Chapter 14 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach: Relevant Research

1
Chapter 14The Behavioral/Social Learning
ApproachRelevant Research
2
Gender Roles
3
Young girl learning how to dress and act feminine
4
Macho men flexing their muscles
5
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 ones gender
  role, and proscribe (discourage) other behaviors
  as being inconsistent with ones 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 womens 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
  womens behavior is easy to illustrate.

6
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 youre 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 doesnt 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, low-necked
  dress bending over.
• 3. Run a short distance, keeping your
  knees together. Youll 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.

7
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 womans experience
  of trying to avoid bad encounters with men who
  decide that she looks available.

8
Sandra L. Bem

• A self-described feminist, Sandra Bem argued that
  traditional gender roles limit both womens and
  mens 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.

9
Traditional single-dimensional model of
masculinity and femininity
Masculine Feminine
10
The androgyny model (Bem, 1974)
Masculinity (agentic orientation) Masculinity (agentic orientation)
High Low
Femininity (communal orientation) High Androgynous Feminine
Femininity (communal orientation) Low Masculine Undifferentiated
11
Psychological androgyny choosing activities
without regard to traditional gender roles
12
A female Israeli soldier the rule, not the
exception
13
(No Transcript)
14
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 sex-typed.
• 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.

15
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.

16
Average amount of talking during five minutes of
interaction (Ickes Barnes, 1977)
17
Average amount of gazing at partner during five
minutes of interaction (Ickes Barnes, 1977)
18
Average amount of smiling during five minutes of
interaction (Ickes Barnes, 1977)
19
Average liking expressed by partners after five
minutes of interaction (Ickes Barnes, 1977)
20
Average marital satisfaction in married or
cohabiting couples (Antill, 1983)
21
Average marital satisfaction in married or
cohabiting couples (Antill, 1983)
22

• Mass Media Aggression
• and Aggressive Behavior

23
Banduras 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.

24
Mean number of aggressive acts imitated by first-
and second-grade children (Slife Rychlak, 1982)
25
Seriousness of criminal act at age 30 as a
function of viewing aggression on TV at age 8
(Eron, 1987)
26
Percentage of respondents who engaged in acts of
violence as a function of viewing televised
aggression (Johnson et al., 2002)
27
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
  childrens 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.

28
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).

29

• Learned Helplessness

30
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.

31
Shuttle box used in learned helplessness
experiments
32
(No Transcript)
33
(No Transcript)
34
Effect of inescapable shock on avoidance learning
in dogs
35
(No Transcript)
36
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.

37
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 responsibility-induced residents had died,
  compared to 30 of the learned helplessness
  residents.
• Given these results, was this study ethical?
  Should it be repeated?

38
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.

39
Locus of control

• Self-report measures of locus of control assess
  ones general perceptions that ones 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 dont 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.

40
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 countrys 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.

41
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.

42
(No Transcript)