Outline two types of gender bias in Psychology, and discuss gender bias in two or more psychological studies

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Clive Newstead

Outline two types of gender bias in Psychology, and discuss gender bias in two or more psychological studies

One type of gender bias is alpha bias. This is the tendency to exaggerate differences between males and females. An example of this is heightening the value of women (e.g. Gilligan's theory of moral development), and a contrasting example is devaluing them (e.g. Freud's theory of psychosexual development, which says that women develop inferior superegos). Another type of gender bias is beta bias, which is the tendency to overlook differences or exaggerate similarities between the sexes. This was an issue in Kohlberg's theory of the development of moral understanding, as his classifications were largely based on justice-based morality for both men and women, when it may be that women have different moral values.

Many psychological studies have been criticised for being androcentric. An example of this is Milgram's (1963) research into obedience. This bias was particularly methodological: he used only male participants, meaning that it is possible that the findings only apply to males and do not generalise to females. This criticism is supported by a replica study by Kilham & Mann (1974), who used both male and female participants, 16% of the female participants obeyed and administered the full shock, compared with 40% of the males. This significant difference was overlooked by Milgram's study as he only studied male behaviour. Both of these pieces of research were conducted in a laboratory setting, which is criticised by feminists for being a male-dominated environment that disadvantages women and feminine behaviour: this may have influenced how some of the participants in both studies acted, in that they may have otherwise acted differently if the setting was more natural. The feminist criticism would suggest that, in Kilham & Mann's study, less women would obey in real life; however this criticism may itself be criticised for alpha bias and reductionism, since it may be too simplistic to characterise behaviours and settings as 'masculine' or 'feminine'.

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A theory criticised for its alpha bias is the sociobiological theory of interpersonal attraction. The theory states that males and females look for different characteristics in either sex, and will emphasise certain aspects of their own characteristics in order to attract a partner of the opposite sex. Dunbar (1995) compared around 900 'lonely hearts' advertisements from four newspapers in the United States, and found that 42% of males sought physically attractive characteristics in their partner, compared to 22% of women; and 50% of females adv ertised their own physical attraction, compared with 34% of males. Their conclusion was that the ...

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