This study is so flawed as to be scientifically worthless.
The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."
"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:
"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."
Not being double blind doesn't make it scientifically worthless.
Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.
If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?
The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."
"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:
"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."