Gender - Psychological Explanations - Gender Schema Theory

Martin and Halverson - Basic gender identity sufficient for child to absorb gender schema
Schema affect cognitive processes such as memory and attention
Children learn gender schemas from interactions with others
More interested in ingroup (same sex) than outgroup (other sex) schemas
Gender beliefs are resilient to change
Evaluation
1. Do gender preferences appear before gender identity? Gender identity appears by 19 months
2. Martin and Little - Children under 4 had strong gender stereotypes even though no gender stability
3. Memory - children recall more gender consistent information (Martin and Halverson) and pay more attention to ingroup schema (Bradbard et al)
4. Gender schema may lead to distortion of inconsistent information (Martin and Halverson)
5. Children may be receptive to some gender stereotype changes (Gibbons et al)
6. Reconcile the two cognitive theories - gender schema = organisation, gender constancy = motivation
IDA
1. RWA - counter stereotypes don't work because information distorted
2. Freudian approach - Ingroup Identification leads to gender development

Resource summary

	Created by george.stringer over 12 years ago