Children's beliefs about the biological and social origins of gender differences.

Four studies examined children's beliefs about the biological and social causes of gender differences and addressed two main questions: (1) What developmental changes are there in children's beliefs about nature versus nurture? (2) Do children differentiate between aspects of gender roles that adults believe to be biologically- or environmentally-based? Sixty-four 4- and 5-year-olds and 32 adults participated in Study 1; 96 7- to 11-year-olds participated in Study 2. Subjects were told about a child raised with only opposite-sex individuals (conflict condition) or with only same-sex individuals (control condition), and were asked whether the child possessed a series of gender-stereotyped properties at age 10. Biologically and environmentally-constrained control properties were included. Children were capable of taking environmental information into account on control items. For stereotyped properties, adults and older children (age 9 and up) answered based on the character's environment, whereas younger children answered based on the character's gender category. For biological properties, all subjects used gender category membership. Thus, until age 9 or 10 young children believe that the gender category into which a child is born is more important in shaping development than the child's social environment. In Study 3, 24 4-year-olds were asked which properties the story characters of Study 1 had when they were infants. Stereotyped properties typically attributed to the 10-year-old character were typically not attributed to the infant, providing critical evidence that children were not merely reporting stereotypical category associations. They anticipate that properties not currently possessed by the infants would inevitably develop, even in an opposite-sex environment. Study 4 provided further evidence that children did not simply rely on previous category knowledge. In a modification of Study 1, 139 5- to 11-year-old children were asked about both familiar and novel social and biological properties. The youngest children had a bias to use category membership rather than environment to make inferences, even for unfamiliar properties. Results also indicated that children's beliefs about the origins of gender differences were related to responses on other cognitive measures of gender-based processing (i.e., gender-role knowledge and flexibility) but not measures of sex-typing (i.e., activity or occupational preferences).PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103677/1/9332175.pdfDescription of 9332175.pdf : Restricted to UM users only