2 sample essays on 8 marker and 12 marker extended response questions about culture and gender issues in psychology
part of issues and debates topic
helping to provide an overview of the structure of these type of essays
Assess whether the learning theories approach demonstrates
any cultural or gender issues. (8 marks)
Learning theories may demonstrate cultural and gender issues. Cultural and
gender issues must be taken into account when studying human behaviour
as these may affect how often behaviour is displayed. For example, Bandura
(1961) studied 72 children aged 3 to 5 from the university in America, and
found that boys engaged in more physical aggression compared to girls,
who tended to engage in social aggression. This might have been due to
cultural expectations of boys and girls which the children have already
learned. This is an example of alpha bias where differences between girls and
boys are overemphasised, such as differences in physical aggression levels. In
addition, this study was ethnocentric as it only focused on American culture
and the findings are assumed to apply to other cultures. This means that this
study that was based on observational learning and social learning theory
may have cultural and gender issues due to its findings only applying to the
American population. On the other hand, this study may not have these
issues as the process of learning by observing role models might be similar
across both genders and cultures. For example, children from any culture
may learn and imitate behaviour from their parents and role models in a
similar way, thus showing that there are not significant gender and cultural
differences in how behaviour may be learnt.
Learning theories may not demonstrate cultural and gender issues in the
acquisition of phobias. Etic research studies cross-cultural differences and
seeks universal aspects of behaviour. One way of doing this whilst still
avoiding cultural bias is to use indigenous researchers in each cultural setting.
For example, although Watson and Rayner (1920) might demonstrate beta
bias since the process of the acquisition of Albert’s phobia of rats was
thought to apply also to girls, it could be argued that this process might
actually be similar across both genders as demonstrated by case studies. For
example, Mineka and Zinbarg (2006) conducted a case study of a boy with
vomiting phobia after witnessing his grandfather vomiting while dying which
caused him to contemplate suicide when he felt nauseous + feared being sick.
Similarly, Barrett (1969) attempted to treat phobia of snakes in college students,
but 1 student associated the snake images with her eyes being shut down, which
caused her insomnia and absence from lectures. This demonstrates that the
principles of classical conditioning involving learning phobias through
association, apply to everyone regardless of gender and culture. This conveys
how learning theories may not have cultural and gender issues. On the other
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