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Brain Research On Boys' Preference For Video Games and Girls' For Social Media (wsj.com) 161

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

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Brain Research On Boys' Preference For Video Games and Girls' For Social Media

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  • Sexist (Score:5, Insightful)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @10:36PM (#59232646)

    Everyone is the same!

    Unless there is some advantage of course, then that should be brought forward.

    Unless one is white, male, or identifies as their biological sex.

    • Yup. Correlation is not causation, and I see nothing of value in this so-called 'study'.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • google fire (Score:5, Funny)

    by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @10:42PM (#59232662)
    Hasn't google fired people for thoughts like this?
  • Back when we were all living in tribes on the plain or the jungle the men would all go out and hunt. The skills needed were to track, stalk, and attack to kill.

    The women would stay behind and take care the children and the camp. The skills needed were communication and empathy and interest in social interaction.

    This social model was successful enough that over generations the best reproducers were those that supported it. And so we evolved.

    I thought this was all pretty much consensus way back bef

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Back when we were all living in tribes on the plain or the jungle the men would all go out and hunt. The skills needed were to track, stalk, and attack to kill. I thought this was all pretty much consensus way back before The Naked Ape was published.

      Back when we were all living in tribes, women gathered berries. This selected for a propensity to be more attuned to (and prefer) berry colors, and that's why women like pink. It's consensus that women prefer pink. But it's not really true - http://www.bbc.com/future/stor... [bbc.com]

      So how do we distinguish evolutionary psychology stories like "social" that are true, from those like "pink" that aren't? - Just by the necessary boring grunt work of science. That's what this story is about. No one's surprised at the "r

      • Back when we were all living in tribes, women gathered berries. This selected for a propensity to be more attuned to (and prefer) berry colors, and that's why women like pink. It's consensus that women prefer pink.

        The use of pink and blue is arbitrary and recent [quora.com]. In old photos, all babies wear white clothes. In historical paintings you never see this pink/blue dualism. That is a well known fact to everybody with half a brain.
        So, no, it is not consensus that women prefer pink, it is just a color coding. I suspect that those, who say it is consensus, just want to "debunk" another (false) imposition of the patriarchy.

        • Actually pink was male color before because it was considered strong, shawty color.
          Also only 100 years ago all boys were dressed as girls until 7 or so. My grandma sang me song about a boy that gets his first pair of trousers.
          BTW I went to my first medical check for the army dressed in pink top to bottom. Noone made a comment...

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          White is an odd colour to dress a baby. Brown, or puke yellow would be much more practical. It's as if we dress babies to suit our own preferences.

          • White is an odd colour to dress a baby. Brown, or puke yellow would be much more practical. It's as if we dress babies to suit our own preferences.

            Preferences had very little to do with it. People dressed their babies in white because white cloth was the cheapest. Good dyes were rare and expensive for most of human history. Purple was the color of royalty because the dye was literally too expensive for most anyone else. Meanwhile linen is naturally white or off-white, and when it's off-white, just bleaching it whiter is fairly cheap. In short, it was all about the benjamins.

            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Clothing dye wasn't particularly expensive, so long as you didn't want a colour that required something exotic (like purple). In medieval Europe woad blue was cheap and common among the lower classes.

              Art often depicts babies wrapped in woad blue, or brown, which were easy to make, or brilliant white, maybe because people associated it with purity.

    • Oh golly more evolutionary just so stories.

      Thet sound nice and neat and for very cleanly into many people's preconceptions based on a weird idealised view of society, but that doesn't make the stories correct.

      Unless of course the men all carried stone spears, wore spiffy leopard skins, were bad with prepositions and we're all called Og, Thag and such like. In that case I'm right with you.

  • UNPOSSIBLE (Score:2, Funny)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
    Boys and girls are identical down to the last quark. Sex I mean gender doesn't exist which is why every aspect of reality(the good things)must be divided at least 50/50 by gender in favor of womyn (which is an imaginary group btw). All differences between genders is due to a conspiracy of evil white heteronormative NAZI men devoted primarily to oppressing girls, infiltrating every major society to adapt the same basic sex I mean gender roles and brainwash strong independent poor weak victimized womyn into
  • Socially determined (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jenik ( 1030872 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @12:20AM (#59232780)
    The role of women in most societies is such that advanced social skills and sociability are highly valued and rewarded. For men it is, on the other hand, winning, being strong, etc. While there may be actual biological factors in play, this research does not distinguish between what's "biological" and what "social". (Yes, there are those changes in brain blood flow but those arise as a result of learning too.]
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For men it is, on the other hand, winning, being strong, etc.

      I really hope not, because nerds are not usually associated with winning and being strong, and I'm certainly quite puny compared even to my wife who is half my size.

      Fortunately it doesn't seem to have held me back.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by green1 ( 322787 )
        You obviously don't have kids, nor have you spent much time with them.

        You can try all you want to force kids to play with "the other gender's" toys, but in the end, the majority* of them will pick the toys we stereotypically assign them. And they do this starting from an age where they haven't interacted with other kids or other caregivers much yet. Yes we know that some specific adults (generally older ones) will try to reinforce this stereotype (as shown in your study) but that doesn't disprove the natura
        • by hawk ( 1151 )

          We always had cars, trucks, and other things that I would have wanted to play with as a boy around for our girls.

          They never got used.

          And then, one day, I saw our twins playing with the trucks and cars at the garage in the playroom.

          I grabbed my wife, and as we got close enough to hear,

          "This is the mommy truck."
          The other picked up another and announced, "This is the baby truck."

          At which point we just threw in the towel.

          hawk

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      As a parent I can assure you that little girls form social circles and ostracize girls not in their clique, while boys pick teams to compete against each other, the only selection criteria being ability.
      • I'm also a parent (2 step sons full time from a very young age, one daughter, and one older girl that we took in when she was in her teens). I'd say that the social circles you are seeing girls form are also "teams" that are picked based on ability. Certainly, I noticed significant differences between the girls and boys, but all of them have been part of a team.

  • Girls do like gaming, but social media is the gamification of social interaction and not treated as such by the study. How many likes? How many comments? Were they high status or low status individuals?

    It isn't that girls don't like competition, its that they don't like the make-believe stakes that occupy boys.

    This was especially true in the early days of computer games, so the people who got interested in computers were disproportionately male. The resulting culture reflects this--and combined with linge

    • by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @08:11AM (#59233662) Journal

      Once women have equality of opportunity and incentives, time will tell what is dictated by biology

      I thought these experiments had already been run. In the most gender-equal nations, like Sweden, the gender gap in professions increased. When women are perfectly free to choose whatever they want to do, they want to do not programming.

  • You don't have to go far to find out that boys have been developed 'for boys'. You look at the 80s and all TV ads were about boys playing video games. They are 'boys themed' (cars, fighting, male protagonist etc.) and they used to be in the boys aisle. No wonder they got a preference for them, they were (and still are) developed 'for them'. And even if it's not as obvious, we could say the same about social medias for girls.

    Next on 'Obvious Real Science', does dogs prefer chicken or broccoli? Let's find out

    • The median gamer is a middle aged woman. They play Farmville and Candy Crush and that sort of thing. The existence of Call of Duty does not discourage girls from playing the sorts of not Call of Duty games they want to play. This is a problem capitalism has already solved.

  • Men evolved to fight for dominance and impregnate women with their domination-winning genes. It's not a proud thing but that's the animal kingdom for you.

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