David Widman

In one of our classes Professor David Widman came in to guest lecture us on how gender effects the thinking process because he is a psychology professor. He used the lab rats that he works with and how the reacted differently to certain situations the help us understand the mind of men and women. He talk about how the reacted to different stimulus and how much it took to push male and female rats to kill their babies. He said that if you put babies in a cage with a male rat he would almost always kill them, however just kill them and not eat them. The mother had to really be pushed to kill her children, she would have to be put under extreme stress and starved. The difference however between the male and the female rats when they killed the babies was everytime a female killed a baby it would eat them to conserve the energy to produce more young at a better time that there was no danger and she thought it would be a safe enviroment to have her young, the males would just kill them! this was a nice way to examine the difference in the thought process regaurding the young with difference to gender