Gilligan suggested that this may be flawed – women operate, according to her theory, on a care-based morality, and men on a justice-based one. Her research partially supports this claim, but also exposes the alpha-bias of her own theory, in that she may have overestimated the gender differences. That is, she found an almost-even distribution of women across care-based and justice-based morality systems and a combination of the two, whereas men were weighted towards the justice-based side of the scale. The beta bias in Kohlberg's theory and alpha-bias in Gilligan's may be a result of the theories' inability to account for individual differences. They are both biologically deterministic and therefore assume that gender differences in morality are innate and set in stone, despite research to suggest the contrary. The methodology of both hteories may also be criticised, as they are both derived from interviews of single-sex samples (Kohlberg used boys and Gilligan used girls and women). This, combined with the gender-specific nature of the topic discussed in the interviews (justice dilemmas with Kohlberg and abortions with Gilligan) may have led to a very one-sided view of either sex. To overcome this, a theory could be developed whereby members of both sexes are interviewed and multiple topics that provoke moral decisions could be used. However, even this may produce gender-biased results, since there si research to suggest that women perform better in interviews than men due to having better verbal ability, so the results may once again be skewed. If this was overcome by using a different research method for either sex, the research would automatically contain alpha bias, and would render the results for both sexes incomparable.
Another psychological theorist who has received much criticism for androcentrism in his theories is Freud, whose theory of psychosexual development is largely concerned with males, and goes as far as to suggest that women are inferior (a viewpoint which Freud himself defended). An example of this in his theory is the 'Oedipus Complex', a process of development in which a boy identifies with his father a resolution of a fear that the father may castrate him because of his desire for his mother. It is through this process that the 'superego' (which contains the conscience) develops. In his original theory, this only applied to boys, and not girls. This would suggest that girls do not truly develop a conscience and are, therefore, morally and developmentally inferior to men. It was not until Junk later proposed an 'Electra Complex' that Freud discussed a female cognate. According to Freud, the girl identifies with the mother as a resolution of the fear of losing her love from being hostile due to having 'penis envy'. That is, Freud believed (and professed) that women desire to have a penis. The repeated portrayal of women as being inferior to men has far-reaching implications for women's rights. One researcher puts the idea of penis envy down to historical bias – developed in the early twentieth century, women may have envied men's higher social status, rather than their anatomy. This is therefore an outdated idea, and as such an implication may be that the theory must be brought up to date to account for equality between the sexes.
Research criticised for gender bias includes that of Milgram, whose electric shock experiment produced very influential results about obedience. The implications of this research were that, under the pressure of an authority figure, people will obey commands up to the point of killing another person – in effect, it could be used as a justification for atrocities such as the Holocaust and Stalin Purges. However, his research was conducted using a solely-male sample, and may therefore have produced androcentric results. It may be that women conform more, or less. Kilham and Mann found that 40% of male participants obeyed the researcher, compared with just 16% of female participants, in a replication of Milgram's study. This therefore demonstrates the androcentric nature of Milgram's study, and may go as far as invalidating its implications as a result.
