Chapter 5 - Genes, Culture, and Gender

Vocabulary:

• Gender: A socially constructed concept of role, behavior, expression, and identity as it can be classified into girl, women, boy, and men

• Sex: Something assigned at birth, refers to the physical differences between people who are typically male/female

• Natural selection: The evolutionary process by which heritable traits that best enable organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environment are passed to ensuing generations

• Nature: Things that influence traits by genetics or very early on experiences

• Nurture: Things that influence traits by environmental influences and life experiences

• Evolutionary psychology: The study of the evolutionary of cognition and behavior using principles or natural selection

• Transgender: Someone whose psychological sense of being male/female differs from their birth sex

• Testosterone: A hormone more prevalent in males than females, linked to dominance and aggression

• Androgynous: Describes something that is both masculine and feminine in nature, shares characteristics

• Culture: The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

• Epigenetics: The study of environmental influences on gene expression that occur without DNA change

• Norm: A standard for accepted and expected behavior, they prescribe ‘proper’ behavior, they are what is considered normal

• Personal space: The buffer zone people like to maintain around physical bodies, size depends on culture and familiarity with whoever is impeding it

• Gender role: A set of behavior expectations for males and females

• Empathy: The vicarious experience of another’s feelings, putting oneself in another’s shoes

• Aggression: Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. In laboratory experiments, could be delivering supposed electrical shocks or saying something likely to hurt another’s feeling

• Interaction: A relationship in which the effect of one factor (such as biology) depends on another factor (such as environment)

• Hostile sexism: Blatant, obvious sexism

• Benevolent sexism: Puts a woman ‘on a pedastle’, women are fragile, delicate, and must stay in the home

Men tend to value power more than women, ranking achievement as more important. Men are also more socially dominant across cultures. These differences are shrinking, though men continue to hold more leadership positions People tend to perceive leaders as having more culturally masculine traits

Differences in self dominance orientation can be explained by feminine self-stereotyping, hostile sexism, and benevolent sexism. For men who were high in benevolent sexism, they were low on SDO. Male SDO was more characterized by the lack of feminine traits as opposed to the presence of male ones

My SDO: 5, 6, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 6, 5 = 37