Skip to content
Heather Skyler
Heather Skyler
Heather Skyler, April 2016

We all watched a video on the giant screen of a baby boy sitting in a chair in front of a small screen. When the baby pulled the string, an image came on the screen, and when he tugged the string again, the image changed. Then the video showed us a baby girl in the same position, doing the same thing. Both babies were delighted by their string-pulling power in this experiment.

Then, the scientists disconnected the screen from the string and the screen went dark. How the baby boys and baby girls reacted to this disconnect was fascinating.

Eighty percent of the baby boys continued to pull on the string, yanking harder and harder, some even getting a foot into the pulling action, until they were exhausted with anger and frustration.

Eighty percent of the baby girls tried the string once or twice, realized immediately it no longer worked, then began to cry.

I was reminded of the “Simpsons” episode in which Lisa devised an experiment called “Is my brother dumber than a hamster?” Every time Bart reached for a cupcake, his hand was shocked. Despite this pain, he reached for the cupcake over and over and over. (Incidentally, this was based on another famous scene, from “A Clockwork Orange,” except in that movie, the man is reaching for breasts instead of cupcakes.)

The cupcake episode was supposed to illustrate Bart’s stupidity, but the string experiment told the scientists something else: Boys are better at dealing with failure than girls are. The girls gave up immediately and got upset. And while it may not have been the most logical plan of action, the boys persisted. The failure of the string didn’t stop them in their tracks.

At the recent Girls Scouts of Orange County “Voice for Girls” event, JoAnn Deak, a developmental psychologist, educator and author, showed the audience this baby-string-pulling video during her talk about the differences between girls’ and boys’ brains. I won’t delve into the technical terms, but the gist was this: Most girls are biologically wired to be more cautious and to avoid failure. The reason? Girls are born with all the eggs they are ever going to have. We won’t produce any new eggs, so we need to be extra protective of ourselves.

Men, on the other hand, produce new sperm daily, so are more expendable, biologically speaking. (Sorry, men. It’s nothing personal.) Biology wants to keep the strongest, most virile men around, so they are weeded out by risk-taking. The risk takers who succeed and overcome failure are the best mates.

Of course, these concepts don’t really matter the way they once did, when danger lurked around the corner of every cave dwelling. Today, not all women want to have babies, and risk-averse men can father plenty of healthy kids.

Still, our biological tendencies persist.

This can be a problem for girls because the ability to fail and move forward is an essential element of success in many fields. It’s OK to be cautious, but to be so fearful of failure that you stop trying is deleterious.

After Deak left the stage, a panel of successful people discussed failure. The participants were Jerry Dipoto, general manager of the Angels; Michelle Khine, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, chemical engineering and materials science at UC Irvine; and Kim Shepherd, CEO of Decision Toolbox and a former TV and foreign correspondent. Failure had played a big role in all of their lives.

Khine talked about having hundreds of bad ideas in science for every great idea. Shepherd talked about jumping between industries and the entrepreneurial inevitability of failing once in a while (though she never uses the word failure herself). Dipoto pointed out that a excellent batting average means you fail 70 percent of the time!

Deak speculates that women who have succeeded as CEOs or sports stars are part of that 20 percent of girls who aren’t afraid of risk and failure. Does that mean if you’re in the majority of women who fear failure, or the minority of boys who do, that you’ll never lead a company or compete in the Olympics? It doesn’t have to.

Here’s the good news. The brain is malleable, especially before age 20, according to Deak.

So if you have a little girl, or a 20 percent boy, encourage them to try the things that scare them, even if it’s just talking to a new kid at school or sleeping over at a friend’s house. Deak calls it “hugging the fear monster.” Every time you try something that scares you, your brain’s wiring shifts a little bit in the opposite direction, according to Deak. (Note: “Shifts a little bit” and “wiring” are not the scientific terms she used.)

So praise your daughters’ and sons’ attempts to do the things they fear (unless, of course, they fear things they are supposed to, like talking to strange men or driving over the speed limit). Explain to them that the more they try these stressful endeavors, the easier they will become, and the more they accept failure as a potential positive, the wider their lives will open.

Contact the writer: @heatherskyler hskyler@ocregister.comheatherskyler.com