girl toys (a doll, a tea set, a playhouse), and sex-neutral toys (an hourglass, a chiming toy, stacking rings). Which ones did boys and girls mess around with most? No matter their age, kids consistently picked the toys most typically linked with their sex. Trucks and tools were first with boys; dolls with girls.
The second category of gender research accepts this male-female split in toy choice, but questions whether to pin it on how we're built (nature) or how we're taught (nurture). Gender issues, of course, are a political minefield, and the nurture argument has gained significant traction. Most psychologists now subscribe to it — with the caveat that almost none would say it's 100 percent either way. According to Dan Anderson, psychology professor and child behavior specialist at the University of Massachusetts, the consensus seems to reckon it at about 80 percent nurture, 20 percent nature, especially before age 6.
Personally, I find this ratio a bit hard to accept. My wife wore a dress at our wedding, but otherwise is strictly a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of woman. However, from the time our daughter Alison could voice an opinion, she refused to wear anything but dresses, preferably with floral prints. At one point, she even decided to change her name to Alison Flowers.
Still, nurture clearly counts. No child grows up in a hermetically sealed bubble, and the media issues a constant stream of images about "appropriate" gender behavior. You don't tend to see any girls in a TV ad for Transformers or Hot Wheels. There is also the unavoidable fact that parents buy a child's toys and, consciously or not, play into expectations too.
Kids themselves also contribute to the process. Virtually all child psychologists accept that children develop a clear awareness of sex differences and their own gender identity by the age of 2 1/2. In their study, O'Brien and Huston asked the kids to identify the gender of men and women in photos. They found that by the age of 20 months, the children were nailing the distinction. But they also found that by the age of 14 months, these same kids were consistently picking toys stereotypical to their gender. This seems to imply that they chose toys aligned with their sex before they had full awareness that there was a difference between the sexes: The effect was preceding the cause. Score one, it seems, for nature.
Next page: The bad news for nurture advocates
