Gender and Culture

• Milgram had beta bias in his experiment as the sample was 40 ppts, a male experimenter and a male learner. He is assuming men and women are alike which conveys gender bias.
• Becker showed alpha and beta bias by focusing on girls and eating disorders then assuming males would behave in a similar way.
• In Criminal Psychology, the causes of aggression show alpha bias as the testosterone and XYY syndrome hypotheses both exaggerate the differences between men and women assuming men are more aggressive and women are weaker.
• Sherif showed beta bias as his sample in the Robbers Cave experiment was from the USA, all white and protestant boys who were all middle class, which is a very narrow sample.
• Baddeley’s research on memory using word lists used 72 ppts from the applied psychology panel in cambridge. Which is a narrow geographical sample.
• Milgram did later replicate with female ppts and found the same results for his obedience experiment and therefore, conclude the same things. However, not all gender combinations were tested so obedience may fluctuate depending on the gender of the perceived authority figure.
• 90% of people with AN are females so it’s a safer assumption to make by testing females. However, it still overlooks the fact that males can get eating disorders too and we don't fully understand how they work.
• Archer showed a positive correlation between testosterone and aggression so testing this hypothesis for women would be a pointless experiment. But females are still aggressive which isn’t explained by this theory so further research needs to be done to understand the complexities of hormones and aggression.
• Sherif’s study was replicated in Lebanon where the findings and conclusions were identical which shows there may be no culture bias. It’s hard to generalise results on prejudice to other cultures as it gives a very westernised view of how prejudice occurs and may be different in collectivist cultures compared to individualist cultures.
• We can see memory structures in LTM and STM across cultures in other memory tests that can easily be carried out. Baddeley’s experiment is very westernised as it used the British language to test semantic and acoustic encoding which may not be valid as other languages for different people may be easier to remember.