Psychoanalytical approach
The unconscious mind
The Id
The Ego
The superego
Gender is acquired in the Phallic Stage where the child has to solve the Oedipus complex. The child falls in love with their opposite sex parents. Boys try and become like their father to gain the approval of their mother and so this is when they start acting like boys.
Girls on the other hand don’t act like their mother to get their father’s approval. But they are scared to lose their mother if she finds out about their daughter’s love for their father so they just act like their mother hoping that their mother would love them back.
Little Hans
He was scared of white horses who had black coloring around their mouths and that was a problem for Hans and their family. Freud concluded that Hans was actually scared of his father, not of the horse and the horse symbolized his father. His father had a black moustache, which symbolizes the black coloring. Hans was afraid that the horse might bite him just as his father might castrate him.
Evaluation of the approach:
- Case studies cannot be applied to everyone else.
- The study is putting women as inferior to men. Women had ‘penis envy’ and they don’t internalize as much because they don’t have strong morals.
Practical applications:
- One parent families are common nowadays and it is usually the mother bringing up the child so there are no issues with that and boys don’t have gender identity problems.
Social learning theory
Observation/imitation is when someone learns someone else’s behaviours.
Children imitate similar behaviours. Bandura showed that aggressive boys were more likely to copy behaviours of aggressive men than aggressive women. This suggests that children will copy and follow the behaviours and attitudes of similar people, suggesting that they imitate same sex behaviour.
Children are likely to copy appropriate behaviours. In Bandura’s experiment, an aggressive female/male child is more likely to copy the behaviours of an aggressive man than an aggressive woman an that is because aggressive behaviours is more appropriate to males than females so it was copied. Therefore if a child sees that a particular behaviour is more appropriate to one sex then the child is likely to copy it.
Vicarious reinforcement
➔ when you are awarded or punished for a particular behaviour.
Evaluation of the theory:
- Doesn’t take into account hormones and chromosomes.
- Difficult to explain why some males do adopt certain female behaviours and vice versa.
Practical applications:
Only mothers bring up children and so male children have no male role model to imitate but there is no problem with these children’s gender identity.
- Male aggression in gender models:
Studies always show that males have higher aggression levels than females and that may be because of the gender models they are exposed to. We can reduce the exposure of boys to non-aggressive male gender models through TV, films and other media portrayals of male violence.
