Girl Monkeys Prefer Dolls, Boy Monkeys Prefer Their Balls

Sorry for not having posted in a while. Sometimes I do other things than reading quantitative data spreads about president name sounds. Sometimes. 


As I was researching edible toys (<------- worth the read), I came across a bizarre study that will likely rancor some of my readers. The researchers put “a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog,” (469) into a cage with some adorable monkeys in order to see if the girl-monkeys liked dolls more and if boy-monkeys instinctively liked toy cars. Weird thing is: it seems they did.

Well, kinda. The researchers recorded two variables for each vervet: approach and contact. Approach meant getting within a meter of a toy. Contact meant anything from touching it to playing with it. The relative times of the vervets’ interactions with each toy was recorded and then analyzed.

Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus)

Gerianne M. Alexander, Melissa Hines

Evolution and Human Behavior 23 (2002) 467 – 479

“In some instances, we also noted that vervet monkeys contacted toys in ways that appeared to resemble children’s contact with them, such as moving the car along the ground. They also interacted with the doll in ways that resembled female vervet contact with infants, such as inspecting it physically,” (472).

 “Toys preferred by boys, such as the ball and police car used in this research, have been characterized as objects with an ability to be used actively or objects that can be propelled in space,” (475). Hmm, I have a pretty distinct impression that any object can be “propelled in space.” Girls like anvils? I’m confused.

Strange Findings: “[M]ale animals were more likely to approach and contact toys overall,” (470).

 “Whereas the approach of these Old World Primates to individual toys was unrelated to their sex or to toy category, their contact with the toys was,” (473).

“A preference for red or reddish pink has been proposed to elicit female behaviors to infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact. The hypothesis that reddish pink or red may be a cue signaling opportunities for nurturance and thus eliciting female responsiveness could explain our finding of greater female contact with both the doll (with a pink face) and the pot (colored red),” (474-5).

“[A]ndrogens appear to influence the development of two primate visual pathways that are differentially involved in the processing of object features (such as color or shape) and object movement,” (475).

“However, although female vervets preferred ‘‘feminine’’ toys over ‘‘masculine’’ toys, male vervets did not appear to prefer ‘‘masculine’’ toys over ‘‘feminine’’ toys. This difference between male vervets and boys may indicate that toy preferences in boys are directed by gender socialization to a larger degree than are toy preferences in girls,” (476).

“[I]t seems that, like chromatic color vision, sex-related object preferences appeared early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. Primate color vision appears to have evolved to facilitate foraging for fruit and edible leaves. It may be that differential selection pressures based on diverse processing requirements of tasks that are conducted more by males or females (such as infant care) may have contributed to the formation of perceptual categories of objects with differential adaptive significance for males and females,” (476).

I wonder if similar “see-what-the-girl-monkey-touches” would be credible if they had some slight statistical significance. “It was seen that the female spent 23% more time watching Desperate Housewives while the males threw their shit at the TV during this time. This study was not designed to interpret such behavior, but we all know what it means.”

There may be something to the androgen-color perception stuff though. Several other studies confirm similar findings. The explanation for the female vervets’ attraction to the “feminine” red pot/pan is that its redness is linked to a female evolutionary sex adaptation that makes it likely to respond to reds and pinks. That is, maybe, to the little hairless pink faces of their progeny. And since the male monkeys seem to enjoy throwing stuff, maybe it’s better that they are less interested in dolls/babies.

Ok, Evolution and Human Behavior. But maybe if you could consistently differentiate a pot from a pan I would believe you more. 


But one thing all baby monkeys like, regardless of gender, is being flipped upside-down: 

Get the full scoop on baby monkey toy choices on Ziddu.

And leave comments! Enough of you are coming now that I know you are just being lazy. Especially the Germans. I know you have something to say. Keep looking forward to future posts on how you can see things without using your eyes (but with a different organ...), why you can say your night of heavy drinking is like becoming a butterfly, and Malaysian ant sports.