Learn about a gender gap in 8-year-olds; how speaking another language can change you; and a monumental dino discovery. Learn about how kids as young as 8 show a gender gap when it comes to negotiating; how speaking another language can change your personality; and what paleontologists can learn from a momentous new discovery of fossilized dinosaur embryos. Kids as young as 8 show a gender gap when it comes to negotiating by Kelsey Donk Children As Young As Eight Show A Gender Gap In Negotiation. (2021, March 11). Research Digest; Research Digest. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/03/11/children-as-young-as-8-show-a-gender-gap-in-negotiation/ Arnold, S. H., & McAuliffe, K. (2021). Children Show a Gender Gap in Negotiation. Psychological Science, 32(2), 153–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620965544 How Speaking Another Language Can Change Your Personality by Ashley Hamer Prentis, N. (2017, March 8). Speaking a foreign language can change your personality. Quartz; Quartz. https://qz.com/925630/feel-more-fun-in-french-your-personality-can-change-depending-on-the-language-you-speak/ Ramírez-Esparza, Nairán, and Adrián García-Sierra. "The bilingual brain: language, culture and identity." The Oxford handbook of multicultural identity (2014): 35-56. https://labclab.psychology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1167/2015/04/Language3.pdf Ramírez-Esparza, N., Gosling, S. D., Benet-Martínez, V., Potter, J. P., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(2), 99–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2004.09.001 Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities. (2014, April 23). The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/117485/multilinguals-have-multiple-personalities Scientists just found a fossilized dino incubating its eggs by Grant Currin Cassella, C. (2021). Jaw-Dropping Fossil Find Contains a Dinosaur Sitting on an Entire Clutch of Eggs. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/fossilized-dinosaur-found-brooding-on-a-nest-of-preserved-eggs-with-actual-embryos-inside Bi, S., Amiot, R., Peyre de Fabrègues, C., Pittman, M., Lamanna, M. C., Yu, Y., Yu, C., Yang, T., Zhang, S., Zhao, Q., & Xu, X. (2020). An oviraptorid preserved atop an embryo-bearing egg clutch sheds light on the reproductive biology of non-avialan theropod dinosaurs. Science Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2020.12.018 Gamillo, E. (2021, March 18). For the First Time, Paleontologists Unearth Fossil of Non-Avian Dinosaur Incubating a Nest of Eggs. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-science/unearthed-dinosaur-fossil-found-incubating-nest-eggs-180977264/ Geggel, L. (2021, March 16). “Rarest of the rare” dinosaur fossil found brooding on its eggs. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/dinosaur-sitting-on-eggs-with-embryos.html Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! You can also listen to our show as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here:https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Learn about a gender gap in 8-year-olds; how speaking another language can change you; and a monumental dino discovery.
Learn about how kids as young as 8 show a gender gap when it comes to negotiating; how speaking another language can change your personality; and what paleontologists can learn from a momentous new discovery of fossilized dinosaur embryos.
Kids as young as 8 show a gender gap when it comes to negotiating by Kelsey Donk
How Speaking Another Language Can Change Your Personality by Ashley Hamer
Scientists just found a fossilized dino incubating its eggs by Grant Currin
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! You can also listen to our show as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/this-dino-was-fossilized-incubating-its-eggs
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how kids as young as 8 show a gender gap when it comes to negotiating; how speaking another language can change your personality; and what paleontologists can learn from a momentous new discovery of fossilized dinosaur embryos.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The world has a stubborn gender pay gap problem, where women consistently make less than men do for the same work. It’s an alarming problem that urgently needs a solution, and, understandably, most of the proposed solutions have involved changing the beliefs and behaviors of adults. Now, a new study suggests that the gap could start to appear in children as young as 8.
Researchers from Boston College and NYU studied 240 children in and around Boston. They worked with boys and girls in a variety of age groups, the littlest between 3 and 4 years old, and the oldest between 8 and 9 years old. The children did a simple task with an experimenter, who then let them select stickers as a reward. The researchers asked the children to decide for themselves how many stickers they deserved for finishing the game they’d just played.
That’s when the negotiation began.
If a child asked for one or two stickers, they got them. But if they asked for more, the experimenter started negotiating. They told the children they were asking for too many stickers and asked them again how many they thought they deserved. About 154 children played hardball with the researcher and kept asking for more than two stickers. These future CEOs moved on to the next phase.
The experimenters told the children that if they asked for more stickers than they could be given, they wouldn’t get any at all. Still, some children asked for more than two. Then, the researchers told them they could only have fewer than three. However many stickers the children asked for next, the experiment ended.
The researchers found that the oldest girls, between 8 and 9 years old, asked for fewer stickers initially if they had a male experimenter. The experimenter’s gender didn’t matter for the younger girls or for any of the boys.
The researchers also found that the older girls were more likely to drop out of the sticker negotiation when they had a male experimenter. Once again, that wasn’t true of anyone else.
The researchers think it’s possible that by the age of 8 or 9, girls think that they have a lower status than men. It’s bleak, but it’s also a wildly important finding. It suggests that work to address the gender gap should start much earlier than previously thought — all the way back in elementary school.
Language goes a lot deeper than communication. Research is showing that the language you speak affects the way you think, from how you make decisions to how you interact with others. In fact, speaking another language can even change your personality.
This idea has been studied a lot, and the results are almost always the same. At the turn of the 21st century, two linguists surveyed more than a thousand bilingual people and found that 65 percent of them felt like a different person when they used a different language. And more recently in 2006, research at the University of Connecticut gave bilingual Spanish and English speakers a test that measured the "Big Five" personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. They found that when participants took the test in English, they scored higher in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than they did when they took the test in Spanish.
These traits lined up with the results of earlier tests the researchers gave monolingual speakers in the U.S. and Mexico, showing there was something about the language that brought out those traits. The researchers think that might be because of cultural differences. English-speaking cultures are more individualistic, and therefore more prone to "self-enhancement," as the researchers put it — which explains the high scores in extraversion and agreeableness. In collectivist cultures like Mexico, there's more of a focus on the communal good than on singing your own praises.
This all points to some fascinating questions. Which one is your "true" personality? If you were born speaking a different language, would you be a different person? One thing is clear: the impact of the language you speak can't be understated. You may think in that language, but that language also changes the way you think.
Paleontologists digging near a railway station in Ganzhou [GAHN-joe], China, have uncovered something incredibly special. It’s the fossilized remains of a dinosaur called an oviraptor [OH-vuh-RAP-ter], PLUS the 24 huge eggs it was sitting on. Even better for scientists, the embryos are at different stages of development!
This is a huge trove of information that paleontologists will analyze for decades. It’s the first time researchers have ever found the fossil of a dinosaur that was sitting on top of eggs containing embryos, and it’s already yielding some pretty big surprises.
Oviraptors looked a lot like ostriches. They were mostly carnivorous and walked on two legs, just like fellow therapods Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. The researchers can infer from the surrounding layers of rock that this parent and its brood died about 70 million years ago.
The researchers could tell from oxygen isotopes in the fossils that the eggs were kept near the parent’s body temperature. That suggests the adult was incubating the eggs, not just guarding the nest the way crocodiles do. The most mature eggs were almost ready to hatch, which strongly suggests the adult had invested a lot of time and energy into keeping them safe and warm. All of that makes this the first hard evidence that dinosaurs were brooding parents!
Paleontologists haven’t been able to agree on the sex of the adult, but it wouldn’t be a big surprise if it turns out to be a male. Research on nests from other species of therapod suggests that males provided some care, and modern ostriches take turns parenting.
At least seven of the eggs contain fossilized remains of embryos. The biggest ones are about the size of a NERF football. It looks like one of them contains the tiny, curled-up skeleton of an oviraptor that was just about to hatch.
The researchers aren’t sure why some of the embryos are so much more developed than others. Most modern birds deliberately wait until all the eggs are laid before they start incubating. That causes the babies to hatch at about the same time. Some species start incubating right away, leading to the staggered hatching the poor oviraptor was probably expecting. But researchers think that adaptation evolved much more recently. One possibility is that eggs closer to the adult developed more quickly because they were warmer.
These new findings are exciting, but they’re really just scratching the surface. The real news is the fossil itself, which is destined to slowly reveal secrets to generations of paleontologists yet to come.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Ashley Hamer, and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. That’s non-negotiable. Wait, am I allowed to say that?
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!