Socialization

The norms, standards, or cultural cues utilized to instill appropriate behaviors according to one’s gender.

Standards for accepted and expected behavior. Norms prescribe “proper” behavior - behavior that is normal

Gender

Determined by your socialization in, and identification with, the cultural meaning of male and female.

The generally agreed-upon ways of thinking about men and women, and defining masculine and feminine behaviors; One’s personal beliefs about what men and women, as groups of people, are like or what constitutes masculinity and femininity

Gender bias

the tendency to value men and masculine traits over women and feminine traits.

Gender Differences arise out of social roles:

Arise when...

-societies assign different responsibilities and roles

-Start out the same but assigned or “guided into” different roles

-Social-Interaction-Model (Deaux & Majors, 1987) of gender differences makes an important point: gender differences are, in part, context-dependent outcomes - the model explains the process but does not, explain the origin of gender beliefs.

Stages of Gender Role Development:

Gender Roles - The social expectations for appropriate male or female behavior.

Gender Identity - The individual’s perceiving him or herself as male or female.

18 months - An emergence of the Object Self (facial recognition of self in mirrors, pictures etc.) which paves the way for the beginning of Gender Identity Consolidation. Gender Identity is usually achieved by the age of 3 years at the latest.

Gender Constancy - 5-6 years- The attainment of the recognition that gender does not change with dress or behavior (once a male, always a male even if he is wearing a dress).

Social Role Theory - Sex differences in social behavior are due to society’s division of labor between the sexes.

Theories of Gender Role Development:

Social Learning Theory - Children acquire their gender roles through the process of imitation and reinforcement.

Gender-Schema Theory - Children use gender as a schema to organize their world. Gender-Schema theory considers both social learning and the child’s cognitive processes involved in gender role acquisition. For example, girls play with dolls because she has observed other girls doing so.

Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development:

Males and females express their thoughts about morality in “different voices” - the males in terms of equal-handed justice and rights, and the females in terms of people’s feeling so compassion in social relationships.

Gilligan’s Relational Crisis:

-Gilligan found at 11 or 12 years of age, girls experience a relational crisis in - Some girls disconnect themselves in order to maintain relationships with others. Adolescent girls experience a “loss of voice” when they realize that women’s opinions are not highly valued:

As a result, some girls experience:

- a drop in academic achievement

- a loss in self-esteem

- an increased vulnerability to psychological problems

- Adolescent girls must learn to maintain a healthy resistance to disconnection with self as well as respond to the increasing pressure to fit the cultural stereotypes about the “perfect good woman” from the family and society at large.

Psychological Differences based on Gender:

Helpfulness & Empathy:

-Most people perceive women as more empathic and helpful than men.

Heroic Helping - Assisting someone in dire need or distress

Social Dominance & Aggressiveness:

Social Dominance

- Studies of nearly 80,000 people across 70 countries show that men more than women rate power and achievement as important

Aggression - Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone.

- In Male embryos, the genes direct the formation of testes, which begin to secret testosterone, the male sex hormone that influences masculine appearance and heightens aggressiveness

Relational Aggression

-Social exclusion (eg., ignoring or shunning others), spreading rumors or lying about others, and passive aggression (e.g., being aggressively uncooperative or unhelpful toward others).

- When girls are angry they are more likely to use indirect and relational forms of aggression, such as verbal insults, gossip, tattling, ostracism, threatening to withdraw one’s friendship, getting even or third-party retaliation

Justification-Suppression Model of Prejudice

We learn from society different prejudice then try to control it ourselves or avoid it all together. This is automatic and natural.

Cognitive Components of Prejudice

Automatic Component of Prejudice - All people regardless of their intention to be fair-minded and non-prejudiced, are aware of the stereotypes held about various groups. By internalizing these beliefs, we adopt negative emotional responses to those groups. These well-learned attitudes and responses operate automatically upon encountering a member of the disliked group.

DIFFERENCE

2). Controlled Component of Prejudice - Reflects one’s own beliefs about people from other groups. The controlled component of prejudice - are usually based on our personal experience with socially-different people as well as larger social/ethical principles (e.g., Humanitarisim) that we may adopt as adults.

Prejudice is composed of three elements:

Cognitive - prejudice thoughts

Affective - Feelings

Behavioral - Discrimination (Action)

CAB!

Defending Ourselves & Our Group:

Social Identity Theory - We look to social categories and group membership to help identify us, and we want these social affiliations to be a positive as possible.

Prejudice is related to defending the self

if in-group bias enhances self-esteem, then we would expect people with low levels of self-esteem to engage in the most in-group bias because they have the greatest self-esteem needs. -- It is actually people with high levels of self-esteem who exhibit the most in-group bias.

- When we are confronted with a deviant group member, such as a female corporate CEO or a gay minister, the unsettling (or contradicting) of our comfortable stereotypic assumptions is threatening.

Realistic GroupConflict

because dislike of out-groups often has a tangible, material basis.

* Prejudice as the consequences of societal conditions - of economic, social, political, or cultural factors that are said to produce a prejudiced populous. Therefore, prejudice results from interactions among multiple types of personalities and multiple types of societies.

Anxiety & Prejudice:

- Fear and anxiety contribute to negative evaluations of socially-different people.

Terror Management Theory -

The realization that we are insignificant creatures living in an unjust, and often chaotic, world terrorizes us (Greenberg et al., 1986). Social and cultural groups help us manage the terror associated with death and mortality by developing and maintaining systems of meaning or worldviews.

- Researchers have shown that people who are able to affirm their cultural worldview, or defend it against threat, are less anxious than people who cannot affirm or defend their worldviews (Ardnt et al., 1997). Thus, worldviews shield us from existential anxiety and despair.

Prejudice as an Attitude:

Attitudes - Underlying propensities to act either positively or negatively toward people, institutions, or events; expectations that guide behavior.

Adopting a prejudice consists of three phases:

1). Attributing Characteristics - which usually are undesirable traits - to a class of people (blacks, women, homosexuals, dwarfs, the deaf, the homeless, etc.).

2). Identifying a particular person as belonging in that class or in a combination of classes, and

3). Attributing to that person the supposed undesirable characteristics of the class without learning whether such traits are true to that individual.

Multiple-Jeopardy Hypothesis -

BLACK WOMAN IN WHEEL CHAIR

Practical Application:

4). Educational Approach - Stresses the common for humanity of all people and includes efforts to raise people’s level of empathy for outgroup members. This method involves participants (a) admitting that everyone holds certain biased views of other people, (b) recognizing the nature of their own biases and those of others, and (c) suggesting rules for judging others that minimize bias and encourage impartiality.

Are the emotions observed in one culture, universal throughout all cultures, and thus are characteristic of humankind, (b) emotions vary from one culture to another and thus are culturally constructed.

Emotional Socialization Theory -

3). Emotional Socialization Theory - Emotions are most usefully defined in terms of elicitors, receptors, states, expressions and experiences.

a). elicitors - events that stimulate emotional (b) receptors - which are relatively specific locations or pathways in the central nervous system that activate changes in a person’s physiological and/or mental states (c) emotional states are the patterns of change in somatic and/or neuronal activity that accompany the activation of receptors. (d) emotionalexpressions are the potentially observable surface changes in a person’s face, body, voice, and activity that accompany emotional states (e) emotional experiences are people’s conscious or unconscious interpretation of their perceived states and expressions. - A typical emotional event begins with stimuli impacting on a receptor which sets off both a state change and emotional expression, then culminates in an emotional experience. WHATVARIABLES ASSOCIATED WITH IT? BE ABLE TO RULE ONE OUT

Teaching Emotional Behavior

Instrumental Learning - A child discovering by direct encounters with daily-life incidents what consequences accompany different kinds of emotional expression that the child may exhibit in emotion-eliciting circumstances. In other words, children learn which kinds of expression- crying, laughing, complaining, smiling, attacking, running away - serve as instruments for producing desired, rewarding consequences and which kinds produce unpleasant, punishing consequences.

-things in the environment - such things as people, animals, objects (works of art, endangered plant/animal species) or institutions (schools, clubs, organizations, religions, government, philosophical traditions).

-The extent of a child’s identification with a thing is reflected in the quality and degree of emotion the child feels when learning of what has happened to that thing.