Psych and Gender: The self and family

exam 2

Preferential Looking

infants are shown two stimuli at the same time and are measured on which object they look at longer (female/male face)

How is preferential looking used to investigate infants’ understanding of gender categories?

By 6 months, infants can distinguish between male and female faces but when cultural cues are removed (facial hair, accessories, hair) they cannot distinguish between males and females

Habituation

infants noticing if the stimuli has changed

• male face is shown until children are “habituated”

• changed from male face to female face to see if infants look longer

Sequential Touching

demonstrates an infants categorization skills of objects and faces

How is sequential touching used to investigate infants’ understanding of gender categories?

Until 22 months: categorization skills limited to different levels (animals vs vehicles) but not same level (horses, cows, male/female dolls)

What are the ages at which children develop an understanding of gender categories?

by 2-3 years old, children are able to categorize self and others into gender categories (boy and girl)

Essentialism

The belief that members of a category share an inherent, non-obvious property (essence) that confers identity and causes other category-typical properties to emerge

• Gender essentialism: all women (or men) share underlying features (psychological) that are innate

Switched-at-birth task

Study done where child of one sex raised by individuals of the other sex (ages 4-10) are asked about

• Stereotyped qualities

• Biological qualities

• control questions (does the girl go to school with girls on the island?)

What do the results from the studies with swithced-at-birth task show about essentialism?

All children matched biological qualities to biological sex

• Before age 9: children attributed stereotyped qualities to biological sex

• Children have strong essentialist beliefs until age 8

Gender constancy

Understanding that gender is a stable, unchanging characteristic

Kohlberg’s Phases

1. Self-labeling: children’s abilities to identity themselves as boys or girls (previously known as gender identity), develops at 2-3 years old

2. Gender stability: understanding the lasting nature of gender, develops at 4-5 years old

3. Gender consistency (constancy): gender is unchanged even with changes in appearance, develops at 6-7 years old

What is Sandra Bem’s criticism of Kohlberg’s methods for his three-stage theory and when it develops?

• Argued that the tasks used were unnecessarily difficult

• Bem’s method shows thaat children start showing gender consistency (constancy) by age 3

Information Processing

How we attend to, encode, and remember environmental stimuli such as events, pictures, or stories

Bottom-up processing

Data-driven, perception directs cognition

Top-down processing

Perception is constructed by cognition

Gender-differentiated attention

By age 2, only boys are more likely to imitate culturally masculine actions (i.e building a house) than a feminine action (i.e cracking an egg and cooking it)

• By preschool (4-5 years) children show greater interest in novel objects described as for their gender than objects labeled for the other gender

How do errors of encoding relate to gender-atypical behavior?

When identifying the sex of actors in pictures, 84% of errors occur on pictures depicting a person in a gender-atypical activity

How do people tend to remember gender-role-consistent vs gender-role-inconsistent information?

Children are better at remembering own-sex info than other-sex info

• Children are more likely to remember gender-typical info than gender-atypical info and to distort gender-atypical info

• Exception: strong violation of male gender norms

Cognitive errors

Errors in our thought processes

• Categorizing people into social groups by race, gender, socioeconomic status

What are some of the cognitive errors that people commit with respect to gender and categories and roles?

Categorization by gender leads to

• Exaggerating contrast between men and women: attributing individual differences to gender

• Overusing the normative male

• Making biased judgements: judging competence based on gender

• Remembering gender-consistent information: makes changing stereotypes harder

• Applying stereotypes to ourselves: self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotype threat

How parents contribute to children’s gendered world: subtle preferences

• Choice of clothing

• Choice of room decoration

• Choice of toys

How parents contribute to children’s gendered world: gendered names

• Boys names are more traditional

• Trends more common in girls name

• Boys are more likely to be named after a parent or relative

• Boys names that are adopted for girls end up being girls name

• Parents see boys in a more traditional way and are uncomfortable with unusual names for boys especially feminine sounding ones

How parents contribute to children’s gendered world: choice of activities

Parents choose gendered activities for boys and girls

• Emphasis on sports involvement for boys more than girls and believe that boys have more athletic ability: parents views of athletic ability affect children’s performance

• Gendered behavior/interests and avoidance of feminine activities encouraged

How parents contribute to children’s gendered world: academics

Parents often hold stereotypes about children’s competence in academic fields

• Expectations of child’s ability tend to follow from their own gender stereotypes

• Expectations affect children’s perceptions of their own ability even more than actual grades

How does parents anxiety about math relate to their kids anxiety and performance?

1st and 2nd graders completed math/reading tests and parents completed measure of math anxiety/extent of homework help

• Results: children’s performance is affected by parents’ math anxiety when parents help a lot with homework

How parents contribute to children’s gendered world: chores

Parents assign gendered chores to boys and girls

• Girls are assigned more chores than boys

• Gendered chore assignment depends on sibling composition in family, parents own gender-role attitudes (whether father does chores), and if mother is employed

How parents treat their children differently: judging newborns

New parents asked to rate their babies on 18 adjective pairs (strong-weak, big-little)

• Babies physical characteristics measured and were not found different (weight, length, health)

• Daughters rated by mom/dad as softer, finer-featured, little, more inattentive

• Sons rated by mom/dad firm, larger featured, better coordinated, more alert, stronger, hardier

• Similar trends persist today

How parents treat their children differently: crawling ability

Parents are asked to judge their 11 month old ability to crawl down an inclined ramp

• Mothers estimated boys would be able to crawl steeper ramps than girls

• There was no actual crawling difference between boys/girls

• Parents have gendered expectations from the start, initially these don’t have any effect on children but later on they do

How parents treat their children differently: play patterns

When present in a playroom with toys, parents (especially fathers) are more likely to choose gendered toys for boys and girls

• Parents respond positively when children choose gender-typical toys

How parents treat their children differently: socialization of emotions

• Parents enforce emotion control more in young boys except for anger

• Anger more acceptable from boys which causes parents give in to demands of boys more than girls

• Parents more tolerant of vulnerable emotions (fear, sadness) from girls

• Parents discuss emotions more with girls than boys (except anger) and focus on relationships with others

• Parents talk to girls more than boys and are more supportive

• Parents more likely to discuss academics with boys and friends/relationships with girls

How parents treat their children differently: reactions to behaviors

When children engage in risky behavior, parents more likely to intervene to prevent harm if it’s a girl

• Parents believe that risky behavior is inevitable for boys and permit more autonomy/independence

• Parents more likely to engage in physical play with sons and quieter pretend play with daughters

How parents treat their children differently: spending patterns

Family spending patterns differ slightly in families with daughters only or sons only

• Daughter only: more money spent on clothing (short-term spending)

• Son only: more money spent on housing (long-term investment, better school choices)

• Choices reflect parents expectations of their children: importance on appearance for girls and academic success for boys

How parents treat their children differently: spending time

Gauthier et al studied time spent by parents with their children in 16 industrialized countries

• Time spent with children increased over time for mothers and fathers

• Mothers spent significantly more time than fathers even when they were employed

• Homemaker mothers: 3.4 hours per day

• Working mothers: 2.2 hours

• Fathers: 1.2 hours

Why do fathers spend less time with children than mothers do?

Men earn more on average which makes sense for fathers to work more to provide for family

• Men socialized to care less about children and nuturing

• Gatekeeping: mothers see themselves are predominantly responsible for children and they keep fathers less involved

Aka pygmies in Africa

Fathers spend lots of time with children, interacting with them and caring for them almost as much as mothers

• Men are not innately inclined to avoid children

• Providing food is a collaborative activity for men and women

• When men are not main breadwinners they can spend more time with children

How parents model gendered behavior: interactions with children

• Young children: mothers more likely to be caretakers and fathers are playmates

• Mothers tend to be more involved in children’s lives and know more details

• Interaction style: mothers tend to be more responsive/comforting, fathers more authoritarian/less flexible

Nontraditional families

Parents who are commited to equality of parenting and feminism

• Children learn gender labels and toy stereotypes later than average

• Children have less stereotyped interests and more flexible attitudes about roles in the family and workplace

• Girls don’t show decline in math performance in middle/high school

Nontraditional families: single-parent families

• Parent is observed doing variety of tasks that don’t follow gender norms

• Some studies show that children are less stereotypical and more flexible

• Other studies (especially of single-mother families) show average stereotyping levels

Nontraditional families: gay & lesbian parents

• Gay parents less likely to have custody of children from previous heterosexual relationship and gay couples less likely to form families

• Lesbian mothers have parenting behaviors similar to heterosexual mothers

• Having 2 mothers means more involvement and knowledge

How does the sibling composition relate to children’s intersts?

• Girls with (older) brothers have more masculine interests

• Boys with olders sisters have more feminine interests initially but then have more masculine interests than boys w/o sisters as they get older

How does the sibling composition affect math performance and verbal performance?

• Having a brother improves math performance of boys/girls

• Having a sister improves verbal performance of boys

• Firstborns achieve at a higher level than later-born children

• Younger sisters of older brothers are notably disadvantaged