gender bias-

• androcentrism- psychologists and theories that are gender biased are often androcentric, meaning they reflect and support a male-centric view of the world. This bias is because most psychologists who developed these theories were male. This gender imbalance can be seen in the composition of many psychology courses, where male psychologists are referenced more frequently than female psychologists.
• alpha bias- is the assumption that there are significant differences in behaviour between genders, often leading to an overemphasis or exaggeration of these differences between males and females.
• Bowlby's monotropic theory- emphasises the mother's role as crucial in an infant's development more so than the father's role.
• beta bias- the assumption there is no differences in behaviour of males and females, often leading to underestimating or minimising actual behavioural differences
• social influence research with beta bias- milgram's only study- 40 males and only looked at obedience to male authority figures, overlooking potential differences in response to female authority figures
• Another social influence research that included beta bias forms- asch- conformity study was only conducted on male participants
• alpha bias- 'Freud's psychoanalytic theory argues that women develop weaker superegos than men and have 'penis envy', exaggerating differences between men and women,
• if a researcher's study suffers from gender bias, then it can get in the way of said theorist's claim of universality
• bias- a distorted view of the world, gender bias- when a research or theory offers a view that does not justifiably represent the experience or behaviour of men or women (usually women)
• alpha- simplifies the differences into being insignificant
• beta- presents a minimisation of the overall differences in behaviours
• example of beta bias- research into the fight or flight response, early research based on male animals- said to be a 'universal' response to a feared stimulus, more recently, research has shown that a female memeber of a species have evolved biologically to inhibit the fight or flight response, said that instead females have evolved to display more maternal behaviours
• androcentrism- in the past most psychologists were males and most pps in studies were also males, - an example of a male-dominated view of the world, anything deviant is abnormal, may lead to female behaviour being pathologised or misunderstood