[MUSIC PLAYING] JANET SHIBLEY HYDE: There's a very interesting study by Dylan Perentis in which they had people express their aggression—that was college students—using a video game where they could drop bombs on their opponent. So they weren't actually hurting the opponent—just dropping bombs. And when they brought males and females into the laboratory and just had them do the task, males, in fact, were more aggressive. They dropped more bombs on their opponent. But if they made it a particular condition in which gender role constraints were removed because the person was very anonymous, then the women dropped as many bombs as the men did.
So it's a clever little experimental manipulation in the laboratory that tries to remove the constraints, the pressures of gender roles. And when they did that manipulation, they found that the women were as aggressive as the men. There've been a number of other demonstrations of this. So women are capable of aggressive behavior.
I don't know if we want to encourage it, but women are capable of it. But there are many societal constraints that put a lid on it. And they do for men too, but men still receive more encouragement.
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