Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (16 page)

Read Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior Online

Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

Tags: #test

BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
3.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 52
tances and directions, sometimes compared to an internal compass or a bird's-eye view, that allows them to visualize in all directions.
Women are superior at mastering the details of specific localities, an inheritance from primitive ancestors who survived and passed on the ability to attend to multiple tasks within specific geographic boundaries. The skills that men have are particularly associated with travel. Prehistoric men hunted and traveled, and they had to be able to find their way home without getting lost. Good hunters and travelers survived to pass their spatial abilities and their testosterone on to succeeding generations. The modern descendants of prehistoric hunters and travelers go to school, and among other things, they study geography.
Young boys, who generally do less well in school than girls, can take comfort in geography. Boys today are better than girls at geography, a fact that troubles the National Geographic Society, which works to promote the equality of the sexes. Boys always win the National Geography Bee, which tests children in grades four through eight on their knowledge of places around the world. In 1993, fifty-five out of fifty-seven regional finalists were boys, as were all ten of the national finalists.
22
Among college students, males can locate almost twice as many countries on an unlabeled map of the world as females can.
23
Boys may know more about geography because they read more travel stories than girls do, but the question remains as to why boys prefer stories about travel, and girls prefer stories about people and their relationships. There is no reason to believe the preference is entirely learned.
Our prehistoric ancestors set a pattern that continued through ancient times to the present. More men than women have been explorers and travelers. No doubt some of the difference has been due to the traditional role of women in the home and the greater opportunity for men to become famous outside the home. Nevertheless, recent research indicates the difference is not entirely cultural. We know that some of this traveling behavior is directly related to testosterone, at least in animals. After testosterone injections, birds travel farther,
24
and mice are less afraid to enter new and strange places.
25
Testosterone may do more than enhance spatial visualization. It may motivate people and animals to move around in larger spaces. Among children at a playground or monkeys in the jungle, males play less at the center and more at the edges of the group than girls do.
 
Page 53
Researchers have observed differences in the spatial behavior of boy and girl babies. Among one-year-olds observed at play, boys on average move farther away from their mothers than the girls do, and they stay away from their mothers for longer periods of time.
26
My students and I plan to study whether people of either sex who are higher in testosterone travel more and know more about faraway places in the world. At present, we know more about the differences in spatial abilities between men and women than about those between high- and low-testosterone people of the same sex. It makes sense, though, to hypothesize that a difference between men and women would predict a difference between high- and low-testosterone individuals.
Anyone familiar with standardized tests has seen the odd three-dimensional drawings with multiple-choice questions about how the drawings would look viewed from another direction. These drawings test the ability to visualize objects and imagine them from various angles. Mental rotation ability is related to geographical and mechanical skills. People who do well on mental rotation tests should have an advantage when it comes to throwing spears, chipping stone axes, using maps, and repairing carburetors. The psychological research on spatial ability indicates that performance on mental rotation tests is probably related to testosterone.
27
Females who receive testosterone injections in preparation for sex-change operations show large increases in mental rotation ability.
28
Women with a disorder called Turner syndrome have only one X chromosome, and their bodies produce no testosterone. They are average or above average in verbal intelligence, but they perform far below average on mental rotation tests. Men generally do better on these tests than women, and high-testosterone men do best of all.
Target tests, which involve watching two projectiles moving across a computer screen at various speeds and judging which will reach its target first, assess a specific ability to deal with complex movement in three-dimensional space. It is not surprising that men, with their genetic legacy from prehistoric hunters, are better than women at tests of tracking and hitting targets.
29
Three-dimensional spatial ability goes along with testosterone and the strong visual experience that made the Dutch sex-change patient
 
Page 54
feel euphoric. Visual contact with the target is one of the appeals of guns, which explains why so many men, even some who never hunt, enjoy target practice. It also partly explains why hunters use telescopic sights when shooting within the range of iron sights. Telescopic sights are popular because they are easy to use and make the target appear close and vivid. Men like to see the action. Pilots standing around talking at a small airport will always pause to watch a plane touch down; they find the sight of converging plane and ground irresistible. Similarly, a baseball soaring through the air is a sight baseball players find hard to ignore. The appeal of watching a baseball fly away after it has been hit is so strong that it is hard for batters to resist a quick peek, even though they know that looking takes away from their speed in running the bases.
Lauren Baker, a student at Georgia State University, has studied men, women, and photography. She conducted an experiment to find out if there was a difference between the kind of pictures men and women preferred.
30
She found that men liked pictures with a faraway focus that showed the horizon, while women liked close-ups with details in the foreground. Her findings were what we expected in light of what we know about men and women and their spatial skills. Where men excel at mental rotations and geographic ability, women excel at another kind of spatial ability: women notice and remember where objects are located.
31
This may be part of a more general ability women have to keep track of more than one thing at a time.
Until recently, researchers have not paid much attention to the spatial skills that are more characteristic of women than of men. Dianne Winters, one of my former students, made me aware of how useful these skills can be. She made good use of her ability to keep track of many things at once and remember landmarks. Before she came to Georgia State University, she had worked as an air traffic controller, an unusual occupation for a woman. Her particular job was to keep track of activity on the airport surfaceground control. Sitting in front of a model of the airport, she monitored where everything was and where it was going. Sometimes she monitored two runways at once, listening to radio traffic from one runway through her left earphone and from the other runway through her right earphone.
Mary and I are the stereotypical couple when it comes to finding
 
Page 55
our cars in parking lots. I find mine by remembering directions and distances; she finds hers by remembering landmarks. Men and women use their best spatial skills to keep track of their cars and to travel. When women travel, they find a place by remembering what it was near, what it looked like, or what signs were there. On trips, men remember directions and distances, and women remember landmarks along the way.
32
Once when I was visiting my brother, Dick, on his farm in South Carolina, I told him about the research I was doing concerning the way men and women give directions. Since then, Dick had a good opportunity to take advantage of what I told him. Disney was using his place to film a movie, and there was a lot of coming and going around the farm. Dick got frequent calls from people who wanted directions about how to get from town to the farm. During the filming, I visited him again. He said, ''I gave directions to the men the same way I've always done it. I tell them, 'Take 378 east about 12 miles till you hit junction 527. Turn right on 527, go half a mile, and turn right,' but I've been telling the women about landmarks. I tell them, 'Go ten miles to Black River Swamp, cross it, and then go about two miles farther on to a crossroads with a little minimart over to the left. Then you take a right and go down about a half mile to where the first paved road comes in on your left. Then you turn right on the dirt road.' Women have been telling me, 'You know how to give good directions. Most men don't.'"
Dick is able to tell women about landmarks because he is in an area he knows well. If he were not so familiar with a place, he would have to rely on directions and distances. Like most men, he pays little attention to landmarks when he travels. Again, this bears on skills used in hunting. Hunters follow indirect and wandering paths in searching for game, and they do not remember detailed landmarks or return home by the same route. Instead, they keep track of the directions and distances they travel, and when the hunt is over they return home directly across country.
Some women are better than men at dealing with all sorts of space. I once saw a little girl who convinced me that little girls can have the spatial sense of astronauts. I saw her on a Saturday morning when I was making my way through the maze of aisles at our local farmers' market, a huge warehouselike building piled high with produce and crowded with shoppers. She was about seven years old, and she was helping her
 
Page 56
father shop. He was pushing a buggy, and she was riding on the front. She was standing on the outside of the buggy with her feet over the front two wheels, holding on and swinging backward while she talked. As they came to an intersection, she glanced to one side. Something caught her eye, and in an instant she looked back at her father, flung out her right arm, and said, "Quick, Daddy! Turn that way! My right, your left!" I had never seen anyone give directions so quickly. I wondered how she got that way. Was it just learning, or had she been exposed to extra testosterone
in utero
? If testosterone was behind her navigational skill, was it behind anything else, such as her decision to joyride backward on the outside of a buggy?
I wondered if she would grow up to like mechanical things, maybe even enjoying the twenty-first-century equivalent of fixing carburetors. People who are good at fixing carburetors are skillful at visualizing and manipulating objects in various configurations. They have a particular kind of mechanical ability, which is, along with geographical ability, included in the set of spatial skills that evolved with testosterone. Modern mechanics, plumbers, and electricians need mechanical skill to work with wires, gears, and pipes, just as their Stone Age ancestors needed it to work with rocks, sticks, and animal hides. Studies indicate that mechanical work goes with masculinity, and the average man does better than the average woman on most, but not all, tests of mechanical skill.
Fifty years ago, anthropologists like George Murdock studied the details of what people did for a living. Murdock listed occupations of men and women in 224 tribes from all parts of the world.
33
He found only one occupation that was exclusively male, and that was metalworking. Metalworking and mechanical work have a lot in common. More men than women are mechanics and engineers, which makes me wonder whether testosterone affects a person's decision to choose an occupation requiring mechanical skills. Even television character Murphy Brown's feminist humor acknowledged the handyman. She suggested women get rid of all men in the world except two, one for plumbing and one for electrical work.
Some of the mechanical-skill difference between men and women is due to learning, but more than learning is involved. Psychologist Melissa Hines has studied girls born with adrenal hyperplasia, an
 
Page 57
adrenal gland disorder that produces high testosterone levels. When given a choice, these high-testosterone girls prefer boys' toys, which are more mechanical than girls' toys.
34
They like transportation and construction toys, including helicopters, cars, fire engines, blocks, and Lincoln Logs, better than dolls, kitchen supplies, toy telephones, and crayons and paper. Hines jokes that it is almost as if there were a gene for liking toy trucks.
The research on adrenal hyperplasia points to personality and cognitive differences between women at the high and low ends of the normal range of testosterone. Not all women have the same interests, abilities, or testosterone levels. There are women who do jobs traditionally held by men and do them well. As more jobs open up, more women will work with heavy equipment and machines. A woman employee, a member of the maintenance crew at a Nucor steel factory, wanted one of those jobs. She was a grandmother, she wore a hard hat, and she wanted to handle the real stuff, the molten steel. She said,
We all have a dream, right? . . . I want to be a ladle-crane operator. I want to carry steel from the furnace to the casting machine. I don't know if they'll give me that job. They only want the most experienced people to carry ladles of steel. I'll probably end up on a scrap crane. But to carry a ladle to the caster, that's the dream. That's the dream.
35
More women will realize such dreams as cultural changes help equalize the work of men and women. Nevertheless, to the extent that testosterone is a factor, men will probably continue to outnumber women in some traditionally male jobs, regardless of cultural changes.
Men appear to like mechanical work more than women do, although women have an advantage over men when it comes to some kinds of mechanical aptitude.
36
Women do especially well at tasks that call for a combination of mechanical aptitude, fine motor skill, and computational ability. Women have better fine motor skill and computational ability than men.
37
An interesting report concerning the effect of hormones on computational skill came from a male-to-female transsexual who was taking estrogen in preparation for a sex-change operation. After she started taking estrogen, her computational skills improved to

Other books

The Convicts by Iain Lawrence
The Hydrogen Murder by Camille Minichino
His to Take by Kallista Dane
After the Loving by Gwynne Forster
Scandalous Innocent by Juliet Landon
The Boy Next Door by Staci Parker
Under Construction by J. A. Armstrong