Cognitive explanation of gender development: Gender Schema theory

Question 1

what are schemas?

Answer 1

a cognitive framework that forms a concept

Question 2

How do schema’s apply to the GST

Answer 2

• children learn schemas related to gender from their interactions with other children and adults
• gender schema’s have the function or organising and structuring other information that is presented to children
• they learn about what toys are appropriate for each gender, what clothes to wear and so on

Question 3

What are ingroup and outgroup schema’s

Answer 3

• ingroup refers to the groups of which a person identifies
• being a girl means that you identify yourself with that ingroup. A girl will also identify with many other groups (such as the town she comes from, the boy band she likes etc)

Question 4

what do ingroup and outgroup schemas lead to?

Answer 4

• Once an individual has identified with any group this leads them to positively evaluate their own group and negatively evaluate the outgroup.
• ingroup schema’s motivate a child to be like their own group and avoid the behaviours of the other group
• it also leads them to actively seek information about what their ingroup does
• it has been argued that even before gender constancy, children focus on ingroup schemas

Question 5

what does resilience of gender beliefs refer to?

Answer 5

• gender beliefs lead children to hold very fixed gender attitudes
• this is because they ignore any information they encounter that is not consistent with ingroup information

Question 6

How do peers influence gender

Answer 6

• children develop knowledge of the potential consequences associated with different social relationships.
• playing with other children leads children to believe that all girls share the same interests and all boys share the same interests and to avoid children of the opposite sex because they are not like me
• same sex peers on the other hand are like me and are therefore more fun to play with.