Chapter 14
The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach:
Relevant Research
Gender Roles
Young girl learning how to dress and act
feminine
Macho men flexing their muscles
Gender roles as “rules” for behavior
 Gender roles act as normative guidelines or “rules” for behavior.
 They have both prescriptive and proscriptive aspects. They prescribe
(promote) certain behaviors as being consistent with one’s gender role,
and proscribe (discourage) other behaviors as being inconsistent with
one’s gender role.
 They affect a wide range of our behaviors, influencing how we dress,
how we move, how we talk, what products we buy, what household
tasks we do, what sports and hobbies we pursue, what college majors
we choose, and what professions we enter.
 With the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, many people
began to express concern about how gender roles shape and restrict our
behavior.
 The restrictiveness of their gender role on women’s behavior is easy to
illustrate.
Exercises for men
1. Sit down in a straight chair. Cross your legs at the ankles and keep
you knees pressed together. Try to do this while you’re having a
conversation with someone, but pay attention at all times to keeping
your knees pressed together.
2. Bend down to pick up an object from the floor. Each time you
bend, remember to bend your knees so that your rear end doesn’t stick
up, and place one hand on your shirt-front to hold it to your chest.
This exercise simulates the experience of a woman in a short, lownecked dress bending over.
3. Run a short distance, keeping your knees together. You’ll find that
you have to take short, high steps if you run this way. Women have
been taught it is unfeminine to run like a man with long, free strides.
See how far you get running this way for 30 seconds.
Exercises for men
4. Walk down a city street. Pay a lot
of attention to your clothing. Make
sure your pants are zipped, shirt tucked
in, buttons done. Look straight ahead.
Every time a man walks past, avert
your eyes and make your face
expressionless.
This exercise simulates a woman’s
experience of trying to avoid bad
encounters with men who decide that
she looks available.
Sandra L. Bem
 A self-described feminist, Sandra Bem
argued that traditional gender roles limit
both women’s and men’s potential for
personal development.
 She proposed that masculinity and
femininity are not the extremes of a single
dimension but are instead separate
dimensions of personality.
 She saw androgyny (having socially
desirable masculine traits and social
desirable feminine traits) as a more
appropriate ideal for our culture than the
acquisition of traditional masculine or
feminine gender roles.
Traditional single-dimensional model of
masculinity and femininity
Masculine
Feminine
The androgyny model (Bem, 1974)
Masculinity
(agentic orientation)
Femininity
High
Low
High
Androgynous
Feminine
Low
Masculine
Undifferentiated
(communal
orientation)
Psychological androgyny: choosing activities
without regard to traditional gender roles
A female Israeli soldier: the rule, not the
exception
Gender type and psychological adjustment
 The congruence model: Early researchers proposed that the most well-
adjusted people are those who adopt the gender role that society has
traditionally prescribed for people of their gender.
 The androgyny model: Bem proposed that the most well-adjusted
people are those who are psychologically androgynous, as opposed to
being traditionally masculine sex-typed or traditionally feminine sextyped.
 The masculinity model: This model maintains that being highly
masculine is the key to better mental health and high self-esteem.
 Which model has the best research support? When it comes to
individual success, self-esteem, and well-being, the data favor the
masculinity model. However, when it comes to social success and
harmonious relations with others, the masculinity model receives the
least support.
Gender type and interpersonal relations
 When he was much younger, your
instructor and his colleagues
studied how strangers’ gender role
orientations influenced the quality
of their initial interactions.
 In the first of these studies, Ickes
and Barnes (1978) compared
interactions in which the male and
female partners had traditional
gender roles with interactions in
which one or both of the partners
was androgynous.
Average amount of talking during five minutes
of interaction (Ickes & Barnes, 1977)
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Masc male Fem female
Masc male Andr female
Andr male Fem female
Andr male Andr female
Average amount of gazing at partner during five
minutes of interaction (Ickes & Barnes, 1977)
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Masc male Fem female
Masc male Andr female
Andr male Fem female
Andr male Andr female
Average amount of smiling during five minutes
of interaction (Ickes & Barnes, 1977)
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Masc male Fem female
Masc male Andr female
Andr male Fem female
Andr male Andr female
Average liking expressed by partners after five
minutes of interaction (Ickes & Barnes, 1977)
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Masc male Fem female
Masc male Andr female
Andr male Fem female
Andr male Andr female
Average marital satisfaction in married or
cohabiting couples (Antill, 1983)
250
245
240
235
230
225
220
215
210
205
Masc male - Masc male Fem female Andr female
Andr male Fem female
Andr male Andr female
Average marital satisfaction in married or
cohabiting couples (Antill, 1983)
250
240
230
Husbands
Wives
220
210
200
Undiff
Masc
Fem
Andr
Mass Media Aggression
and Aggressive Behavior
Bandura’s four-step model of how observed
aggression leads to expressed aggression
 The person must attend to the
aggressive action performed by the
model.
 The person must remember the
aggressive action and how to
perform it.
 The person must expect that his or
her own expression in that form will
result in a rewarding outcome.
 The person must enact the
previously modeled aggressive act.
Mean number of aggressive acts imitated by firstand second-grade children (Slife & Rychlak, 1982)
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Liked toy / liked
act
Disliked toy /
liked act
Like toy /
disliked act
Disliked toy /
disliked act
Seriousness of criminal act at age 30 as a function of
viewing aggression on TV at age 8 (Eron, 1987)
50
45
40
35
30
Females
25
Males
20
15
10
5
0
Low
Medium
High
Percentage of respondents who engaged in acts of
violence as a function of viewing televised aggression
(Johnson et al., 2002)
50
45
40
35
30
Females
25
Males
20
15
10
5
0
< 1 hour per day
1-3 hours / day
> 3 hours /day
Media aggression and aggressive behavior
 One possible interpretation of these findings is that children who are
already aggressive watch more TV. If these same children engage in
more aggressive behavior later in life, that would not be surprising.
 However, when the data analyses control for the children’s initial
aggressiveness, the results still indicate that greater exposure to TV
results in more aggressiveness later in life.
 The aggressive acts observed later in life may not be ones that were
portrayed on TV and in films seen earlier, raising the question of how
to account for these apparently novel acts of aggression.
 Phillips (1983) analyzed crime statistics data and found that the
homicide rate increased by an average of 12.46% over the expected
rate three days after highly publicized heavyweight championship
fights.
Long-term effects of playing violent
videogames
 One study revealed that adolescents who played a lot of violent
videogames were more likely to argue with teachers and get into
physical fights (Gentile et al., 2004).
 Another study revealed that college students who frequently played
these games were more likely to have engaged in violent acts during
the past year (destroying property, hitting, threatening to hurt
someone) than students who rarely played such games (Anderson &
Dill, 2000).
 In a third study, the more often young adolescents played violent
videogames at about age 13, the more they displayed violent behavior
30 months later (hitting, threatening to hit, pulling hair) (Moller &
Krahe, 2009).
Learned Helplessness
Martin E.P. Seligman
 Identified the phenomenon of learned
helplessness in laboratory animals.
 Went on to explore the phenomenon of
learned helplessness in people.
 Proposed that, because people make
attributions about the causes of their
successes and failures, an attributional
model of learned helplessness is
needed to account for the human data.
Shuttle box used in learned helplessness
experiments
Effect of inescapable shock on avoidance
learning in dogs
Percentage of dogs learning the
avoidance response
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Unharnessed
Harnessed
Learned helplessness in humans
 In a study by Hiroto and Seligman (1975), human participants were
randomly assigned to a condition in which they had to solve a problem
in order to turn off an irritating noise. For the participants in one
condition, the problems were solvable. For the participants in the other
condition, the problems were insolvable.
 After experiencing this first set of problems, all participants were given
a second set of problems to solve. All of these problems were
solvable, but the participants who had felt helpless to turn off the noise
performed significantly worse than those who were able to turn it off.
 Many researchers have replicated this basic effect with human
subjects.
 In fact, a similar effect has been demonstrated in people who learned
through observation or simple instruction that they are helpless.
Learned helplessness in the elderly
 Langer and Rodin (1976) induced learned helplessness in residents




who had been randomly assigned to one of two floors of a retirement
residence.
Within a few weeks, the residents in the responsibility-induced
condition reported feeling happier than those in the learned
helplessness condition.
Staff and nurse records also revealed that they visited other residents
more, sat around less, and showed better adjustment (93% vs 21%).
Most dramatically, 18 months later only 15% of the responsibilityinduced residents had died, compared to 30% of the learned
helplessness residents.
Given these results, was this study ethical? Should it be repeated?
Learned helplessness and psychological
disorders
 Severely depressed people act as if they suffer from learned helplessness




(perceptions of helplessness in one area of their lives are overgeneralized
to other areas of their lives).
The neurotransmitter serotonin appears to play a role in the development
of both learned helplessness and depression.
By ruminating about their depression and their sense of hopelessness,
depressed people may prolong the depression for weeks, months, or even
years.
In one study, when rats were exposed periodically to the location in which
their initial helplessness experience had occurred, the researchers found no
decline in helplessness over time.
Severely depressed humans often move to a different city or state
following a major loss, in order to avoid encountering the cues associated
with their loss and sense of learned helplessness.
Locus of control
 Self-report measures of locus of control assess one’s general
perceptions that one’s outcomes have either an internal or an external
locus of control.
 Sample locus of control items
– When I make plans, I am almost certain to make them work.
– I usually don’t set goals because I have a hard time following through on
them.
 Individual differences on locus of control scales tend to be fairly stable
over time.
 One study found that newly-divorced women became more external
for a time, but returned after a few years to a locus of control level
similar to that of married women.
Locus of control and well-being
 Psychological disorders
– External locus of control scores are associated with higher levels of
anxiety and depression.
– Suicide attempters frequently experience an increase in distressing events
outside their personal control prior to the attempt.
– The rate of suicide in a country correlates .68 with the average (external)
locus of control score for that country’s citizens.
 Achievement
– Graduate students with high internal locus of control scores receive higher
grades and better teaching evaluations.
– Externals are likely to make excuses following a poor performance,
whereas internals take responsibility and work to improve.
– Studies conducted in the workplace also reveal that internals achieve
higher levels of performance than externals do.
Locus of control and well-being
 Psychotherapy
– Israeli soldiers who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder scored
highly external after leaving the battlefront but became increasingly
internal as they recovered.
– Externals may do better in more structured and directed forms of
psychotherapy, whereas internals may do better in more client-centered
forms.
 Health
– People with high internal locus of control scores are healthier and practice
better health habits than those with an external locus of control.
– These effects are most evident in people who place a high value on good
health.