Maccoby (1988) article
This week’s discussion section will be about the Maccoby (1988) article**.
(1) In a few sentences, summarize Maccoby’s principle conclusions: What is the specific question at issue, and what position does she take?
(2) How might each of our recent thinkers (Freud? Erikson? Evolutionary Psychologists?) account for the development of differing play styles in boys and girls?
(3) How ‘natural’ do you think gender-segregated play in middle childhood is? Are there advantages/disadvantages to this style of interaction? Have you witnessed any variation in this feature of ‘child society’, either across time or across locations?
**A quick word on genetics! As Jesse pointed out, much of social psychology has traditionally been less concerned with genetically sensitive designs, meaning that this type of work, on average, will spend less time distinguishing between e.g. genetic roots of behavior and the role of very early experience. You may have critiques along these lines – which is good! – but please try to engage with the arguments in this article (and other approaches in this section) and see how far you can push them. In many case, this difference is because it’s much harder to study things like gender in experimental contexts – society doesn’t typically permit us to double-blind an infants’ gender! One approach to this work is to ask what kind of evidence would be necessary to distinguish between theories: you know you understand a theory well if you can come up with what data could falsify that theory! Consider cross-cultural studies, experimental work, genetic/population measurements…
**And a quick word on gender! In modern usage, we typically *do* distinguish sex, the biological feature, from gender, the social identity/role. This article doesn’t do that, and in fact argues against the decision on the basis that whether social behavior is truly separate from biology is an unknown. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
