belief and politics : making God in man's image

Always interesting to see cognitive dissonance at work, in this case in how both sides of the political divide interpret Jesus in line with their own biases. Of course like all scriptures the Bible is remarkably accomodating on that front, since between the slaughter-your-son-just-to-honour-me savagery of the old testament and the turn-the-other-cheek humility of the new, something for every stripe of philosophy.

"A study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California has found that the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. 
The researchers discovered that conservatives believe Jesus would have prioritised the moral issues close to their own hearts, and that disparities in wealth or the treatment of illegal immigrants wouldn't have been high on his agenda. Liberals believed the opposite."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/mar/04/jesus-liberals-conservatives
However, overall the conclusion is quite depressing, given the role religion plays in US politics, then one might at least have hoped it might have provided some common ground for debates, but as this shows, belief is personal, and personally biased.

Julian Baggini on secularism

Julian Baggini in the Guardian makes a valid point that secularism shouldn't ultimately be about stamping out religion, it's about moving it from the public, political sphere into the private. However since this  often requires the displacement of one particular religion from a priviledged position then this can make those of the related sect feel persecuted (with no sense of irony in the case of the catholic church, but then I guess no one expects the Spanish Inquisition :-). But preventing the views of one section of society from dominating the whole is not persecution, it is democratic tolerance, especially when most of the people labelled as belonging to that section don't seem to actually fully agree or take seriously the official beliefs ascribed to them. Which is why as he says "in theory, if not in practice, the United States is both culturally the most religious country in the developed west and constitutionally the most secular."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/is-religion-really-under-threat

In addition Baggini makes the importance case (originally fromJohn Rawls) that preventing religious beliefs from being grounds for action in modern democratic societies does not mean that they can't be acknowledged as motivations. People should be allowed believe what they want, but as in all areas, when it comes to the interaction with others (e.g. via the laws of that society) then other justifications are needed "If we're debating the ethics of abortion, for example, we'd get nowhere if some insisted their views rested on their Catholic faith whereas others took theirs to flow inexorably from their atheism. What we all need to do is provide reasons that have some purchase for other people in their capacity as fellow citizens, whatever their world-views. That doesn't mean denying or even covering up the fact that we have religious or other motivations for believing what we do. It is simply to acknowledge that we can't expect these to carry any weight with others."

(update 2012-02-19)
Related to this is the letter exchanged between Richard Dawkins and Will Hutton in this weeks Observer, sparked by the survey conducted by Dawkins' foundation which showed most people who would have registered themselves as 'Christian' in the latest UK senses, do so only on a very loose basis, and hence that it is unfair to use the census figure of 72% self-identified Christians to support the notion that the UK is an 'actively' Christian country.

debatable disgnoses...the new DSM

While I'm all for quantitative measuring methods, I too have serious concerns about the DSM, and while it is hard to generalize, would think that there can be too much 'medicalization' of mental problems.The dangers are (a) that some kind of amazing level of balanced happiness is then considered both normal and achievable and that (b) those who can't achieve it are then considered 'sick', which generally implies external remedies are necessary. This is I think detrimental to both the 'well' and the truly 'sick'.
But, it is a complicated area, since of course as a materialist I am fully convinced that all behaviours originate from the chemical/neuronal status of the brain, and from this perspective, any mood can be changed. The problem is to manually force a change is to intervene in an amazingly complex and normally efficiently self-regulating system, and while sometimes the situation merits this, until the techniques are more developed (and their mechanisms properly understood) then I think it is not appropriate unless the person involved has serious problems coping with daily life. Life shouldn't be hell,but there's no reason to think it should be all rosy either...

"Hundreds of thousands of people will be labelled mentally ill because of behaviour most people would consider normal, if a new edition of what has been termed the psychiatrists' diagnostic bible goes ahead, experts are warning."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/09/us-mental-health-manual

• Psychiatrists and psychologists in the UK are speaking out against the publishing of DSM-5, an updated version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that categorises every type of mental disorder, including some that the psychologists say should not exist. 
• Under the DSM-4, last revised 12 years ago, children who argue and refuse to obey parents can be classified as having oppositional defiant disorder."
•  "Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology at Kings College London, said: "The proposals in DSM-5 are likely to shrink the pool of normality to a puddle with more and more people being given a diagnosis of mental illness." "

John Gray on Alain de Botton's atheist temple

An interesting article by John Gray on de Botton's new Atheism, which provides some historical insight into the quest for something to capture what religion inspires, without accepting what it implies.

Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/02/alain-de-botton-atheist-temple-defunct

but as always the enduring role of religious art and structures as a focal point for human thoughts about existence was I think best put by Larkin in his poem Churchgoing :
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

SciAm : Thinking About Mortality Changes How We Act

"Psychological scientists Laura E. R. Blackie and Philip J. Cozzolino of the University of Essex in England have been exploring the idea that we are all governed by two disparate existential systems, each with its own distinct method of processing the idea of death. Both existential minds have the power to meaningfully change our attitudes and actions, but they work in very different—almost opposite—ways."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=two-faces-of-death&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120206

Socialists and conservatives may be born not made

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jan/31/socialists-conservatives-born-not-made

This is not the first study I've read about which correlates political leanings to certain dispositions, but it's one that fits into a pet (and half in jest!) stereotyping of mine that people on the right worry more about the undeserving being treated too fairly, and people on the left worry more about the deserving being treated unfairly.

Both of these concerns are valid, since the drives to support and help those we feel as part of our society, and the drives to punish those who we feel act against it, are both I think equally important (and necessary) strands in a moral community. Doing good is not enough, for the system to work we need to also act against 'the bad', and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have been hard wired by evolution for both these dispositions. While most people will agree about the former (that some people will and should help others despite cost to themselves), it is perhaps less widely known that studies show people will also accept a cost to themselves just to punish other people, and from similar righteous reasons (the classic example of this is the 'ultimatum' game ).

For me it's a bit like worrying which is worse - that nine guilty men go free, or one innocent man goes to jail. My view is that a lot of right wing politics is focused most on the travesty of the nine guilty escaping punishment, or as is more likely the case, nine welfare cheats  getting away with excessive benefits. Of course no one can disagree with being angry about this, and these are real problems which society has to work on, but the question is how important they are. In contrast, I would think it a more left-wing approach to focus most instead on what happens the one innocent, or the deserving welfare recipient who might lose out due to new 'tough' policies.  Of course no one on the right disagrees with this either, the point is not that one side is 'nasty' or the other 'soft' , both agree in principle, but disagree in priority.

The study mentioned in this article seem to indicate that right-leaning/left-leaning people differ in the magnitude of their responses to negative and positive stimuli, and I think this fits in with the theory above, namely that if one gets more charged up about negative things, e.g. moral outrage about cheats, one is more likely to favour a conservative platform, since these issues provoke a deeper response, and hence raise their relative priority. The converse is harder to show, since it's not clear absence of unfair punishment is really a sort of 'positive' stimulus, but my impression is there is something valid in this direction as well.

Given how passionate people can be about politics then the more psychological information we can gather the better, and studies such as this provide promising initial insights.

extract:

"The results showed those with right-wing beliefs had a relatively increased response to disgust and threat, whereas those who vote left-of-centre had a relatively increased response to pleasurable images.

This suggests that left-wing people are relatively more responsive to appetitive than aversive stimuli and that people who are right-of-centre are more responsive to aversive stimuli. Put another way, conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli whereas those on the left are more responsive to positive stimuli.
The implication is that the same stimuli will evoke polarised responses depending on where you are on the aversive-appetitive spectrum. These different reactions to shared experiences will mean those of politically opposing viewpoints will automatically judge the other as wrong, and no amount of arguing in the House of Commons can change that."

Gossip is good...

Interesting study on the social role of gossip, and how we are hard wired for it..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/gossip-good-research-robb-willer?mobile-redirect=false

Extract:
"[what do you mean by 'prosocial' gossip?]
It is a subset of gossip that involves warning other people about
untrustworthy others. We think it is pretty common. We find generous
people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a
motivation to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to tarnish another's reputation or advance oneself."

Happiness, it's complicated...

In principle definitely good that David Cameron is making "happiness" a government target, since surely this is the end to which all policies are means, but as in everything, the devil is in the details, or more precisely, the definition. What kind of happiness is to be pursued? What is really meant by happiness? An unrealistic ideal or a solid, achievable state? So Labour's Andy Burnham is starting an important debate when he says:
"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

Labour scorns Cameron's 'happiness' agenda | Society | The Observer

Divine prejudice

Unfortunately it seems people assume not believing a in deity watching over us makes atheists less trustworthy.  But the article mentions some interesting experiments examining this, not only because the distrust could be reduced (reminding people of secular authorities such as the police made them seemingly more open to the idea that people didn't need a holy policeman) but also seem to provide some insights into how different societies might be more or less condusive to atheism.
In Atheists We Distrust: Scientific American

When people look back on their life in their 30s, 40s and older what are some common regrets they have?

(what follows is a reposting fom Quora, but related is my own blog post on regret HERE) 

QUORA :

From Bradley Voytek, BA in psychology and PhD in neuroscience":

110 votes by Laura Copeland, Emily Altman, Monika Kothari, (more)

In 2011 there was a large, national survey of Americans across all age groups that looked at just this. The paper was called Regrets of the Typical American published by Roese and Morrison in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2...

Here's the main finding, outlined by Vaughan Bell over on the Mind Hacks blog:
http://mindhacks.com/2011/03/27/...


The main sources of regret were, in order:

1. romance
2. family
3. education
4. career
5. finance
6. parenting
7. health
8. "other"
9. friends
10. spirituality
11. community
12. leisure
13. self

They also looked at differences between sexes:

Women, who tend to value social relationships more than men, have more regrets of love (romance, family) compared to men. Conversely, men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets. Those who lack either higher education or a romantic relationship hold the most regrets in precisely these areas.


Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets. Apparently, the more education obtained, the more acute may be the sensitivity to aspiration and fulfillment. Moreover, the youngest and least-educated people in our sample, who most likely possess the greatest capability of fixing their regrets, were indeed the most likely to provide fixable regrets.

Vaughan also has some great insight into this work:

The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.


The difference between the two is often a psychological one, because we can frame the same regret either way – as regret about an action: 'If only I had not dropped out of school'; or as a regret about an inaction: 'If only I had stayed in school'.


Despite the fact that they are practically equivalent, regrets framed as laments about actions were more common and more intense than regrets about inactions, although inaction regrets tended to be longer lasting.

This was the easiest source to find, but from what I recall from psychology courses, for older adults without children, not having a family is the primary regret, which is corroborated by #2 from the larger group in this study.

update 10 April 2011 : 
another related article is Top 5 Regrets of the dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings 
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends 
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

 

Atheism 2.0

I've often felt that even if one doesn't accept the mysterious supernatural tenets of religions, they are such developed and functional institutions that there is a lot to be reclaimed from then. Not only because religions have arisen and persisted because they tap into important elements of our nature, feelings of community and awe etc., but also because they have perfected many techniques that means they can harnass significant power to have an effect (albeit for bad as well as good) on the world. As this lecture discusses, this is in stark contrast to their generally individual and uncoordinated secular counterparts (artists, philosophers, even film makers) who also try to provide comment and guidance about 'higher' things, but often with much less effect.  As de Botton says, there is a lot secular society can learn, and religion is too important to be left to the religious...

TED: Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 - Alain de Botton (2011)

Claiming success....

Interesting survey on country differences on the question of fatalism...or how much success is determined by forces outside our control :

"Just 36 percent of Americans believe in this fatalistic statement, while the vast majority of their compatriots are greater believers in self-determination. Put another way, Americans are (not surprisingly) more likely to believe in the American dream.
Americans with less education are more fatalistic..."


http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/fatalism-and-the-american-dream/

Words with word

Am very interested in the possible influence of the tools we use to write on the writing itself, so an interesting article on Microsoft word:

Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work? | Technology | The Observer

an extract:
But has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing".

Memory, more author than authentic

Interesting article on the narrative nature of memory

The story of the self | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

An extract:
What should we do about this troublesome mental function? For one thing, I don't think we should stop valuing it. Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does.

That's how I think we should value memory: as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. It's important not to push the analogy with storytelling too far, but it's a valuable one.

Work less, so can live more, and more can live

The idea of a shorter working week is something which should be much more discussed. While anathema in our growth based systems, at some stage do need to ask when enough is enough. It's a true point that despite technological advances improving productivity, we work more. Furthermore in times of hardship and unemployment, work sharing would indeed seem like a civilized solution, and one that could be win-win: more free time as a result of helping others, l and an improved society as the social divisions are reduced, surely good?

The fundamental problem is I think psychological. The role of possessions and improvement in our personalities in modern consumer culture is so strong, restricting this would be hard for people to handle, provoking material influenced moral indignation and quandary. But for many reasons it might be time to learn how to work to live, not live to work, and reduced working his might play a role in this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank.

every neural pathway has its silver lining

interesting extract from a book on the hard wired nature of optimism :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/01/tali-sharot-the-optimism-bias-extract

some example points (direct quotes) :

• "Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have evolved for memory alone. Rather, the core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future ? to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events, the researchers claimed. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted."
• "Once people started imagining the future, even the most banal life events seemed to take a dramatic turn for the better."
• "While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price ? the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end. The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future."
• "research shows that most of us spend less time mulling over negative outcomes than we do over positive ones. When we do contemplate defeat and heartache, we tend to focus on how these can be avoided."
• "People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed."
• "According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, we re-evaluate the options post-choice to reduce the tension that arises from making a difficult decision between equally desirable options. True, sometimes we regret our decisions; our choices can turn out to be disappointing. But on balance, when you make a decision ? even if it is a hypothetical choice ? you will value it more and expect it to bring you pleasure. This affirmation of our decisions helps us derive heightened pleasure from choices that might actually be neutral. Without this, our lives might well be filled with second-guessing. Have we done the right thing? Should we change our mind? We would find ourselves stuck, overcome by indecision and unable to move forward."
• "by scanning the brains of people as they process both positive and negative information about the future. The findings are striking: when people learn, their neurons faithfully encode desirable information that can enhance optimism but fail at incorporating unexpectedly undesirable information."
  
  

Attention and the web

Fittingly brief article on attention and technology:
Untangling the web: attention | Technology | The Observer

References a book on the typic, with a collection of pieces from the likes of Steven Pinker etc., but also points out jury is still very much out in terms of hard evidence (at least for the moment).
But I do like her closing comment:
" Over the last year I've insisted again and again that the web is not doing anything to us; that it merely presents us with a mirror that challenges us to face ourselves. The only way we can untangle ourselves from the web is to pay attention to this, and to reflect on what it is, in the 21st century, we do to ourselves and to one another."

I personally don't concur that the web is not doing anything to us, since I think any such significant change in how we organize, evaluate and manage not only our lives but our self and social image, must result in some cognitive changes, just as countless other things do. But I agree with the idea that what really is required to deal with this is not just better analysis and understanding of the technology, but of ourselves as well. As the title of Charlie Brooker's new TV drama  suggests, it is a "black mirror", a glass through which we see ourselves, albeit sometimes darkly.

don't regret regret

Nice little talk on the subject of regret on TED : www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html


I especially liked the phrase 'control-Z culture' (as in ctrl-z, the computer 'undo' command), since there is some truth that in the modern world we do desire, and even expect, to be able to 'undo' mistakes. I think there is a way in which the often awe inspiring 'progress' and development (in technology, science, wealth etc.) which surrounds us leads to the subconcious belief almost that everything is always possible, and nothing is ever permanent, or at least the bad stuff anyway.
 
While such optimism is of course often a good thing, there is an element of immaturity to it, since it means we at some level always appeal to some global 'mother' to come and make things all right again. But the harsh reality of adult life is things happen and stay happened, and maybe our culture is less adept at acknowledging that, and hence dealing with it.

What was also interesting in the talk was the list of areas in which people have the most regrets, with the top 5 being : Eductation (32%),  Career (22%), Romance (15%), Parenting (10%) and Self (5%), and I think this is unsurprising, but also informative, since these, are all domains in which we envisage goals for ourselves, rather than experience them.  We want 'to have' a better education, career, be better parents, as a sort of extension of our selves, but ultimately they are only means to an end - so why not regret the actual ends? Romance may be an exception, since this is something which is perhaps an end in itself (we live relationships, not just have them) , but when viewed as  regret, then maybe it is also rather ethereal and 'idealistic' - since we are wishing for what never was, which might never be as we expect. This I think strikes at a fundamental conflict in our lives - we dream of being certain kinds of people, generic types of levels of career, education, and even partners, but we live as specific individuals. A professor, or a CEO still lives through the daily actions we all do, and it is these actions that ultimately constitute their lives. The higher labels only provide means, not ends.
So I think it is unfortunate that these top our regrets list, because even though we may care about them more, maybe they ultimately matter less, They are about the self image we have of who we want to be,  not who we actually are. Though of course another point is to just dea with the brute fact of this tendency also means we need to consider decisions in these areas much more carefully, since they are the ones which will haunt us, rightly or wrongly. And there is some consolation in that, perversely, the things we fret about most, which might actually have most tangible effect on our lives, the financial worries, the minor social worries, are actually the things we will forget about sooner.
One final point from the talk which is worth mentioning, since forewarned is perhaps forearmed : we regret the things we just miss more than those we had less chance of achieving. Missing a plane by 3 minutes feels worse than missing it by twenty. The reason seems to be that in the closer case, we can imagine how other actions could have made the difference, and this imagination is an important element of regret. Knowing this, maybe we can be more rational and handle it better. As the ctrl-z idea shows, the point is not to banish regret, but to deal with it.

Study indicates no news is really good news, or at least better than FOX news

While it goes without saying that there are serious questions about Fox news' journalistic balance, it could be assumed that even biased opinions on reported events would raise awareness about those events themselves. Unfortunately this might not be the case, as a study by Fairleigh Dickerson University suggests.

In response to questions about middle east events, people who watched FOX news were less able to judge how things had actually turned out, than people with no news source at all.

Since naturally this has prevoked a response (albeit the ones I saw were mainly of the blog with US-flag-and-rattlesnake-logo variety, which does indicate a certain disposition to start with) it is worth checking out the original survey results themselves, available here on the university website.

This should help counter any superficial rejections of the study's methodology. For example, said rattlesnake website claimed that the figures presented didn't show FOX news as the ONLY news source, but only perhaps as one of many. The logic being that then FOX news couldn't be solely blamed. Alas this blogger probably knows less about logic and statistics than actual rattlesnakes, but maybe a simple analogy would help explain the situation. If I put my hand into 3 boxes,  with rabbits and hamsters, rabbits and rattlesnakes, and rabbits, rattlesnakes and hamsters, respectively, and get bitten in the last 2 but not the first, then it doesn't take much of a jump of logic to know which pet not to get my kids.

The main point to be drawn from this is I think not that FOX news is a terrible news source (this is more obvious than the pet question), but that its style of news is not just uninformative, but actually detrimental, which is not something even I would have expected.  More studies would be needed to tease out exactly why this is the case, but several possibilities come to mind.

Overall tone overrides the message
Just as the imagery in adverts etc. can be shown to override any accompanying (and even contradictory) verbal message, it could be the overall tone of FOX news drowns out any factual reporting. Maybe  the average viewer is aware of US diplomatic battles with Syria, and so assumes any revolt against Assad has succeeded (with God, or at least Uncle Sam on their side how could it not?), whereas there is no such preconception informing the Egyptian uprising. Indeed maybe something like Obama's famous speech in Cairo linked him to Egypt, and hence any average FOX-viewer prejudice against him would feed into other questions.

The unmentioned better than the dismissed.
Another possibility is that since things like the Egyptian revolt (successful Islamic overthrow of dictator without foreign intervention) didn't fit the FOX narrative, it was so played down on the channel that its viewers also absorbed a distain and active un-interest in it, and hence were basically purely guessing when asked. People without an admitted, chosen, news source of course don't live in an isolationist bubble, and are still going to be aware indirectly of world events, just by channel surfing, or even seeing news headlines on paper stands etc. So even if they don't actively care, it may still be able to catch their attention momentarily, and thus inform them, raising their chance to answer the question, above chance. I.e. maybe FOX news turns people off certain things, and hence makes them more ignorant.

Suits us, but still means something
Of course, the reason this study has gone viral has to be admitted to be largely to the antipathy and disgust with which most people view FOX news, and so any scientific evidence confirming our opinions is going to be jumped on. But regardless of this, the bottom line is there is statistical evidence to show bad news is worse than no news, and this goes beyond FOX, but ties into the wider debate about how important matters are handled by society.

pink vs. blue, really boys toys?

The famous Hamley's toy store in London has decided to scrap its traditional separation of boys and girls toys and instead arrange the sections by type of toy. Apparently until now some floors were floral and pink for the 'girls stuff', and 'boys toys' were in their own levels , all noise and action.
This has prompted a couple of interesting news articles about what, if any, real gender taste differences there are. The bottom line is it's very hard to be sure either way, since nature and nurture are so intertwined, and initial environmental nudging can result in the same reinforced feedback loops as inate disposition. What does seem likely is there is no genetic female preference for pink (something which makes sense given that in previous times pink was considered a boy's colour!) but there is probably some tendency for boys to prefer vehicles and machines, and girls to prefer more role based toys, such as dolls. As someone with both a daughter and a son I can definitely provide ample supporting anecdotal evidence for this one, but despite this was still impressed recently to see in a documentary that this gender preferene is also visible in chimpanzees, even so far as the more masculine (as indicated by testosterone) the chimp was, the more likely it was to choose a toy car over a doll.
What follows are three articles from the Guardian. 

Pink vs, Blue - the initial piece that caught my attention:


Are pink toys turning girls into passive princesses  - an artcle by Kat Arny who argues against the matter

Out of the blue and into the pink  - by master debunker Ben Goldacre who turns his attention to spurious evolutionary reasonings