Four-year-olds ’ knowledge of gender stereotypes foretells their gender bias a year later

By Christian Jarrett  Group loyalty is woven into our DNA. After being allocated to a category on the flimsiest of grounds, such as their matching shirt colour, children will show impressive favouritism toward their new group members, and antipathy toward outsiders. No wonder that once children learn about genders, and become aware of their own – which begins to happen in earnest from around age three – they soon after usually begin to show profound signs of loyalty toward and preference for their own gender. As the authors of a new study in Child Development put it, “Around the world, girls tend to play with girls, whereas boys tend to play with boys. Such stark separation is stunning, yet as adults we tend to accept this segregation without a thought and sometimes even encourage it.” The aim of the new research was to find out how gender-biased beliefs and behaviour develop from age four to five. The researchers hope their findings might help encourage children to be less biased against the opposite gender, and therefore “benefit relationships between girls and boys, and future relationships between women and men.” May Halim and her colleagues measured the gender-based beliefs and attitudes of 246 girls and boys in northeastern USA when they were aged four, and then caught up with them again when they were aged five, to test more attitudes and look for signs of gender bias in their behaviour. The children were from a range of ethnic ba...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Gender Source Type: blogs