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Gender and culture in psychology – universality and bias. Gender bias includingandrocentrism and alpha and beta bias; cultural bias, including ethnocentrism and
cultural relativism
● Universality is the idea that there are a range of psychological characteristics of human
beings that can be applied to all of us despite differences in experiences and upbringing.
● The term bias is used to suggest that a person’s views are distorted in some way, and in
psychology there is evidence that gender is presented in a biased way. This gender
bias leads to differential treatment of males and females, based on stereotypes and not
real differences.
● The difficulty lies in distinguishing “real” from culturally created gender differences.
Evidence suggests that there are a small number of real gender differences, confirmed
through cross-cultural studies. For example, in a review of the research on sex
differences, Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) concluded that there were only four
differences between boys and girls, including:
1. Girls have greater verbal ability
2. Boys have greater visual and spatial abilities
3. Boys have greater arithmetical ability, a difference that only appears at
adolescence
4. Girls are less aggressive than boys
● Androcentrism- taking male thinking/behavior as normal, regarding female
thinking/behavior as deviant, inferior, abnormal, ‘other’ when it is different. In the past
most psychologists were male, and the theories they produced tended to represent a
male view of the world. Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1988) argued for there being two
types of gender bias: alpha and beta bias.
● Alpha bias refers to theories which exaggerate the differences between males and
females
★ The evolutionary approach in psychology has been criticised for its alpha bias. This is
because this approach suggests that evolutionary processes in the development of the
human species explain why men tend to be dominant, why women have a more parental
investment in their offspring, and why men are more likely to commit adultery. However,
society has changed considerably over recent years, and it is argued that the
evolutionary perspective shouldn’t be used to justify gender differences.
★ Similarly within the psychodynamic approach Freud and many of his followers
believed that biological differences between men and women had major consequences
for psychological development. In their view, ‘biology is destiny’.
★ Freud believed that gender divergence begins at the onset of the phallic stage, where
the girl realises that she has no penis, and starts to feel inferior to boys (penis envy).
Penis envy becomes a major driving force in the girl’s mental life, and needs to be
successfully sublimated into a desire for a husband and children if it is not to become
pathological.
★ This view of gender divergence in personality development has implications for other
aspects of development. For example, Freud’s view of morality was that it was regulated
by the superego, which is an internalisation of the same sex parent that regulates
, behavior through the threat of punishment. In boys, immoral behavior is regulated
through the mechanism of castration anxiety – men obey the rules because of an
unconscious fear that their father will take away their penis.
★ In the Freudian view, the girl has already had to accept her castration as a fait accompli,
which raises important questions about the relative moral strength of men and women.
★ The biomedical view of mental illness, which approaches behavioral and psychological
abnormality as a manifestation of underlying pathological processes on the biological
level, dominates discussion of mental illness.
★ In the biomedical view, illnesses such as depression can be explained in terms of
chemical imbalances causing malfunction in the parts of the brain associated with
emotion.
★ When explaining why twice as many women as men are diagnosed with depression,
adherents of the biomedical view tend to suggest that this is due to hormonal
differences, and point to the existence of, for example, postnatal depression to show
how fluctuations in female sex hormones can lead to abnormalities of mood.
★ Similarly, sex differences in hormonal processes can be used to explain the existence of
disorders that are ‘gender bound’, such as premenstrual syndrome.
● Beta bias theories have traditionally ignored or minimised sex differences. These
theories often assume that the findings from males can apply equally to females.
● For example, Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development was based on extensive
interviews that he conducted with boys aged 10-16. The same all male sample was then
re-interviewed at intervals of 3-4 years over a 20- year period. His classification system
is based on a morality of justice and some researchers, such as Carol Gilligan (1982),
have found that women tend to be more focused on relationships when making moral
decisions and therefore often appear to be at a lower level of moral reasoning when
using Kohlberg’s system. Therefore Kohlberg’s approach meant that a real difference
was ignored.
● There is also evidence of beta bias in psychological research. Male and female
participants are used in most studies, but there is normally no attempt to analyse the
data to see whether there are significant sex differences. Where differences are found, it
may be possible that these occur because researchers ignore the differential treatment
of participants. For example, Rosenthal (1966) reported that male experimenters were
more pleasant, friendly, honest, and encouraging with female than with male
participants. This led Rosenthal to conclude: “Male and female subjects may,
psychologically, simply not be in the same experiment at all.”
● Even some animal research can be argued to suffer from beta bias. For example,
biological research into the fight-or-flight response has often been carried out with male
animals because they have less variation in hormones than females. It was assumed
that this would not be a problem as the fight-or-flight response would be the same for
both. However, later stress research by Taylor et al. (2000) has challenged this view by
providing evidence that females produce a tend-and-befriend response. The beta-bias in
the earlier animal studies meant that for a long time the stress response was not fully
understood and a real difference was ignored.
, ● The result of beta bias in psychological research is that we end up with a view of human
nature that is supposed to apply to men and women alike, but in fact, has a male or
androcentric bias. For example, Asch’s (1955) conformity studies involved all male
participants, as did many of the other conformity studies (e.g., Perrin & Spencer, 1980)
and therefore it was assumed that females would respond in the same way.
Positive Consequences of Gender Bias
Alpha Bias:
+ Has led to some theorists (Gilligan) to assert the worth and valuation ‘feminine
qualities’.
+ Has led to healthy criticism of cultural values that praise certain ‘male’ qualities such as
aggression and individualism as desirable, adaptive and universal.
- Kitzinger (1998) argues that questions about sex differences aren’t just scientific
questions – they’re also political (women have same rights as men). So gender
differences distorted to maintain the status quo of male power. For example: Women
kept out of male-dominant universities, women were oppressed, and women stereotypes
(Bowlby).
- Feminists argue that although gender differences are minimal or non-existent, they are
used against women to maintain male power. So can sustain prejudices and
stereotypes.
- Focus on differences between genders leads to the implication of similarity WITHIN
genders, thus this ignores the many ways women differ from each other.
- Judgements about an individual women’s ability are made on the basis of average
differences between the sexes or biased sex-role stereotypes, and this also had the
effect of lowering women’s self esteem; making them, rather than men, think they have
to improve themselves (Tavris, 1993).
Beta Bias:
+ Makes people see men and women as the same, which has led to equal treatment in
legal terms and equal access to, for example, education and employment.
- Draws attention away from the differences in power between men and women
- Is considered as an egalitarian approach but it results in major misrepresentations of
both genders.
● Gender Bias in the Research Process- Institutional sexism- Although female
psychology students outnumber male, at a senior teaching and research level in
universities, men dominate. Men predominate at senior researcher level.
● Research agenda follows male concerns, female concerns may be marginalised or
ignored.
★ Use of standardised procedures in research studies- Most experimental
methodologies are based around standardised treatment of participants. This assumes
that men and women respond in the same ways to the experimental situation.
★ Women and men might respond differently to research situation.
★ Women and men might be treated differently by researchers.
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