The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach:
Relevant Research

Young girl learning how to dress and act feminine

Macho men flexing their muscles

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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.

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.

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.

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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

Masculinity
(agentic orientation)
High Low
Femininity
(communal orientation)
High Androgynous
Low Masculine
Feminine
Undifferentiated

Psychological androgyny: choosing activities without regard to traditional gender roles

A female Israeli soldier: the rule, not the exception

Gender type and psychological adjustment
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The congruence model: Early researchers proposed that the most welladjusted 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)
50
40
30
20
10
0
80
70
60
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

250
245
240
235
230
225
220
215
210
205
M asc male -
Fem female
M asc male -
Andr female
Andr male -
Fem female
Andr male -
Andr female

250
240
230
220
210
200
Undiff Masc Fem Andr
Husbands
Wives

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
25
20
15
10
5
0
Females
Males
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
25
20
15
10
5
0
< 1 hour per day 1-3 hours / day > 3 hours /day
Females
Males

Media aggression and aggressive behavior
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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.

 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

 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

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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.

 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
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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.

 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
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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
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Psychological disorders
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External locus of control scores are associated with higher levels of anxiety and depression.
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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
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Graduate students with high internal locus of control scores receive higher grades and better teaching evaluations.
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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
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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.
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These effects are most evident in people who place a high value on good health.