SLT applied to gender: evaluation

• not generalisable because the sample of the study was only limited to children aged 3-6 year olds from the same nursery

  • meaning we cannot be sure that all children learn gender behaviours in the same way
• Further support for the SLT - a study by PERRY and BUSSEY (1979)

  • showed children aged 8-9 yrs videoclips of older boys and girls models picking fruit: boys were seen picking an apple and girls a pears.

  They found that children tended to pick the same fruit as the one of their same sex models, showing a preference for imitating the same-sex model.

  However, the problem with these studies is that they lack ecological validity as they are based on highly controlled experiments so we cannot establish whether children imitate same sex models in real life.
• However, research supports the important role that socialisation plays on the acquisition of gender-related behaviour:

  SMITH and LLOYED (1978) found that babies are treated differently according to whether they are perceived to be male or female: those perceived as boys are encouraged to be physically active, and girls are held closer and given dolls to play with.
• Research also suggests that boys are more likely to be more positively reinforced than girls for playing with construction toys such as Lego (FAGOT and HAGAN, 1991) and ridiculed by peers when playing with ‘girl’ toys.

  Showing that reinforcement plays a critical influence on how children direct their gender-appropriate behaviour
• SLT has difficulty in explaining the finding that young vervet monkeys show the same gender preferences in choice of toys that humans do: males chose to play with a car and females preferred to play with a doll (ALEXANDER abd HINES 2002). It is highly unlikely that these preferences could have been learnt through observation of role models and perhaps due to biological / evolutionary influences, which SLT ignores
• The case of David Reimer  also demonstrates that biology may have greater influence on our gender behaviour than socialisation – despite being socialised as a girl, David chose to return to his biological gender in later life.

  This suggests that we cannot rely only on socialisation as an explanation of gender but rather we should consider a variety of contributing factors in order to appreciate its complexity