TED Talk: Philip Zimbardo - The demise of guys?

gargleblaster

Hello, men. (And ladies, too, I just wanted to say, "Hello, men.")

Here is something which I thought you might find worthy of discussion. Lots of facts and figures to bat around, and also interesting questions and hypotheses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html

There's a survey linked too, for anyone interested.

Enjoy!

Jaafa

While its true that most girls outperform guys. There are still more guys in the very top levels of our society so I think it evens out that way.

Also I really don't see the relevance of videogames to this.

gargleblaster

I know, right? He seems to have some kind of agenda where video games are concerned. Makes me wonder where he's getting the data that supports his idea that there's any real correlation.

I do think the problem in education is real though, or maybe it's just in the US and Canada. We have a teaching style that is more suited to girls than boys, and IMO that has to be corrected. A more balanced approach would help everyone.

tommy2bad

I think he's wrong, in as much as he confuses cause and effect.
The Internet, video games, porn all produced by men, not exclusively but enough to generalize. So their designed to appeal to men and boys. Its not that thees things are rewiring boys brains as much as they are made to fit boys brains.

source

tommy2bad wrote: »

I think he's wrong, in as much as he confuses cause and effect.
The Internet, video games, porn all produced by men, not exclusively but enough to generalize. So their designed to appeal to men and boys. Its not that thees things are rewiring boys brains as much as they are made to fit boys brains.

I don't think that's the point he was making. I think what he's saying is that the the internet, porn and games are affecting males to an extent that males can no longer interact in a meaningful way with the opposite sex. There's no argument being made that they're not designed by male brains to fit male brains. In fact the issue as I see it is that they are designed to fit male brains.

I would be a little wary about his stats, but I have to admit, on a general scale a lot of what he said I would agree with.

sollar

How do you get boys interested in school and studying like the girls do? If you can crack that men will do just fine.

I don't think its an issue of superior intelligence of one over the other. Its simply girls apply themselves better than boys at school age.

parker kent

source wrote: »

I think what he's saying is that the the internet, porn and games are affecting males to an extent that males can no longer interact in a meaningful way with the opposite sex.

If the internet, porn and games are actually doing as he says, that means that we have left behind some sort of age where men regularly interacted meaningfully with women. Does that not sound like an enormous amount of BS to anybody else? Given that it is not that long since women were seen as beneath men (and they still are in some cultures), I really am not buying these "technology is ruining everything" type arguments.

Sure there are issues in relation to education. But what we are experiencing are natural side effects of moving towards equality. There will be natural teething problems but by and large, I would say that the interactions between men and women are better than at almost any other time in history. Does a guy whacking off to porn on the internet really compare to eras where marital rape was valid? Eras where women had no votes, no rights and no voice. I really don't think that me playing Red Dead Redemption will cause greater difficulties in how I interact with women than eras where women were expected to be subservient to men.

Count Duckula

I'm not sure that girls outpeforming boys is necessarily a bad thing or something worthy of change, anyway. I mean, one gender will always outpeform the other - you'll never get a straight split down the middle.

For decades that was men, who through the construct of society and gender roles were artificially placed "on top" and thus outpeformed their female counterparts. Now, we are moving towards a more equal world and women are tending to outpeform men.

But is this a problem? A talented man will still do as well as ever. A talented person of either gender will succeed, by and large. That there may be more talented women doesn't seem to me to be something worthy of comment - as I said, one gender will always be statistically "greater" than another, as would be the case with any judgement of two distinct groups - and it certainly doesn't suggest to me that we must hurry to "redress the balance".

Women may have a greater prevalence of those good at education, but they've no monopoly on it.

goingpostal

I watched the full clip. All I heard was a blizzard of questionable statistics topped off at the very end by something about "real men". If you want me to lose total interest in your argument, start talking about "real men". Real as opposed to what? Fake? Is Mr Headshrinker with the shares in Just For Men suggesting that my gender is an illusion?

18AD

The issue here isn't about whether men or women come out on top. Where did that come from?

He's simply pointing out some social problems faced by a majority of males. Regardless of whether it's true or false, his stats seem to come from interviews with males students, as he mentions at the start.

Tefral

Here is a thing ive noticed alot in say the last 3 years and its got to do with interacting with people:

I frequent alot of modified car forums, im only 26 but at that age id be in the older bracket and the minority now. A trend Ive noticed is that alot of young fellas wont pick up the phone to call people.

Ill give an example. Insurance quotations on cars. There does be a million and one threads on them all along the lines of "will i get insurance on a civic, I tried online but im getting nowhere". There are others such as ringing scrap yards for parts. They hide behind a wall of internet and words rather than actually picking up the phone and talking to people. In the time it takes to create a thread and wait for a response they could have got the answer.

goingpostal

18AD wrote: »

.....He's simply pointing out some social problems faced by a majority of males.....

I can see your point, but the majority of males have faced social problems, of one sort or another, since the beginning of humankind. Whats new is Dr Feelgood's like this quack making a living from selling platitudes and bromides as a "cure" for these "issues". If it was a choice between a social problem like the black death (circa the 14th century) or a surfeit of internet porn (circa now), I know which social problem I would choose. TED as a concept gets on my wick. "Gather the world's leading thinkers and doers, offer them four days of rapid-fire stimulation, and the result? Unexpected connections. Extraordinary insights. Powerful inspiration." That is what their website says about their dumb conferences. Elitist, overprivileged dogooders, if you ask me. There are some good speakers at it, like Dawkins, and Cindy Gallop gave a better speech than Mr Hair-Died-Off-My-Head about porn, but the self-satisfaction behind it gets on my nerves.

What really annoys me is that this topic "The Demise of Guys" has been popping up every so often throughout my adult life. It usually involves some cheesy guru selling a book. If anyone wants to see a society where men are in genuine demise, go to Russia. Whenever someone hits me with statistics so quickly that I can't actually digest them, as this guy does, I immediately switch off and dismiss their argument. Lying with statistics is easy.

18AD

goingpostal wrote: »

I can see your point, but the majority of males have faced social problems, of one sort or another, since the beginning of humankind. Whats new is Dr Feelgood's like this quack making a living from selling platitudes and bromides as a "cure" for these "issues".

He says in the talk that he is not prescribing any solution to the problem. He's not selling anything.

Whenever someone hits me with statistics so quickly that I can't actually digest them

Well that's your own short coming.

Are you saying that statistics are all wrong? How do you filter through the good and the bad or do you just dismiss it outright? A mistake in my opinion.

Also, Dawkins is a pseudo-philosopher whos pompous character bores me at the best of times. I like some if his ideas though. :pac:

Zimbardo is an interesting guy. Some of his other work on time consciousness and the infamous stanford prison experiment make for good reading and I'd recommend a cursory awareness of them.

Logical Fallacy

goingpostal wrote: »

What really annoys me is that this topic "The Demise of Guys" has been popping up every so often throughout my adult life. It usually involves some cheesy guru selling a book. If anyone wants to see a society where men are in genuine demise, go to Russia. Whenever someone hits me with statistics so quickly that I can't actually digest them, as this guy does, I immediately switch off and dismiss their argument. Lying with statistics is easy.

So a cheesy book is bad unless it backs up what you want to think?

the_syco

I suppose it'd be interesting to compare how men were taught in the 60's compared to how men are taught today, and if anything was changed to make it fairer to women in the way we were taught?

Apart from getting the sh|t kicked out of you by the teachers, I know of no difference. Maybe someone has something to add?

minidazzler

goingpostal wrote: »

I can see your point, but the majority of males have faced social problems, of one sort or another, since the beginning of humankind. Whats new is Dr Feelgood's like this quack making a living from selling platitudes and bromides as a "cure" for these "issues". If it was a choice between a social problem like the black death (circa the 14th century) or a surfeit of internet porn (circa now), I know which social problem I would choose. TED as a concept gets on my wick. "Gather the world's leading thinkers and doers, offer them four days of rapid-fire stimulation, and the result? Unexpected connections. Extraordinary insights. Powerful inspiration." That is what their website says about their dumb conferences. Elitist, overprivileged dogooders, if you ask me. There are some good speakers at it, like Dawkins, and Cindy Gallop gave a better speech than Mr Hair-Died-Off-My-Head about porn, but the self-satisfaction behind it gets on my nerves.

TED is a place you only have a few minutes to get your point across for the most part. Others have longer, but most have around 5 minutes. There is not enough time to go in depth on the subjects, just to raise the issues for further debate.

Zimbardo is anything but a quack TBH, he is massively respected in his field and world famous just from carrying out one experiment, which admittedly he lost the run of himself on and had to be made stop by the woman who is now his wife.

Typh

I usually quite like TED talks, and while this was interesting I thought it swept too many complex ideas together, but as the above poster said, while these speakers have earned enough esteem in their field to give such a talk, they’re given such limited time to not only convey but elaborate. A lot of what he said was a bit too titular. Too much of a talk to entertain, not quite enlighten.

How men are taught to behave, as elaborated by social expectations, in modern Ireland, I’m not sure which side of the fence to stand on. Are we changing more and more due to increasing modernity/gender ambiguity/shattering of the glass ceiling to some extent/technology impacting so heavily on human interaction/fear and a sense of masculine anxiety? Or are the treads of masculinity too deeply embedded in the snow at this stage to the point that we will still always want to be like our father? No answer… or too many answers, we get it.

Thought the guy made quite a few leaps of faith that weren’t entirely founded, but tbh the theorists are there to make assertions based on data that they have observed, and not be afraid to make a wave in the pond with an unpopular opinion.

All that being said a part of me feels that life these days is a bit too easy for guys, and girls alike, to get lost in how convenient modern tech is when it comes to getting off on something we enjoy. Despite that I did slightly take issue with this inference that these ideas on emotional illiteracy and fear of intimacy, which undoubtedly exist, tie so… so… heavily into how so many young men live within what is essentially a Second Life online. He may have been trying to be concise but it cut a fine line with scare-mongering the death of an ideal man that lived so long ago, and set it up in stark contrast with this social pariah that still lives in his mother's basement, eternally naked from the waist down.
I don’t think that just because some teenage male furiously self-loves several times a day, while playing Quake 4, that he’ll be visited by the ghost of masculinity past and be shown a montage of when actual men fought wars for ideas and ideologies as opposed to leveling up.

HavingCrack

cronin_j wrote: »

Here is a thing ive noticed alot in say the last 3 years and its got to do with interacting with people:

I frequent alot of modified car forums, im only 26 but at that age id be in the older bracket and the minority now. A trend Ive noticed is that alot of young fellas wont pick up the phone to call people.

Ill give an example. Insurance quotations on cars. There does be a million and one threads on them all along the lines of "will i get insurance on a civic, I tried online but im getting nowhere". There are others such as ringing scrap yards for parts. They hide behind a wall of internet and words rather than actually picking up the phone and talking to people. In the time it takes to create a thread and wait for a response they could have got the answer.

Oddly enough, I think this is more to do with technology than 'psycology' or whatever you want to call it. In the past you would have had no choice as to making a phone call or not. That was the only method of communication pre the internet taking off. Anyway I suspect that some men in the past (10, 20 years ago or more) would have used the internet rather than phonecalls if the technology had existed.

From a personal perspective I loath making phonecalls and go out of my way to avoid having to do so. I do as much of my work through e mail and face to face as I can. I have no trouble with personal contact but chatting on the phone is my worst nightmare :P.

Morag

But how many young men are being taught by fathers/uncles/brothers how to chat up or woo a young lady or how to be have on a date.

We have generations which don't hang out with parents or people older and wiser at all, only thier peers and then we wonder why PUA is on the rise.

fly_agaric

Sharrow wrote: »

But how many young men are being taught by fathers/uncles/brothers how to chat up or woo a young lady or how to be have on a date.

Were fathers/uncles ever "teaching" their sons/nephews that sort of stuff?

Even in the glory days of Holy Catholic Ireland? I don't see it tbh! Maybe I was deprived.

iptba

One point often doesn't get highlighted much in such discussions, perhaps because it may not be seen as PC, is that males' performance (in comparison to females) varies quite dramatically depending on the subject.

For example here are the numbers for A1s at higher level in the Leaving Cert this year:

http://examinations.ie/statistics/statistics_2011/gender_ard_2011lessthan10.pdf

Irish (H): Male 235 (29.6%); Female: 560 (70.4%). Ratio: 0.42:1

English (H): Male: 557 (39.8%); Female: 843 (60.2%) Ratio: 0.66:1

Foreign Language:
French (H): Male: 287 (35.9%); Female: 512 (64.1%) Ratio: 0.56:1
German (H): Male: 143 (40.7%); Female: 208 (59.3%) Ratio: 0.69:1
Spanish (H): Male: 72 (38.7%); Female: 114 (61.3%) Ratio: 0.63:1

Vs

Mathematics (H): Male: 306 (65.0%); Female: 164 (35.0%) Ratio: 1.87:1

I think a lot of boys could get bored with school as they might not be "stimulated" enough at primary and secondary level. My impression from statistics in the past (e.g. 10 years ago) is that males do quite well at third level when they are free to drop subjects they are not interested in.

lazygal

iptba wrote: »

My impression from statistics in the past (e.g. 10 years ago) is that males do quite well at third level when they are free to drop subjects they are not interested in.

And women too! I have no aptitude for science or maths, I've always (since I was in Montessori aged 3) been more verbal and better at reading/writing. As soon as I dropped to lower level maths and convinced my school I didn't need a science subject for my college choice, I went from average results to As and Bs-I got my first choice (a liberal arts type degree) and got a first, and went on to post grad study in that field too.

In my experience of children in a preschool classroom, which is of course anecdotical, girls are miles ahead of boys until about eight. They just don't have the same aptitude to sit still, concentrate on more detailed tasks and don't express themselves with the same fluency and variety of words. But then they catch up.

The "chalk and talk" method used for so long (and still used in many schools) was designed for a more male centered school system, yet girls seemed to do quite well within a system to which they had to adapt. With the new primary curriculum centered on a lot of team and group based learning, it will be interesting to see what changes it will make to how both genders learn.

Peetrik

Interesting stuff and I'd agree to an extent...

However haven't women in general always been much more interested in the etiquette of traditional pair bonding?

While its very possible that the role models for maturing girls are very different than they were in the past and so the emulation has changed to incompass academic/professional achievement. I would be much more likely to believe that women being more adapt at social interaction is due to a much greater interest from an early age in social dynamics of relationship forming compared to men being more focused on the physical side of things.