Psyc 305 Final

• Culture: The distinctive customs, values, beliefs, knowledge, art, and language of a society or a community. These are passed on from generation to generation and they are the basis for everyday behaviours and practices
• Cultural Identity: A person's sense of belonging to a particular culture or group; is formed by internalizing the beliefs, values, norms, and social practices of one's culture
• Sex: biological categorization of people as female, male, or intersex; Gender: the social and cultural meanings/interpretations of the different sex categories, including commonly associated attributes: woman/man, boy/girl, feminine/masculine
• Gender Identity: A person's deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a man, a woman, or an alternative gender that may not correspond with sex (cisgender, transgender (trans), genderqueer, Two-Spirit, gender fluid, ect..); Gender expression: a person's presentation and expressed behaviour that communicate aspects of their gender or gender roles such as clothing (masculine/feminine, androgynous, butch/femme, ect..)
• Sexual Orientation: a person's sexual or romantic attraction to others based on their sex and/or gender; sexual identity: a person's identity as it pertains to their sexual orientation (straight, lesbian, gay, bi, pansexual, asexual, ect..)
• Complex traits such as sexual orientation depend on multiple factors, both environmental and genetic; multiple genes play a role in determining same-sex orientation; the role of each on its own is relatively small, suggesting that being gay, lesbian, or bisexual is a natural variation of human experience; the "chosen lifestyle" is not supported by science
• Gender identity: both environmental and biological factors; But this is not a matter of choice or "confusion"; Transgender children showed patterns of gender cognition more consistent with their expressed gender than their assigned gender at birth: no signs of "confusion"; These results provide evidence that early in development transgender youth are statistically indistinguishable from cisgender children of the same gender identity
• nonconforming identities are not new: many pre-colonial Indigenous tribes recognized and respected third-gender or gender-variant people; Ex traditional Navajo culture recognised 4 genders, including the Nadleehi (feminine male) and the Dilbaa (masculine female).
• Identity clarity is an important factor is psychological health; Among trans people, low gender identity clarity has been associated with suicidal ideation; In gay and straight women, ambiguity about sexual identity has been associated with alcohol misuse and suicidal ideation
• Identity clarity is an important factor in psychological health: in Indigenous youth, low cultural identity clarity has been associated with: low subjective well-being and low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, physical and relational aggression
• Intersectionality: the study of intersecting, overlapping social identities and labels; and related systems of discrimination and oppression
• Problems with the historical study of sex differences: reliance on sex/gender binaries and cisgender people; possible exaggeration of differences, stereotype reinforcement; insufficient attention to intersectionality
• Effect size or d-statistic: Use to express the difference in standard deviation units; Effect size can be calculated for each study of sex differences, then averaged across studies to give an objective assessment of the difference
• Effect size (d): 0.20 = small, 0.50 = medium, 0.8 = large, positive d means men are higher, negative d means women are higher; Effects sizes do not necessarily have implication for any one individual; Most differences are small, statistics shouldn't be used to exaggerate the differences between sexes
• When referring to average or mean differences, there is a lot of overlap
• Gender Similarity Hypothesis: suggests that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables; Based on the results from a review of 46 meta-analyses, found that 78% of sex differences were small or close to zero
• Females across cultures consistently score higher on all aspects of agreeableness, including trust and tender-mindedness specifically; Females also score higher on warmth (extraversion) and empathy; associated with higher tendency towards nurturance
• by age 4 or 5, males show higher aggression (low agreeableness); Across cultures, males are more aggressive, as assessed on personality tests, in fantasies, and in behaviour; Males are also higher in the dark triad
• Sexes may show aggression differently, with overt aggression being more common amongst boys and relational aggression being more common amongst girls
• Females across cultures report experiencing more positive and negative emotions (greater frequency and intensity; present in early life); after puberty, females show depression 2-3 x more; females also ruminate more, and this contributes to depression
• Cross-cultural study: Found that age-related increases in self-esteem from late adolescence to middle adulthood; Also found significant gender gaps, with males consistently reporting higher self-esteem than females
• in the 1930s, researchers assumed sex differences on various personality traits were attributable along the single dimension of masculinity-femininity; masculinity referred to the possession of psychological and physical attributes traditionally associated with men; Femininity referred to the possession of psychological and physical attributes traditionally associated with women; originally assumed to exist along a single dimension
• In the 1970s, researchers challenged the assumption of the single dimension, instead arguing that masculinity and femininity might be independent and separable; Androgyny: was proposed to refer to the possession of high levels of both masculine and feminine attributes
• Masculinity and femininity are now typically studied as instrumentality (or agency) and expressiveness (or communion)
• Unmitigated Agency: focus on the self to the exclusion of others; Problems stem from unwillingness to attend to relationships; negative views of others; correlated with hegemonic & toxic masculinity; correlated with dark traits
• Unmitigated Communion: Focus on others to the exclusion of self; Problems stem from tendency to subjugate one's own needs; dependence on others for esteem
• Gender Schemas are cognitive orientations that lead people to process information through a sex-linked perspective; Explain how individuals become gendered in society and how gender stereotypes (beliefs about how men and women differ or are supposed to differ) are maintained over time
• 3 components of gender stereotypes: Cognitive: social categories (ex dads, soccer moms); Affective: +/- feelings result from stereotypes (ex sexism); Behavioural: treating people differently (ex discrimination)
• Gender stereotypes: beliefs about how men and women differ or are supposed to differ, in contrast to what the actual differences are; have real consequences, including prejudiced behaviour and discrimination on the basis of gender
• Williams and Best (1990): Examined 30 countries for 15 years, including countries in Western Europe (e.g., Germany, Netherlands, Italy), Asia (e.g., Japan, India), South America (e.g., Venezuela), and Africa (e.g., Nigeria). University students examined 300 trait adjectives (e.g., aggressive, emotional, dominant) and indicated whether each trait is more often associated with men, women, or both sexes; Many trait adjectives were associated with one or the other sex; there was tremendous consensus across cultures
• UNDP Report (2020): International responses (from 75 countries) to the UN World Values Survey indicate that nearly 90% of people are biased against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence, and/or reproductive rights (UNDP, 2020). 91% of men / 86% of women hold at least one bias against women. E.g., Almost half of people surveyed feel men are superior political leaders; over 40% believe men make better business executives.
• Sandra Bem's legacy: Bem wanted people to see how the male/female dichotomy is often unnecessary and sometimes harmful; Society should decrease the use of gender dichotomy as a functional unit and try to be gender-aschematic
• Socialization theory: males are reinforced by parents, teachers, and the media for being "masculine," and females for being "feminine"; Thus males and females become different over time
• Social Learning theory: children learn by observing and modelling the behaviours of same-sex others; over time, these models provide a guide to what behaviours are "masculine" or "feminine"
• Social Role Theory: Sex differences arise because males and females are distributed differently into different occupational and family roles; Over time, children learn behaviours associated with these roles
• Evidence for Socialization: there is ongoing evidence that boys and girls are treated differently (rough-and-tumble play, gendered toys, chores, sexual restraint; Evidence of differential treatment across cultures); Exposure to counter-stereotypical role models can influence aspirations of young people; But teenagers in Sweden (one of the most gender-neutral countries) still tend to choose gender-typical careers
• Andersen et al. (2013) compared competitiveness of children in matrilineal and patriarchal societies; Studied 2 villages in the same general region of Meghalaya in northeast India, one patriarchal and one matrilineal (in which women compete more than men and kinship is defined by maternal lines); Girls were found to be less competitive than boys only in the patriarchal society, while no such difference was found in the matrilineal society
• Sex-typed toy preferences emerge very early in childhood; In a study of 120 infants (Jadva et al., 2010), males were more likely to look at cars and females were more likely to look at dolls at 1-year. BUT, concerning within-sex differences, both males and females preferred to look at dolls at 1-year. Both also preferred the colour red over blue: Suggests that avoidance of dolls (in older boys) and preference for pink (in older girls) may be acquired via socialization.
• Hormonal, physiological differences cause boys and girls to diverge; following puberty, there is little similarity in levels of circulating testosterone (with males have 10 x more); Sex differences in testosterone are linked with traditional sex, differences in behaviour, aggression, dominance, career choice, and sexual desire, also depression and empathy; Estrogen is also associated with empathy and oxytocin secretion; But the link between hormones and behaviour is bidirectional
• The sexes are predicted to differ only in those domains in which people are recurrently faced with different adaptive problems (problems must be solved to survive and reproduce); Research supports predicted sex differences in mating and sexuality (ex males are higher in aggression; females are higher in nurturance; males are higher in sexuality (# of partners, ect.))