Martin and Halverson (1983)

aim

to see the impact of gender schema theory on a child’s ability to recall information that was not consistent with their gender schema

sample

48 kindergarten children, equal boys and girls

method

true lab

procedure

• a test to see their gender schema

• shown 16 images of boys and girls doing activities in line or inconsistent with their gender schema: asked to identify gender, not told they would need to remember the images

  a week later

• asked about what they remember with probed recall

• asked about 24 images, hadn’t seen 8 to control for response bias

• asked “do you remember seeing something doing (activity) in the pictures i showed you last week?”

• asked if person was a man, women, girl, boy or i dont remember

• asked to rate their certainty on a four point scale

results

• children experienced greater memory distortion when the images were inconsistent with their gender schema, for example they’d remember a girl holding a hammer as a boy

• experienced less memory distortion and were more confident in answers when aligned with gender schema theory

conclusion

supports the theory that stereotypes affect both the encoding and retrieval of information and are influenced by gender schemas. asked to identify sex of person in picture in first phase, children sometimes made errors that made the sex consistent with gender stereotypes shows distortion in encoding and error in recall of information

strengths

• highly standardised so easily replicable

• avoided forced responses of “boy“ or “girl“ and gave children five choices to choose from

limitations

• low ecological validity as it is very artificial and controlled, may not reflect how information is processed in real world

• score from test for schema theory was not correlated with memory distortion, leads us to question how schemas were operationalised in the study