Social Influences as Explanations of Gender
- Created by: rhallett
- Created on: 21-09-15 18:11
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- Social Influences as Explanations of Gender
- Gender is something learned from the environment
- Operant Conditioning; Parents & Peers
- Gender approp. behaviour is rewarded, thus repeated - cross gender play is criticised/ punished
- Process begins from v. young ag; gradually shapes child's gender; inc. things like toys and clothes
- Evidence
- Lytton & Romney - meta analysis - 27k children - boys and girls encouraged to do different activites; boys outdoors and girls domestic
- Massive sample was used thus much data collected
- Durkin - peers are more important in shaping gender than parents - children as young as 3 criticised cross gender play
- Smith & Lloyd - Baby X - people treated babies on the basis of their gender - if a girl (given fem. name and clothes) people talk in more soothing way and are less physically stimulating
- Differential reinforcement may generally shape gender
- Lytton & Romney - meta analysis - 27k children - boys and girls encouraged to do different activites; boys outdoors and girls domestic
- Social Learning Theory; Albert Bendura
- Occurs when children are exposed to role models which they observe and imitate; highly selective and in choosing dominant and powerful ones to imitate
- More likely to imitate those whose behaviour is rewarded - Vicarious reinforcement
- Media; TV is full of gender stereotypes - Evidence
- Canadian remote town - Notel; no TV - compared with town that had number of channels - Multitel - Notel had fewer stereotypes - After Notel got TV, children developed more stereotypes
- Measured using questionnaire
- Morgan - children who watch more TV have more gender sterotypes
- Correlation does not equal causation; other factors involved
- Natural experiment; low levels of control
- Canadian remote town - Notel; no TV - compared with town that had number of channels - Multitel - Notel had fewer stereotypes - After Notel got TV, children developed more stereotypes
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