There could be all sorts of explanations for the results in this study--a study which is probably made invalid by the minuscule scope of the experiment--but I'd like to point out that women (at least in our own subculture--I can't speak to the others) are infamous for their emotional cruelty toward and manipulation of others.

Both genders seem to be willing to inflict pain on one another in certain circumstances. A willingness to deliver shocks to someone from whom one is far-removed--meaning that 1-"it's not 'personal,'" and 2-that the person who is giving the shocks is not putting him/herself in harm's way, reprisal-wise--has a different quality to the cruelty, however: It's in an entirely different category than cruelty/violence that is "personal."

So the question remains as to whether this type of cruelty is inherent to males-in-general or whether there has been some mediating cultural influence to a perhaps-inborn tendency, namely video games (boys seem to prefer graphically-violent video games to a far greater extent than girls do). I'd imagine that if one has been playing this type of video game for a while that 1-it desensitizes one to cruelty/violence and 2-it conditions one to dissociate oneself from cruel/violent actions by giving them an unreal, "cartoonish" aura. How much difference is there between blowing up a realistic-looking character on a screen and pushing a button to "shock" someone who is on the other side of a one-way window?

Even if you were to look back a few generations ago--to the time when my parents were growing up--there seemed to be gender-based differences in the nature of cruelty/violence. From what my father told me, fighting between boys on school grounds was a widely-accepted part of growing up. The school administrators never attempted to intervene, no angry parents threatened any principals when their sons came home with black eyes and bloody noses...it was simply accepted that males had some inherent need to establish a social "pecking order," and that this was done through a series of informal fistfight contests. Given that that sort of behavior will get one expelled from school nowadays, this type of violence seems to have been sublimated into the sort of violent video games that are overwhelmingly more-popular with boys than with girls. And what about the girls (and women)? Nothing much seems to have changed over the generations, aside from the birth of the (not-all-that-widely-accepted and somewhat-radical) notion that "Sisterhood Is Powerful." Not to be sexist, but the stereotype of females-in-general having more-advanced social skills than males-in-general has been long-accepted as true. Given females' greater ability to empathize, it gives the girls/women power to intuit what sort of words and actions would be the most effective when the goal is to "get [a rival] where it hurts."

If one can conclude anything from such a limited study, it might not be that men are inherently more-cruel than women but that there may be a greater tendency toward "impersonal" cruelty in men than in women.

OK, I stand by what I wrote.

However, what I wrote had to do with an entirely different experiment that I'd read about some years previously--one in which people anonymously gave others "shocks."

So, although I read the article and fully-understood it, I experienced a sort of "brain blip," and had a mental picture of a similar-but-qualitatively-different experiment when I addressed the issue of male vs. female cruelty. I do this sort of thing once in a while. I call it "contextual dyslexia". It's very embarrassing when I do it publicly.