Psychology and Women's Studies: Gender Development, Stereotypes, Power, and Cognitive Differences

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering cognitive aptitudes, power dynamics, ambivalent sexism, gender stereotyping, and developmental gender socialization theories.

Cognitive Ability

Mental skills, such as paying attention, reasoning, remembering, solving problems, speaking, and interpreting speech.

General Mental Ability ($g$)

The general capacity to understand ideas, think abstractly, reason, solve problems, and learn, originally conceptualized by Spearman in the early 1900s.

Visual-Spatial Performance

Cognitive skills that help individuals understand relationships between objects and navigate three-dimensional space, including mental rotation, trajectory estimation, and remembering object locations.

Mental Rotation

A visual-spatial ability requiring individuals to mentally rotate two- or three-dimensional objects, showing a sex difference favoring men ($d = 0.47$ to $0.73$) that appears in infancy.

Spatial Perception

The ability to determine spatial relationships with respect to the orientation of one's own body in the environment (e.g., Piaget's Water Level Task), exhibiting a small male advantage in childhood ($d = 0.33$) that increases to a moderate advantage in adulthood ($d = 0.48$).

Spatial Location Memory

The ability to remember where objects are located in space, which shows a small female advantage ($d = -0.27$) often linked to ancestral foraging activities.

Greater Male Variability Hypothesis

The hypothesis that men exhibit greater variability than women in their distribution of scores on cognitive performance measures, resulting in more men scoring at the highest and lowest extremes.

Stereotype Threat

The anxiety individuals feel when they are concerned that their behavior or performance might confirm a negative group stereotype, which disrupts working memory and impairs test performance.

Patriarchy

A social structure in which men constitute the dominant group holding primary power and privilege.

Matriarchy

A social structure in which women constitute the dominant group holding primary power and privilege.

Matrilineal

A kinship and inheritance system in which descent and property are passed through the mother's kinship line.

Patrilineal

A kinship and inheritance system in which descent and property are passed through the father's kinship line.

Matrilocal

A cultural residential arrangement where married couples live near the wife's family.

Patrilocal

A cultural residential arrangement where married couples live near the husband's family.

Structural Power

Power that shapes how societies operate and determines which groups of people have access to resources, education, autonomy, and jobs.

Dyadic Power

The capacity to choose and control intimate partners and close personal relationships.

Force

The capacity to inflict physical or psychological harm on another individual as a means of exerting power.

Resource Control

Controlling the creation or distribution of essential and desirable goods and opportunities within a society.

Cultural Ideologies

Shared sets of beliefs and assumptions about groups that explain and justify unequal social hierarchies and power distributions.

Androcentrism

The practice of defining men and their experiences as the universal human norm while treating women and their experiences as deviations from that norm.

Ethnocentrism

The practice of viewing the dominant ethnic group as universal and treating other ethnic groups as deviations from the norm.

Heterocentrism

The practice of treating heterosexual people and experiences as universal and viewing sexual minority groups as deviations from the norm.

Double Jeopardy Hypothesis

The hypothesis stating that individuals belonging to two or more marginalized groups experience more total discrimination than individuals belonging to only one marginalized group.

Intersectional Invisibility Hypothesis

The hypothesis that the experiences of people with multiple subordinate-group identities are neglected or ignored because they do not fit the prototypical templates of either group.

Ambivalent Sexism Theory

A theoretical framework proposing that gender relations are characterized by two distinct but complementary attitudes: hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.

Hostile Sexism

An antagonistic and derogatory set of beliefs about women, especially directed toward women who challenge traditional roles or seek power.

Benevolent Sexism

A subjectively positive and chivalrous set of attitudes that characterizes women as pure, caring, and needing male protection, which ultimately keeps women subservient.

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

A measure of an individual's preference for inequality and status hierarchy between social groups, where higher scores reflect belief that group hierarchies are fair and natural.

Microaggressions

Common, everyday verbal, behavioral, or environmental insults and indignities directed toward members of marginalized social groups.

Attributional Ambiguity

Difficulty in attributing negative treatment specifically to discrimination when plausible alternative explanations for the treatment are present.

Pluralistic Ignorance

The erroneous assumption that no one else thinks an episode was severe because no one else is actively speaking up or confronting it.

Diffusion of Responsibility

The tendency of individuals not to take action when others are present because of the assumption that someone else will act.

Gender Stereotypes

Overgeneralized and often inaccurate beliefs about the traits, role behaviors, physical characteristics, and occupations of males and females.

Communion

A core dimension of personality and stereotypes centered on warmth, connectedness, generosity, kindness, and relationship maintenance, typically associated with women.

Agency

A core dimension of personality and stereotypes centered on competence, intelligence, assertiveness, and competitiveness, typically associated with men.

Stereotype Content Model

A model proposing that stereotypes about social groups fall along two primary dimensions: warmth (communion) and competence (agency).

Women Are Wonderful Effect

The tendency for people to view stereotypes about women more positively than stereotypes about men, specifically applying to women who are White, middle/upper-class, and conform to traditional gender roles.

Prototype

The most typical or representative cognitive exemplar of a category, serving as the cultural default for representing a social group.

Status Incongruity Hypothesis

The assumption that gender role-violating women are viewed negatively because they appear overly dominant, while gender role-violating men are viewed negatively because they appear low in status.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A process through which a perceiver's initial expectation about a target influences their actions, prompting the target to respond in ways that confirm the initial expectation.

Direction Accuracy

An aspect of stereotype accuracy evaluating whether people correctly identify which sex group is higher or lower on a given trait or ability.

Discrepancy Accuracy

An aspect of stereotype accuracy evaluating how close or far the perceived size and direction of a sex difference is relative to actual empirical data.

Gender Socialization

The developmental process by which children learn gendered expectations, values, and roles from models such as parents, siblings, peers, and media.

Social Learning Theories of Gender Development

Theories emphasizing that children learn gendered beliefs, behaviors, and preferences by observing and imitating social models and through direct reinforcement and punishment.

Sex Typing

The process by which children become aware of their gender and adopt the values, attributes, and behaviors considered culturally appropriate for members of that sex.

Cross-Sex Behavior

Behaviors, activities, or play preferences strongly associated with a sex group other than an individual's own assigned sex.

Gender Identity (Gender Labeling)

The initial stage of Kohlberg's theory (ages $2\text{--}3$) where children can label themselves and others as boys or girls, but view gender as alterable by superficial appearance changes.

Gender Stability

The second stage of Kohlberg's theory (ages $4\text{--}5$) where children understand that gender remains stable over time, but still believe external appearance or activity changes can alter sex.

Gender Constancy

The final stage of Kohlberg's theory (ages $6\text{--}7$) involving the full cognitive appreciation of the permanence of gender over time and across different situations or external transformations.

Gender Schema Theory

A cognitive developmental theory proposing that children develop organized cognitive frameworks (schemas) about gender that guide what information they notice, process, and retain.

Gender Schematic

Describing an individual who frequently uses gender as a salient cognitive schema to filter information, interpret events, and make decisions.

Gender Aschematic

Describing an individual who rarely uses gender as a salient framework or cognitive schema for processing information about the social world.

Biased-Interaction Theory

Milton Diamond's ($2006$) developmental theory positing that children compare their internal sense of self (preferences and predispositions) to the traits of boys and girls to construct their gender identity.

Motherhood Mandate

The cultural expectation that all women should have children and devote substantial time and energy to nurturing and raising them.

Hegemonic Masculinity

A culturally idealized form of manhood characterized by dominance, aggression, competition, emotional toughness, success, and the total avoidance of femininity.

Precarious Manhood Hypothesis

The theory proposing that manhood is an earned and elusive social status that is difficult to achieve, easily lost, and demands continuous public validation through risky or masculine action.

Double Standard of Aging

The social reality wherein women's perceived social value declines more rapidly with age due to decreases in physical attractiveness, whereas men's status and value often increase or remain stable.