Gender Bias

• Alpha Bias

  Psychological research that EXAGGERATES the differences between sexes. These differences can increase the value of women, but more often they devalue females in relation to males.
• Alpha Bias

  Negative alpha bias of women is present in Freud's theory of psychosexual development. During the phallic stage of development boys andgirls develop a desire for the opposite-sex-parent. In a boy this creates 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, which means her Superego is also; because it develops as a result of taking on the same-sex parent's moral perspective. Therefore girls/ women are morally inferior to boys.
• Alpha Bias

  Alpha bias can sometimes favour women in the psychodynamic approach. Chodorow suggested that daughters and mothers have a greater connectedness than sons and mothers because of biological similarities. As a result of the child's closeness, women develop better abilities to bond with others and empathise.
• Beta Bias

  Psychological research that ignores or underestimates differences is beta-biased. This happens when we assume that research findings apply equally to both sexes even when females have been excluded from the research process.
• Beta Bias

  One example of beta bias is research on the fight or flight response. Biological research has generally favoured using male animals because female behaviour is affected by regular hormonal changes due to ovulation. This simply ignores any possible differences. Early research into fight or flight did just that - it assumed that both males and females respond to threatening situations with fight or flight.
• Beta Bias

  Regarding the fights or flight response, Taylor claimed that this is not true and described the tend and befriend response. The love' hormone oxytocin is more plentiful in females (but present in smaller quantities in men) and it seems that women respond to stress by increasing oxytocin production. This reduces the fight or flight response ant enhances a preference for 'tend and befriend' (an evolved response for looking after others).
• Beta Bias

  This illustrates how research that minimises gender differences may result in a misrepresentation of female behaviour. Other research has misrepresented males. For example research on attachment that assumed emotional care is provided solely by mothers. But research on the role of fathers shows that fathers can supply the emotional care often assumed to be the province of women.
• Androcentrism

  Alpha bias and beta bias are consequences of androcentrism. Over the years, psychology has presented a male-dominated version of the world. For example, the American Psychological Association published a list of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th Century which included only six women. This suggests that psychology has traditionally been a subject produced by males, for males and about males - an androcentric perspective.
• Androcentrism

  Female behaviour, if it has been considered, has been misunderstood, and at work, pathologised - taken as a sign of illness. Feminists have objected to the diagnostic category premenstrual syndrome, for example, on the grounds that is medicalises female emotions such as anger by explaining these in hormonal terms. Male anger, in contrast, is seen as a rational response to external pressures (Brescoll and

  Uhlmann).
• Universality

  Any underlying characteristic of human beings that is capable of being applied to all, despite differences of experience and upbringing gender bias and culture bias threaten the universality of findings in psychology.