Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Cementing relationships
When girl best friends communicate with each other, they lean in,
maintain eye contact, and do a lot of talking. They use their sophisticated
verbal talents to cement their relationships. Boys never do this. They rarely
face each other directly, preferring either parallel or oblique angles. They
make little eye contact, their gaze always casting about the room. They do
not use verbal information to cement their relationships. Instead,
commotion seems to be the central currency of a little boy’s social
economy. Doing things physically together is the glue that cements their
relationships.
My sons, Josh and Noah, have been playing a one-upmanship game
since they were toddlers. A typical version might involve ball throwing.
Josh would say, “I can throw this up to the ceiling,” and would promptly
try. Then they would laugh. Noah would respond by grabbing and throwing
the ball, saying, “Oh yeah? I can throw this up to the sky.” This ratcheting,
with laughter, would continue until they reached the “galaxy” or the big
prize, “God.”
Tannen consistently saw this style everywhere she looked—except
when observing little girls. The female version goes something like this.
One sister says, “I can take this ball and throw it to the ceiling,” and she
does. Both laugh. The other sister grabs the ball, throws it up to the ceiling,
and says, “I can, too!” Then they talk about how cool it is that they can both
throw the ball. This style persists into adulthood for both sexes. Tannen’s
data, unfortunately, have been misinterpreted as “Boys always compete, and
girls always cooperate.” As this example shows, however, boys are being
extremely cooperative. They are simply doing it through competition,
deploying their favorite strategy of physical activity.
Negotiating status
By elementary school, boys finally start using their verbal skills for
something: to negotiate their status in a large group. Tannen found that

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high-status males give orders to the rest of the group, verbally or even
physically pushing the low-status boys around. The “leaders” maintain their
fiefdoms not only by issuing orders but also by making sure the orders are
carried out. Other strong members try to challenge them, so the guys at the
top learn quickly to deflect challenges. Hierarchy is very evident with boys.
It can be hard on them, too: The life of a low-status male is often miserable.
Tannen found that little girls have hierarchies of status, too. But they
used strikingly different strategies to generate and maintain them. Verbal
communication is so important that the type of talk determines the status of
the relationship. Your “best friend” is the one to whom you tell secrets. The
more secrets revealed, the more likely the girls are to identify each other as
close. Girls tend to deemphasize the status between them in these situations.
Using their sophisticated verbal ability, the girls tend not to give top-down
imperial orders. If one of the girls tries issuing commands, the style is
usually rejected: The girl is tagged as “bossy” and isolated socially. Not that
decisions aren’t made. Various members of the group give suggestions,
discuss alternatives, and come to a consensus.
The difference between girls’ and boys’ communication could be
described as the addition of a single powerful word. Boys might say, “Do
this.” Girls would say, “
Let’s
do this.”
Styles persist, then clash
Tannen found that, over time, these ways of using language become
increasingly reinforced. By college age, most of these styles are deeply
entrenched. And that’s when the problems between men and women
become most noticeable.
Tannen tells the story of a woman driving with her husband. “Would
you like to stop for a drink?” the wife asked. The husband wasn’t thirsty.
“No,” he replied. The woman was annoyed because she had wanted to stop;
the man was annoyed because she wasn’t direct. In her book 
You Just Don’t
Understand
, Tannen explains: “From her point of view, she had shown
concern for her husband’s wishes, but he had shown no concern for hers.”
How would this conversation likely go between two women? The thirsty
woman would ask, “Are you thirsty?” With lifelong experience at verbal
negotiation, her friend would know what she wanted and respond, “I don’t

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know. Are 
you
thirsty?” Then a small discussion would ensue about
whether they were both thirsty enough to stop the car and get water.
These differences in social sensitivity play out in the workforce just as
easily as in marriage. At work, women who exert “male” leadership styles
are in danger of being perceived as bossy and aggressive. Men who do the
same thing are often praised as decisive and assertive. Tannen’s great
contribution was to show that these stereotypes form very early in our
social development, perhaps assisted by asymmetric verbal development.
They transcend geography, age, and even time. Tannen, who was an English
literature major, sees these tendencies in manuscripts that go back centuries.
Nature or nurture?
Tannen’s findings are statistical patterns, not an all-or-none phenomenon.
Many factors affect our language patterns, she found. Regional background,
individual personality, profession, social class, age, ethnicity, and birth
order all affect how we use language to negotiate our social ecologies. Boys
and girls are treated differently socially the moment they are born, and they
are often reared in societies filled with centuries of entrenched prejudice. It
would be a miracle if we somehow transcended our experience and behaved
in an egalitarian fashion.
Given the influence of culture on behavior, it is overly simplistic to
invoke a purely biological explanation for Tannen’s observations. Given the
great influence of brain biology on behavior, it is also simplistic to invoke a
purely social explanation. The real answer to the nature-or-nurture question
is “We don’t know.” That can be frustrating to hear. As scientists explore
how genes and cells and behaviors connect, their findings give us not
completed bridges but boards and nails. It’s dangerous to assume the
bridges are complete. Just ask Larry Summers.
More ideas
Get the facts straight on emotions

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Dealing with the emotional lives of men and women is a big part of the
job for teachers and managers. They need to know:
1) Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention.
2) Men and women process certain emotions differently.
3) The differences are a product of complex interactions between nature
and nurture.
Experiment with same-sex classrooms
My son’s third-grade teacher began seeing a stereotype that worsened as
the year progressed. The girls were excelling in the language arts, and the
boys were pulling ahead in math and science. This was only the 
third
grade
! The language-arts differences made some sense to her. But she knew
there was no statistical support for the contention that men have a better
aptitude for math and science than women. Why, for heaven’s sake, was she
presiding over a stereotype? The teacher guessed that part of the answer lay
in the students’ social participation during class. When the teacher asked a
question of the class, who answered first turned out to be unbelievably
important. In the language arts, the girls invariably answered first. Other
girls reacted with that participatory “me too” instinct. The reaction on the