Sunday, July 1, 2007

Would risk be different in a female dominated society?

So this week was busy, again, but I had fun in the lab. I created more stimuli, practiced coding and ran more babies.

Something interesting we talked about at lab meeting, which I then continued talking about with Sara and Evan:

Our lab is running risk experiments with both adults, kids and lemurs. The human adults and kids run a gain condition (they risk winning one or three versus two every time) and a loss condition (they lose one every time or risk losing none or two...). The lemurs run only the gain condition. In adults, and I believe in children, boys tend to be more risky. What I talked about with Sara and Evan was the lemurs. Because we don't run any female lemurs, we don't know if this trend would continue. It would be fascinating to see, as female lemurs are dominant (I believe that's what Evan said...). The male ringtails (eulemur catta) tend to run very safe (Aracus often runs 100% safe-two sugar pellets every time). I would love to find out what would happen if we tested female ringtails, however right now none are available.

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