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 possess 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?