'GTFO', New Documentary about Female Gamers - Page 52

On March 16 2015 10:11 Hryul wrote:


i honestly don't understand how this isn't a case of severe doublethink. men and women are generally different on a hormonal level.

Very few developmental endpoints are truly “final”; instead, they are interim states, with the possibility of growth and change until death. This is the meaning of plasticity. In this ongoing process, the interaction of physiological and experiential variables is iterative, meaning that the current state of the organism interacts with each subsequent input—whether that input is experiential or physical (including biochemical). [...] As early as 1969 it was known that many of the “organizing” effects of hormones are not permanent, but are easily modifiable by experience. In a little-cited study by researchers at UCLA, for example, scientists found that allowing an androgenized female rat to have just two hours to adapt to a stud male completely eliminated the behavioral effects of prenatal testosterone injections (Clemens, Hiroi, and Gorski 1969). Money and Ehrhardt (1972, 85) suggested that “neonatal androgen may have rendered the females more sensitive to the copulatory environment, possibly to olfactory cues, in the manner that is usually typical of males. Once adapted to the environment, they became disinhibited. The behavior that was then released was not masculine in type, but the feminine response of lordosis” (emphasis added). Subsequent experiments have shown that a great many of the sex-typed behaviors that are supposedly permanently organized by prenatal hormones can be dramatically modified or even reversed by simple and relatively short-term behavioral interventions such as neonatal handling (Wakshlak and Weinstock 1990), early exposure to pups (in rats) (Leboucher 1989), and sexual experience (Hendricks, Lehman, and Oswalt 1982), to cite just a few examples. A recent very exciting example of plasticity in humans concerns dyslexia, a cognitive trait that has been theoretically linked to early testosterone and has even been examined in some brain organization studies as a marker of “masculinization” (for example, Götestam, Coates, and Ekstrand 1992). Simos and colleagues (2002) studied children with dyslexia before and after eighty hours of intensive remedial reading instruction. At the beginning of the study, magnetic source imaging showed that the children with dyslexia had a different pattern of brain activation compared with normal children with no reading problems. In particular, they showed very low signals associated with an area that is normally involved in phonological processing. Remarkably, after the intensive intervention the children not only made substantial improvement in their reading skills but also showed much larger signals associated with the phonological processing area that formerly showed low signals.

Another powerful example concerns spatial cognition—one of the hallmarks of psychosexual differences. Feng, Spence, and Pratt (2007) identified a basic information-processing capacity that underlies spatial cognition and showed that differences in this capacity (the distribution of spatial attention) are related to differences in the higher-level process of mental rotation ability. They then showed that a remarkably brief intervention— just ten hours of practice with an action video game—caused “substantial gains in both spatial attention and mental rotation, with women benefiting more than men” (850). The ten-hour training did not completely eliminate the sex difference, but it came extraordinarily close— the mean scores after training were no longer statistically distinguishable between males and females.

Thus, even though early hormones affect neural development, the language of “hardwiring,” “blueprints,” “latency,” “permanent organization,” and so on clearly conveys an inaccurate picture of the nature of early hormone effects on behavior. As Doell and Longino (1988) noted two decades ago, these metaphors fail to accurately capture how development really works. Even in rats, early hormone exposures do not create a solid foundation on which behavior must forever stand. At first glance the true process might seem to be captured by the notion of developmental “cascades,” which several organization theory researchers raised in their interviews with me. The notion of developmental cascades suggests that hormones don’t directly determine behavior, but create a small push in one direction, which is then amplified by experiences and other inputs that in turn trigger additional inputs, such that a tiny push at the front end can end up in a sizable difference in outcome. But this is only half the story— one in which the small initial differences almost inevitably grow larger as additional effects accumulate. But an early push in a certain direction can be either enhanced or entirely eliminated by subsequent experience, such that development from that point forward would proceed as though the early hormone exposure had never happened.

- Steroid hormones are important, but they aren’t best conceptualized as “sex hormones.” They do lots of things; “sex hormones” was the original conceptualization that drove the research and classification on hormones, but it doesn’t fit the data on what hormones do any better than other possible schemes. And the “sex hormone” framework demonstrably blocks recognition of complex and accurate information (Oudshoorn 1994; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Nehm and Young 2008).
- Personality traits and predispositions are not identical in individuals, but they are also not well captured by the binary system of gender (Witelson 1991)—even in spite of pervasive cognitive schemas that exert pressures toward this pattern. We aren’t blank slates, but we also aren’t pink and blue notepads.
- Brains develop only in interaction; input from the external world, as well as from one’s own sensory apparatus, is as critical to development of the brain as food and water are to the entire organism.
- Brains change and develop over the lifetime. Few inputs are irreversible. Even the animal experiments on brain organization showed that the “permanent” effects of early steroid hormone exposures could be eliminated or even reversed by fairly brief interventions in the physical and/or social environment.
- Gender relations change, and these are demonstrably related to changes in psychosexual outcomes. For example, structural-level shifts in education (removing barriers to admission for women to colleges and graduate programs, barring gender discrimination in funding, and so on) have quickly reshaped the landscape in terms of the proportion of college graduates who are female, as well as the sex composition of particular programs of study (accounting, law, medicine, biology, and so forth).

On March 16 2015 12:22 kwizach wrote:

The effects of hormones and their impact on possible differences between genders are widely discussed in neuroscience, and in recent years there have been many contributions highlighting that the role of hormones should not be overemphasized with regards to cognitive development and differentiation in behaviors between males and females. This is looked at extensively in Jordan-Young, RM (2011), Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, which presents an analysis of the literature on the topic. To quote a rather lengthy passage of the final chapter (p. 288 onwards):


I'm not saying that there are no differences whatsoever on average between men and women on the cognitive level, but the small initial differences that have been identified (for example with regards to certain limited aspects of spatial recognition) are way smaller than people like GoTuNk make them out to be. These differences can in addition very well be bridged as people and brains develop, and they also only exist as averages, with both groups exhibiting greater variance within themselves than the difference in averages between the two groups. To quote Jordan-Young again (pp. 290-291):


The kind of male and female essentialization explaining different career paths that some have pushed here is simply not supported by the science so far. Meanwhile, and like I've said repeatedly, it is well documented that cultural factors have a huge impact on career choices. And hey, even if you believe that we'll one day discover fundamental biological differences between men and women on the cognitive level, how exactly does this mean that we should not fight against socially constructed sexist cultural norms that we already know have a negative impact?