GIRLS are no less competitive than boys, they’re simply subtler about it, a study of pre-schoolers suggests. While boys use head-on aggression to get what they want, girls rely on the pain of social exclusion.
To test the apparent differences in how very young children compete, Joyce Benenson at Emmanuel College in Boston and her colleagues divided 87 4-year-olds into same-sex groups of three. In successive trials, each trio received one, two or three highly prized animal puppets.
The sexes behaved similarly when there were two or three puppets to go round. The differences became clear, though, when there was…
