What The “Boys Alone, Girls Alone” Social Experiment Shows Us About Femininity

The boys drew on the walls and broke furniture. The girls made a chore chart. Most recent commentary on the experiment suggests that the difference between the two houses comes from social conditioning, not innate differences between the sexes. Impact’s coverage asked, “Why do we socialize girls to be more responsible than boys? Why are we still hesitant to elect women to positions of power?” Does this mean that the differences between the two houses can be totally explained away by social pressure?

A Real Life Lord of the Flies?

Despite being compared to The Lord of the Flies, the experiment lacked both a plane crash and a deserted island. Instead, 10 boys aged 11-12 were placed in a large house in southern England for a period of 5 days. The house was stocked with toys, games, and more than enough food and snacks, and importantly, the boys were given cooking classes before the experiment began in case they wanted to make use of the kitchen. The experiment was then replicated identically with 10 girls of the same age, with shockingly different results. 

The boys’ house quickly devolved into something resembling the Lost Boys of Neverland, and some parents say they now regret allowing their sons to partake, questioning the age appropriateness of the experiment. The boys ate cereal and soda instead of cooking, made a mess of the house, and even targeted one boy, tying him to a chair in the backyard. They overturned most of the furniture to make forts and divided into separate factions, battling and throwing things at one another. As one former participant, now an adult, describes: "I was psyched up for a fun time when I walked in. There was a massive banner above the stairs saying there were no rules and inflatable chairs full of sweets. The cupboards were full of pot noodles and water pistols. But soon, I realized it was going to be horrible. We'd descended into hell."

In contrast, the girls’ house mostly resembled an extended sleepover. They divided up chores with a chore chart, prepared group meals, and planned out cooking duties. Beyond just caring for themselves, they also organized a DIY beauty salon to cheer up a girl who was sad, took showers before bed, and even cleaned the house before leaving.

Nature, Nurture, and Neurology

At first glance, it would be easy to assume, as many have, that these small snapshots into gender differences offer insight into how our culture conditions men and women to be more or less responsible. One user commenting on Impact’s coverage mentions, “There is such an obvious disconnect between how boys and girls are raised and it's getting dangerous.” Another said the experiment “demonstrates how men are socialized to expect somebody else to do domestic labor for them, while women are socialized to take it on themselves.” But is this really a fair way to extrapolate an example focused on children?

Our cultural understandings of gender norms often start with developmental differences between boys and girls that are biological, not social, in nature. The fact that the girls in the study focused on art and makeup while the boys rode bikes and flipped furniture tracks with the fact that girls develop fine motor skills more quickly, and boys have the advantage in gross motor skills. Pediatric neurology also supports that boys’ brains develop in favor of things like physical aggression and risk-taking, providing greater reward for impulsivity.

Age Isn’t Just a Number

A lot of the aggressive and impulsive behavior the boys displayed can be explained by the participants’ ages. Girls’ brains develop more quickly than boys’ brains do, with the biggest difference being in adolescence with the development of the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain which manages things like impulse control. The prefrontal cortex develops between 1-2 years earlier in girls than in boys, so comparing 11 and 12-year-old boys and girls is comparing prefrontal cortexes that actually have an age gap. 

The way kids act in two different stages of development isn’t indicative of how they are when they mature. Now grown, many of the boys say they are ashamed of their behavior. "It was mayhem and became depressing as the house divided into the two gangs, and war broke out. The place was trashed, and I'm ashamed to say that I even turned into a bit of a hooligan,” one mentions, now an adult.

Final Thoughts on the Feminine Touch

Impulse control aside, it’s safe to say that the differences between these groups of boys and girls weren’t just the result of maturity differences. Rather, the experiment validates a lot of what we already know regarding how differently boys and girls interact with the world from a young age in terms of risk-seeking behavior and social dynamics. Whether because of neurological development or differences even science can’t yet understand, it’s clear that while boys might catch up in maturity, the two genders are naturally just different beasts.

If boys and girls were the same apart from social conditioning, placing them in these unsupervised conditions should have encouraged the girls to let loose and go just as crazy as the boys. Instead, we saw what young femininity looks like: getting organized, keeping clean, and some bestie breakups and makeups. Rather than seeing the experiment as a validation of the idea that femininity is just a social construct, perhaps we should see it as a rebuttal.

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