According to Freud, because women will not experience castration anxiety, their superego & their sense of morality is not as strong as it is for males.
Issue - this biew could have reinforced discriminatpry policies againdt women, whivh affected decisions about women's rights to vote.
Criticism - many of Freud's theories have little evidence to support them and they were create using introspection on himself.
More recent psychologists i.e. Gilligan, suggests that women have a 'care orientation' to theirmoral reasoning, whereas men have a 'justice orientation'. Her research suggested that men & women have different types of moral reasoning.
In conclusion, Freud's views showed alpha bias, because they suggest that castration anxiety is very important in moral development. Clearly this is a very endrocentric point of view.
Since Freud's theories were first put forward, psychology has moved away for such views.
1 of 4
Depression:
Different rates of depression were explain in terms of hormonal imbalances in women - post-natal, menopausal and pre-menstrual depression, reason why women are twice as likely to get depression.
However, now apparent that women are much more likely than men to seek help and talk about their feelings - account for some of the difference. Men use distravtions like alcohol to deal with their mood state, they're four times as likely to commit suiciide, they may never receive a diagnosis of depresion.
Biological explanations may also ignore differences in social roles E.G. pregnancy, and child-rearing which could also explain why women are more likely to experience depression than men i.e. if men had to deal with those responsilbities, might be more susceptible to depression.
However, recent explanations suggest that it is a combination of biological and situaional factors - diathesis stress explanation. Such theories acknowledge that biological factors may contribute to depression but that environmental triggers are also important.
In conclusion, biological explanations may show beta bias - ignoring differences in the social roles of men & women and ignoring how they deal with their emotional problems. However, more recen theories take account of the different social roles and pressures that men & women face. Thereforem explanations of such disorders seem to be less prone to gender bias than they were in the past.
2 of 4
Historically:
Historically, in psycholgoical research there has been a male perspective as to what the norms of behaviour are. This has led to a bias, with a male behaviour being considered to be more desirable.
However, female-centered psychology is now on the rise to counteract this endocentric view. Some psychological research has only used male participants & then generalised to both genders. This is likely to lead to beta bias because differences between genders are being ignored.
However, some researchers E.G. Milgram have been criticised for using only males in his original research, he and others went on to look at obedience in females.
3 of 4
Conclusion:
Gender bias may also arise as a consequence of the lack of females carrying out research in psychology because research has been historically dominated by males, females may be less visible.
Over the last few decades, the number of females going on to study psychology has dramatically increased.
While gender bias is an on-going problem in psychology, feminist psychologists have a valuable role to play in reducing gender bias and drawing attention to sources of bias and under-researched areas in psychology. However, the extent of gender bias in psychology is probably less than in society in general.
Comments
No comments have yet been made