The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

168 Chapter 5

TAKE HOME POINTS

■ Cognitive development theory emphasizes the role that

the child plays in interpreting the world. The child is an

active agent in gender-role acquisition.

■ There is a series of stages that children move through

to acquire gender roles, starting with gender identity

and proceeding to gender constancy.

■ Social cognitive theory combines elements of social

learning theory and cognitive development theory by

recognizing that the child and the environment interact

with one another to produce gender roles.

Gender Schema Theory

You are probably familiar with the following

puzzle: A little boy and his father get into an

automobile accident. The father dies, but the

little boy is rushed to the hospital. As soon

as the boy gets to the emergency room, the

doctor looks down at him and says, “I cannot

operate. This boy is my son.”

How can this be? Didn’t the boy’s fa-

ther die in the accident? The solution, of

course, is that the physician is the boy’s

mother—a concept that was more foreign

when I was growing up than it is today. Why

is it that people presume the physician is

male? Because being male is (or was) part of

our schema for the category “physician.”

Aschemais a construct that contains

information about the features of a category

as well as its associations with other catego-

ries. We all have schemas for situations (e.g.,

parties, funerals), for people at school (e.g.,

the jocks, the nerds), for objects (e.g., ani-

mals, vegetables) and for subjects in school

(e.g., chemistry, psychology). The content

of a schema varies among people. Those of

you who are psychology majors have more

have not achieved gender constancy al-

ready choose sex-typed behavior (Bussey &

Bandura, 1992). Bussey and Bandura (1999)

have advanced the notion ofsocial cognitive

theory, which states that cognitive develop-

ment is one factor in gender-role acquisition,

but there are social influences as well, such

as parents and peers. According to social

cognitive theory, external sources have the

initial influence on behavior. For example,

the promise of a reward or the threat of pun-

ishment influences behavior. Later, how-

ever, children shift from relying on external

sources to internal standards to guide behav-

ior. Social cognitive theory emphasizes the

interplay between psychological and social

influences.

DO GENDER 5.6

How Children

Determine Gender

Interview five children: a 2-year-old, a

3-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 5-year-old, and

a 6-year-old. If the class is involved in this

assignment, each of you can pool the re-

sults so that you will have more than five

participants. Try to find out how each

child determines whether someone is male

or female. You can do this through a set of

open-ended interview questions. For ex-

ample, is the teacher female or male? How

do you know? Are you female or male?

How do you know? Is Santa Claus male or

female? How do you know? You can also

do this by presenting each child with a se-

ries of pictures, perhaps from storybooks,

and ask the child to indicate whether the

character is female or male and to explain

why. Whichever method you choose, be

sure to standardize it so you are using the

same procedure for each child.

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