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
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