Why do boys gravitate to trucks and girls to dolls? Do parents and advertisers impose these preferences on children, or do they just cater to preferences the kids already have? And how could evolution shape anyone’s taste in toys, given that our ancestors never set eyes on a Barbie doll or monster truck?
In this excerpt from my book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, we’ll tackle one of the most contentious issues in the nature-nurture debate: the origin of sex differences in toy preferences. Among other things, we’ll discover:
Why one of the largest psychological sex differences ever documented makes almost no evolutionary sense
Why toy makers rarely try to sell the same toys to both sexes, even though they’d make more money if they could
What happens when prenatal hormones and parental socialization push in opposite directions
What apes and monkeys reveal about play habits we tend to blame on culture
Whether Santa is a sexist pig
Warning: The findings in this post could change your views not only of children’s toy preferences, but also of how much parents can mold their children, how much advertisers can mold their customers, and how much ancient evolutionary pressures shape our tastes today.