Gender and culture

• Gender bias

  when one gender is treated less favourably than the other
• Alpha bias

  • differences between men and women are exagerated
  • often devalue women in relation to males
  • e.g. Freuds psychosexual development (phallic stage) - both develop a desire for the opposite sex-parent, the boy creates a very strong castration anxiety. The anxiety is resolved when the boy identifies with his father, but a girls eventual identification with her same-sex parent is weaker, meaning her superego is weaker, suggesting girls are morally inferior to boys
• beta bias

  • differences between men and women are minimised
  • when we assume research findings apply equally to both sexes even when females have been excluded from the research
  • e.g. fight or flight, biological research has favoured using male animals because female behaviour is affected by regular hormonal changes due to ovulation (ignores any possible differences) , assumes both males and females respond to threatening situations with fight or flight.
• Androcentrism

  • alpha and beta bias are consequences of androcentrism
  • psychology has presented a male dominated version of the world
  • taking male thinking as normal and regarding female thinking as abnormal when it differs from the view of a male
  • female behaviour, if considered, has been misunderstood and pathologised - taken as a sign of illness
• positives of alpha bias

  • healthy criticism of cultural values that praise certain male qualities such as agression
• negatives of alpha bias

  • can sustain prejudices and stereotypes
• positives of beta bias

  • makes people see men and women as the same, leading to equal treatment in legal terms
• negatives of beta bias

  • draws attention away from the differences in power between men and women
• Culture bias

  • cultures may differ from one another in many ways
  • one view in one culture may not directly apply to another culture
  • can occur when a researcher assumes that an emic construct is actually etic
• Emic construct

  • one that is applied only to one cultural group
• Etic construct

  • behaviour is universal to all cultures
• Ethnocentrism

  • occurs when a researcher assumes that their own culturally specific practices are natural or right
  • uses their own ethnic group to evaluate and make judgment about other groups
  • e.g. strange situation, criticised for only reflecting the norms and values of American culture, misinterpretation of child rearing practices in other countries
• Cultural relativism

  • distinction between etic and emic approaches
  • epic approach looks at behaviour from outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal, an epic approach functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviour that are specific to that culture
  • principle of regarding beliefs and values of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself
  • e.g. ainsworths and bells research is an imposed epic - they studied behaviour inside one culture (America) and they assumed their ideal attachment type could be applied universally
• evaluation of gender Bias

  • one limitation is that gender differences are often presented as fixed and enduring when they are not
  • maccoby and Jacklin presented findings of several gender studies which concluded girls have superior verbal ability whereas boys have better spatial ability. they suggest these differences are "hardwired" into the brain before birth.
  • their research was popularised because it fitted existing stereotypes of girls as "speakers" and boys as "doers".
  • promotes sexism in the research process as women are underrepresented.
• evaluation of culture bias

  • one limitation is many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally bias such as Asch and milgram.
  • one strength is the emergence of cultural psychology - incorporates work from researchers in other disciplines and strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions.