Evidence
Some of the early tests of gender schema theory came in the form of memory and other cognitive tasks designed to assess facilitated processing of sex-typed information. Much of this early research found that participants who were sex-typed remembered more traits associated with their sex, as well as processed sex-type congruent information more efficiently, suggesting that the gender schemata possessed by sex-typed individuals help to assimilate sex-associated information into one’s self-concept (see Bem, 1981). Bem showed that when given the option of clustering words by either semantic meaning or gender, sex-typed individuals are more likely to use the gender clustering system, followed by undifferentiated individuals. Cross-typed individuals had the lowest percentage of words clustered by gender. In the same vein, sex-typed individuals are faster than non-sex-typed individuals when processing information to make schema consistent judgments. Sex-typed individuals are also slower when processing information for schema inconsistent judgments. Later, it was shown that sex-typed and cross-sex-typed individuals confuse members of the opposite sex more often than androgynous or undifferentiated (Frable & Bem, 1985). Further evidence comes from Martin and Halverson. In 1983, they demonstrated that gender schemas are used and occasionally modified to fit stereotypes.
Read more about this topic: Gender Schema Theory
Famous quotes containing the word evidence:
“Generally there is no consistent evidence of significant differences in school achievement between children of working and nonworking mothers, but differences that do appear are often related to maternal satisfaction with her chosen role, and the quality of substitute care.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“Faith. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“Important as fathers are, their influence on children shouldn’t be exaggerated just because they were ignored so long. There is no evidence that there is something especially good about fathers as caretakers. There are no areas where it can be said that fathers must do certain things in order to achieve certain outcomes in children. The same goes for mothers.”
—Michael Lamb (late–20th century)