by Bruce Hood
The Agony of Adolescence
Perhaps you remember a party you went to when you were fifteen, and everyone stopped talking and stared at you when you walked into the room. Or maybe there was a time when the teacher made you stand up in class and everyone was looking at you. Do you remember feeling your face flush bright red and your palms sweating? It was so embarrassing. You felt so self-conscious.
Most of us have had some embarrassing event in our lives that at the time was the worst possible thing we could imagine. We felt we could have died and wished the ground would open up and swallow us. Being embarrassed and becoming self-conscious are key components of the looking glass self. If we did not care about what others think, then we would not be embarrassed. Initially young children are so egocentric and the apple of their parents’ eye. It is not clear that others would ever be of concern to them. However, with a developing sense of self, the child increasingly starts to care about what others think, aided by their emerging theory of mind, where they are able take another person’s perspective. This self-conscious awareness can provide the basis for a moral compass. Even our own reflection can make us acutely aware that we are potentially the focus of other people’s attention. For example, in one classic Canadian study of social transgression,57 children on Halloween night were secretly observed after being told to take only one piece of candy from a bowl while the owner went into another room. If there was a mirror placed so that it reflected a child as they approached the bowl, the children became self-conscious and did as they were told. However, in households where there was no mirror, children took more than one candy. There was no mirror to remind them that they could be seen.
By the time children hit the early teens, they are especially sensitive to the judgement of others. In fact, they often think that there is an imaginary audience evaluating them.58 How often do we see children (and quite often adults who think they are unobserved) receiving the adulation from the imaginary audience that has just heard them perform some amazing task or talent? But this imaginary audience is also the agony of adolescence. By the time they reach their teens, adolescents believe that others are constantly judging them even when this is not the case. They think they are the centre of attention and are hypersensitive to criticism.
Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore has used brain-imaging techniques to investigate what is going on in adolescent heads.59 She found that regions normally triggered by thoughts about one’s self are more active during these adolescent years when compared to young adults. In particular, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is activated when individual adolescents are asked to reflect upon just about any task that forces them to consider things from their own perspective. Whether it’s thinking about self-reflected actions such as reading,60 making intentional plans,61 or simply reflecting on a socially painful memory,62 the adolescent PFC is hyperactive.
The kids simply feel that, as my teenage daughter says, ‘Everyone is getting at me.’ What hyperactive PFC actually means is not clear but it does support the idea that this region is specialized for ‘mentalizing’ about others, and much of that mental effort during adolescence is concerned with what others, especially the peer group, think. No wonder adolescents are susceptible to peer pressure, which explains why they are more likely to get into trouble and engage in risky behaviour in order to establish their own identity and position in the pecking order.63 And who are the worst offenders for risky behaviour? Boys, of course. But what are little boys made of? Is it all biology or does society shape the behaviour of little boys more than we have previously thought?
Boys Will Be Boys
The first thing anyone asks when hearing the news of a birth is invariably, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ So when Toronto couple, Kathy Witterick, thirty-eight, and David Stocker, thirty-nine, announced the birth of Storm in 2011, but told friends and family that they were not disclosing the sex of their third child, their announcement was met with stony silence. They explained that they did not want their child to be labelled but rather they wanted Storm to be free to develop its own identity. The problem was that no one knew how to treat the New Year’s Day baby. Four months later, news of the ‘genderless’ Storm broke, creating a media storm with a flood of criticism and ridicule of the parents.64 But Kathy and David have a point. Our identity based on whether we are a boy or a girl is greatly influenced by those around us.
We are so preoccupied with the question of sex because it is a core component of how people define themselves, how they should behave and how others should behave towards them. It is one of the first important distinctions we make growing up as children and, without knowing which sex someone is, we are at a loss to know how to interact with them. Being a boy or a girl is a sexual difference defined in terms of the chromosomes we inherit from our parents. Normally, twenty-three pairs of chromosomes are inherited from each parent. In each set of chromosomes, one pair is known as the sex chromosomes (X and Y) and the other twenty-two pairs are known as the autosomes. Human females have two X chromosomes, and males have one X and one Y chromosome. In the absence of the Y chromosome, we would develop into little girls with two X chromosomes.
Gender, on the other hand, is not simply biological but rather is related to the psychological profile of the individual. Gender is not genetic but shaped by the group consensus. It is what it is to think and behave masculine or feminine. By three years of age, boys prefer the company of other boys and girls prefer other little girls,65 and by five years, children are already ‘gender detectives’ with a rich set of rules about what is appropriate for boys and girls to do.66 Some gender stereotypes are universal such as mothers should be responsible for childcare and preparing food.67 However, such stereotypes have shifted in recent years as men and women are increasingly able to play a greater role in what were considered traditionally separated activities. This is why ‘gender-benders’ such as Boy George or Marlene Dietrich arouse passions because they challenge stereotypes.
Although not cast in stone, gender stereotypes do tend to be perpetuated across generations. This is what Storm’s parents were trying to avoid. Many parents are eager to know the sex of their children before they are born, which sets up gender expectations such as painting the nursery in either pink or blue.68 When they eventually arrive, newborn baby girls are described mainly in terms of beauty, whereas boys are described in terms of strength. In one study, adults attributed more anger to a boy than to a girl reacting to a jack-in-the-box toy even though it was always the same infant.69 Parents also tend to buy gender-appropriate toys with dolls for girls and guns for boys.70 In another study, different adults were introduced to the same child wearing either blue or pink clothes and told that it was either Sarah or Nathan. If adults thought it was a baby girl, they praised her beauty. If they thought it was a boy, they never commented on beauty but rather talked about what occupation he would eventually have. When it came to play, they were boisterous with the boy baby, throwing him into the air, but cuddled the baby when they thought it was a girl. In fact, the adults seemed to need to know which sex the baby was in order to play with them appropriately.71 Of course, it was the same baby, so the only difference was whether it was wearing either blue or pink. It is worth bearing in mind the association of the colour blue is only recent – a hundred years ago it would have been the boys wearing pink and the girls wearing blue.72
With all this encouragement from adults during the early months, is it any surprise that, by two years of age, most children easily identify with their own gender and the roles and appearances that they believe are appropriate? However, this understanding is still very superficial. For example, up until four years of age, children think that long hair and dresses determine whether you are a boy or girl. We know this because if you show four-year-olds a Ken Barbie Doll and then put a dress on the male doll, they think that he is now a girl. By six years, children’s gender understanding is more sophisticated and goes over and beyond outward appearances. They know that changing clothes and
hair does not change boys into girls or vice versa. They are already demonstrating an understanding of what it means to be essentially a boy or a girl. When they identify gender as a core component of the self, they will tend to see this as unchanging and foundational to who they and others are.73
As children develop, they become more fixed in their outlook about what properties are acquired and what seem to be built in. For example, by six years, children think that men make better mechanics and women are better secretaries. Even the way parents talk to their children reinforces this generalized view of what is essential to gender.74 For example, parents tend to make statements such as ‘Boys play soccer’ and ‘Girls take ballet’ rather than qualifying the statements with ‘Some boys play soccer’ or ‘Some girls take ballet’. We can’t help but fall into the gender trap. Our interaction with children reinforces these gender divisions. Mothers tend to discuss emotional problems with their daughters more than with their sons.75 On a visit to a science museum, parents were three times more likely to explain the exhibits to the boys than to the girls.76
And it’s not just the parents. Teachers perpetuate gender stereotypes. In mixed classes, boys are more likely to volunteer answers, receive more attention from teachers and earn more praise. By the time they are eight to ten years old, girls report lower self-esteem than boys, but it’s not because they are less able.77 According to 2007 UK National Office of Statistics data, girls outperform boys at all levels of education from preschool right through to university. There may be some often-reported superior abilities in boys when it comes to mathematics but that difference does not appear until adolescence, by which time there has been ample opportunity to strengthen stereotypes.78 Male brains are different to female brains in many ways that we don’t yet understand (for example, the shape of the bundle fibres connecting the two hemispheres known as the corpus callosum is different), but commentators may have overstated the case for biology when it comes to some gender stereotypes about the way children should think and behave that are perpetuated by society.79
Stereotypes both support and undermine the self illusion. On the one hand most of us conform to stereotypes because that is what is expected from those in the categories to which we belong and not many of us want to be isolated. On the other hand, we may acknowledge the existence of stereotypes but maintain that as individuals we are not the same as everyone else. Our self illusion assumes that we could act differently if we wished. Then there are those who maintain that they do not conform to any stereotypes because they are individuals. But who is really individual in a species that requires the presence of others upon which to make a relative judgment of whether they are the same or different? By definition, you need others to conform with, or rebel against. For example, consider tattoos as a mark of individuality – an individuality that is increasingly mainstream as evidenced by the rise in popularity for getting inked! Even those who go to the extremes of self-mutilation are inadvertently using others to calibrate the extent of their individuality. The self illusion is a mighty tricky perspective to avoid.
The Supermale Myth of Aggression
Consider another universal self stereotype – that of male aggression. Why do men fight so much? Is it simply in their nature? It’s an area of psychology that has generated a multitude of explanations. Typical accounts are that males need physically to compete for dominance so that they attract the best females with whom to mate, or that males lack the same negotiation skills as women and have to resolve conflicts through action. These notions have been popularized by the ‘women are from Venus, men are from Mars’ mentality. It is true that men have higher levels of testosterone and this can facilitate aggressive behaviour because this hormone makes you stronger. But these may be predispositions that cultures shape. When we consider the nature of our self from the gender perspective, we are invariably viewing this through a lens, shaped by society, of what males and females should be.
Males may end up more aggressive but surprisingly they may not start out like that. Studies have shown equal levels of physical aggression in one-year-old males and females, but by the time they are two years of age, boys are more physically aggressive than girls and this difference generally continues throughout development.80 In contrast, girls increasingly rely less on physical violence during conflicts but are more inclined to taunting and excluding individuals as a way of exerting their influence during bullying.81 Males and females may simply differ in the ways in which they express their aggression.
It seems unquestionable that male biology makes them more physically aggressive, which has led to the ‘supermale’ myth. In some males, they inherit and extra Y chromosome (XYY) which makes them taller, leaner and more prone to acne in comparison to other males. About fifty years ago, it was claimed that these supermales are more aggressive following reports of their being a higher incidence of XYY males in Scottish prisons during the 1960s.82 The belief was further substantiated in the public’s mind by the notorious case of Richard Speck, an American mass murderer who tortured, raped and murdered nine female student nurses in one night of terror on 14 July 1966 in South Chicago Community Hospital. Speck, who had a history of violence, broke into the nurses’ home and held the women hostage. He led them out of the room, one by one, to be strangled or stabbed to death. At the time of his hearing, the defence lawyers claimed that Speck was not responsible for the crime because of diminished responsibility due to the fact that he had the XYY supermale genotype. It later transpired that Richard Speck’s defence lawyer knew that Speck did not have an XYY genotype but perpetrated the myth in order to protect his client.
Even if Speck did have the XYY genotype, many of the claims for the link with violence have not stood up to scrutiny. Early studies were poorly conducted using very small samples and, amazingly, if a criminal had acne, this was sometimes taken as sufficient evidence of them possessing the XYY genotype in the absence of any genetic analysis.83 Speck was tall and had acne. Today the myth of the XYY persists with many experts still disagreeing about a possible link between the genotype and violence. One extensive Danish study84 concluded that the prevalence of XYY was about one in 1,000 males and that the only reliable characteristic was that they were above average height. This physical difference may have contributed to them exhibiting behaviour that is considered more aggressive than normal. It may also explain why nearly half of XYY males are arrested compared with the average of one in ten XY males. Overall, it would appear that XYY males do have behavioural problems, especially during adolescence, which may be compounded by their unusual height. They also tend to have lower IQs and more impulsive behaviour that could contribute to the higher incidence of criminality, but these crimes are not typically ones of violence against others but rather property crimes such as shoplifting.
What makes the supermale myth worth considering in the context of gender stereotyping is that such biological beliefs can have unfortunate consequences. During the 1970s and 1980s, many parents took the decision to abort male foetuses diagnosed with the extra Y chromosome during prenatal examinations because of the supermale myth. The truth is that most males with XYY do not know that they have an extra Y chromosome because most are generally indistinguishable from other XY males.
Even if the XYY genotype was associated with aggression, in all likelihood the environment still plays an important triggering role. In other words, it is a predisposition that requires certain environmental conditions. For example, another gene abnormality linked to aggression affects the production of an enzyme (MAOA) that influences serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitter activity. This gene has been nicknamed the ‘warrior’ gene because it is disrupts the signalling in the PFC, and this has been linked with impulsivity and increased violence. In 2009, Bradley Waldroup escaped the death penalty in Tennessee after a murderous rampage, on the grounds that he had the warrior gene. According to his defence, it was his genes that made him do it. The trouble is that around one in three individuals of European descent po
ssess this gene, but the murder rate in this population is less than one in a hundred. Why don’t the rest of us with the gene go on a bloody rampage?
Researchers studied over 440 New Zealand males with this gene abnormality, from birth to adulthood, to look for the biological basis of antisocial behaviour.85 They discovered that over eight out of ten males who had the MAOA gene abnormality went on to develop antisocial behaviours, but only if they had been raised in an environment in which they were maltreated as children. In contrast, only two out of ten males with the same abnormality developed antisocial adult behaviour if they had been raised in an environment with little maltreatment. This explains why not all victims of maltreatment go on to victimize others. It is the environment that appears to play a crucial role in triggering whether these individuals become antisocial.86 This is why it makes no sense to talk about nature and nurture as separate when we consider how our individuals develop.
Natural Born Killers
If early abuse turns on the effects of the warrior genes, can these negative attributes also be turned off? Neuroscientist Jim Fallon studies what makes psychopaths tick by looking at their brain activity and genes. One day, as he was sorting through lots of scans of psychopathic murderers, he noted that they all seemed to lack inactivity in the orbital cortex, a region of the prefrontal cortex. The orbital cortex is related to social behaviours such as smiling, and is also a region associated with moral decision-making and control of impulsive antisocial behaviour. People with low activity in this region tend to be free-wheeling types or psychopaths. Perhaps these psychopaths had bad brains?