Gender bias

    Cards (10)

    • Issue:
      • Ongoing causes for concern within the field of psychology
    • Debate:
      • Two conflicting ideas about how to study human behaviour
    • Universality:
      Any characteristic's that is capable of being applied to all
      e.g emotions (facial expressions)
    • Alpha bias:
      • Exaggerates differences between the sexes
      • Real + enduring, fixed and inevitable differences
      • devalues females in relation to males
      • Essentialist (fixed)
      • Looks at partner preferences (male have unlimited sperm so more likely to sleep around)
      • Overestimate differences
    • Beta bias:
      • ignores and minimises the differences between the sexes
      • this occurs when females are not included in the research and then the results are presumed to apply to both genders
      • Can also be the other way around but often the females are the ones not included
    • Androcentrism:
      • consequence of beta bias
      • male behaviour is viewed as the norm
      • female behaviour is seen as abnormal
      • Women being leaders is seen as bossy where as men are just seen as dominant leaders
    • Ways that gender bias can be dealt with:
      • not extrapolating findings to both genders
      • representative sample
      • both male and female researchers
      • avoid alpha and beta bias
    • Limitation of gender bias: Research challenging gender bias isn't being published
      • Formanowicz analysed 1000 articles relating to gender bias
      • Gender bias research is funded less and published to less prestigious journals
      • Other bias’ are considered more seriously than gender bias
    • Limitation of gender bias:
      • Murphy
      • Psychology is largely taken by female students but taught by male lectures'
      • Reflects structural imbalances and has wider implications for the validity and inclusivity of psychological research
      • This reflects androcentrism
    • Evaluation of gender bias: Maccoby and Jackin
      • Gender differences are in the brain before birth
      • Found that in scans there were differences in girls and boys brain:
      • Girls have superior verbal ability
      • Boys had superior spatial awareness
      COUNTERPOINT:
      Joel = used more up to date brain scans and found no difference
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