Dr Lise Eliot - Brain and Gender in Infant Social Development
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- Dr. Eliot, author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, challenges the notion that boys are innately less socially-attuned than girls. Rather, it appears that gender expectations and subtle differences in the social environment drive boys and girls toward diverging patterns of interpersonal and communicative behavior. Based on everything we understand about the heightened plasticity of young brains, there is ample room to reduce gender disparities in social-emotional growth through early social immersion.
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Even if this was true, the brain doesn’t operate in a vacuum. What about sex hormones? That’s where the major differences occur.
Is it understanding, or is it instinct?
By the plasticity argument-also made explicitly by neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain Blue Brain-small sex differences in human brains at birth are increased by culture’s influence on the brain’s plasticity. Eliot further argues that we can avoid “troublesome gaps” between the behaviors of adult men and women (a curious contradiction, by the way, of the view that there are no behavioral differences between the sexes) by encouraging boys and girls to learn against their inborn tendencies.
It is critical to understand where the fallacies in this argument lie. First, it is false to conclude that because a particular behavior starts small in children and grows, that behavior has little or no biological basis. One has only to think of handedness, walking, and language to see the point. Second, this argument presupposes that human “cultural” influences are somehow formed independent of the existing biological predispositions of the human brain. But third, and most important, is the key fallacy in the plasticity argument: the implication that the brain is perfectly plastic. It is not. The brain is plastic only within the limits set by biology.
To understand this critical point, consider handedness. It is indeed possible, thanks to the brain’s plasticity, to force a child with a slight tendency to use her left hand to become a right-handed adult. But that does not mean that this practice is a good idea, or that the child is capable of becoming as facile with her right hand as she might have become with her left had she been allowed to develop her natural tendencies unimpeded. The idea that we should use the brain’s plasticity to work against inborn masculine or feminine predispositions in the brains of children is as ill conceived as the idea that we should encourage left-handed children to use their right hand.
The presence of biological limits to plasticity-and hence the presence of limits to how much experiences can affect the brain-is perhaps made most clear in elegant studies by J. Richard Udry. In his paper entitled “Biological Limits of Gender Construction,” Udry examines the interaction between two factors-how much a mother encouraged her daughter to behave in “feminine” ways, and how much the daughter had been exposed to masculinizing hormonal influences in the womb-on how “feminine” the daughter behaved when she was older.
The more mothers encouraged “femininity” in their daughters, the more feminine the daughters behaved as adults, but only in those daughters exposed to little masculinizing hormone in utero. Crucially, the greater the exposure to masculinizing hormonal effects in utero, the less effective was the mother’s encouragement, to the point where encouragement either did not work at all or even tended toward producing the opposite effect on the daughters’ behavior.
All those wishing to understand sex influences on the human brain need to fully grasp the implications of the animal literature, and then think about the Udry data, which captures an incontrovertible fact from brain science: Yes, brains are plastic, but only within the limits set by biology. It is decidedly not the case that environmental experience can turn anything into anything, and equally easily, in the brain. The specious plasticity argument invoked by anti-sex difference authors appears to be just a modern incarnation of the long-debunked “blank slate” view of human brain function, the idea that all people’s brains start out as blank slates, thus are equally moldable to become anything through experience.
The brain is not plastic only by the limit of biology. Gina Rippon did lots of studies about this argument, and she found out our brain is fully plastic. J. Richard Udry was claiming bullshit.
This is how I see gender--it's meant to leverage existing biological differences