Advances in Developmental Psychology

Volume 1

M. E. Lamb, A. L. Brown

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780898591033
• eBook ISBN: 9781135831233
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1981. This volume is the first of a new a new series designed, as the name implies, to survey in thoughtful detail important new strides in developmental psychology. In selecting the chapters to appear in this volume, the authors first identified those researchers whose recent work has provided or promises to provide new understanding of the processes and course of development across the life span. Each of the researchers so identified was then invited to prepare a manuscript describing the research and its theoretical implications. As a result, the chapters present exceptionally valuable perspectives on those aspects of developmental psychology exhibiting significant recent progress.

1

Sex Role and Sex-Related Attributions: Constancy and Change Across the Family Life Cycle

Sharon Churnin Nash
S. Shirley Feldman

Stanford University

Despite the burgeoning interest in sex-role research evident in the past two decades, the field is still plagued by unclear terminology and controversy over what, in fact, is being studied. The term sex role itself remains frustratingly ambiguous: According to Angrist (1969), “Sex role singularly suffers from absence of specific definition—its meaning is connotative instead of denotative [p. 218].” This confusion has arisen in part from the very distinct foci emphasized by the three major disciplines that most commonly employ the term. Anthropologists have stressed the normative expectations that members of a given culture hold about the position men and women should occupy—the term position implying the division of labor between the sexes and the societal tasks assigned to each sex within structured social settings. For sociologists, sex role grows out of self-development during the socialization process. Individuals learn their own and others’ roles through social interaction. The emphasis here is on relationships, or the process of role taking within dyads or larger groups of varying structure. In contrast, psychologists have focused on distinguishing characteristics of women and men (with social context being less relevant). The stress here is on behavior, as measured by object preferences, school achievement, and occupational choices, and on behavior-related attributes of the individual, such as personality, adjustment, need achievement, and aspirations (see Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Nash, 1979, for summaries of relevant research). The sex-related dichotomies emphasized by this approach seem to reinforce the trait theory notion (Angrist, 1969) that “women are women and men are men wherever they may live, eat, play, work, or interact [p. 217].” Such a position implies consistency across diverse behaviors, situations, and time.

In particular, then, the approach to sex roles promulgated by psychologists has caused considerable ambiguity in the literature. Has the psychological definition of sex role strayed from the traditional meaning of the role concept? The word role is derived from the old French word rôle—that is, the “roll” of paper used in the theater for the actors’ scripts. A role is most frequently viewed as the set of expectations that arise from the position one holds in society—a position (sometimes called a status) being a collectively recognized category for classifying people. Despite their prescriptive-proscriptive nature, most social roles specify few exact behaviors; more often, they consist of clear but general guidelines as to how to conduct oneself. There is a range of acceptable performances, just as a stage role may be interpreted differently by different actors. To a certain extent, social roles are interdependent—that is, they establish their boundaries, and derive their meaning in partnership with complementary roles.

The notion of role involves an integration of activity and relation in terms of cultural expectations. According to Bronfenbrenner (1979), “it is the embedded-ness of roles in this larger context that gives them their special power to influence—and even to compel—how a person behaves in a given situation, the activities she engages in, and the relations that become established between that person and other persons present in the setting [p. 86].” The work of Zimbardo and his colleagues, using a simulated prison situation, dramatically demonstrated the powerful impact of roles: Placing comparable, normal individuals in different roles (even in the same physical setting) radically influenced their behavior and interpersonal dynamics (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973). In fact, the considerable body of research generated by self-perception (D. J. Bern, 1967) and attribution theories (Jones & Davis, 1965) has repeatedly emphasized the human tendency to overestimate the degree to which behavior is influenced by enduring personality traits of the individual, and underestimate the degree to which it is caused by external factors. In other words, we presume more cross-situational consistency than actually exists. Thus, the evidence of social-learning theory challenges our intuitive bias towards dispositional explanations and demonstrates the importance of situation, location, and context—so vital to the sociological and anthropological definitions of role—in determining our behavior. To the extent that sex-role behaviors represent a category of social role, they should be sensitive to changes in social context.

The question remains, however, whether sex roles are really “roles” or whether the term role is a misnomer. At best, sex role is an unusual use of the role concept. Unlike other roles, sex roles are ascribed at birth on the basis of gender, and are not achieved or acquired by choice. Other ascribed characteristics (such as age, race, and class) are seldom discussed in terms of role prescriptions. Most roles are focused within a “situated activity system,” activity that occurs entirely within the walls of a single social establishment (Goffman, 1961). In contrast, sex roles are unfocused or diffuse in the larger society; they intrude upon other key roles, introducing considerable modulations in their performance. From a somewhat different point of view, Bates (1956) described sex roles as “dominant,” superceding or influencing other latent roles. Being a male or a female is dominant in the sense that it affects most other role interpretations (e.g., parent, spouse, worker, etc.). Despite some disagreement as to which roles are most appropriately viewed as focal, both these positions touch upon what is unique about sex roles—namely, their pervasiveness: According to Angrist (1969), “To delineate the exact context for sex role is to encompass the whole set of roles an actor is heir to [p. 219].” Thus, sex role involves not one, but a multitude of roles and role combinations that vary across social settings (Spence & Helmreich, 1978).

It would seem, then, that sex roles may be considered roles, albeit unique in nature. Yet, psychologists persist in using sex role as an “all-purpose” label for all the ways males and females are presumed to differ [Spence & Helmreich, 1978], “… not merely to identify observable behavior but also to identify (hypothetical) internal properties, such as personality characteristics differentiating the sexes [p. 14].” The roles we play have many consequences: They define the behaviors expected of us by others, they are a major source of our feelings about ourselves, and they expose us to experiences that can affect later attitudes, feelings, and behaviors (Sales, 1978). Important roles leave a residue in the personality. It has been proposed that the personality is an integration (rather than a simple sum) of all the roles that have been played (Brown, 1965). Turner (1978) has been more specific in his speculations as to when the role and the person are most likely to “merge”—that is, why sex roles are (by their nature) so readily linked to the traits of the individual. Based on the dimensions of the role in question, Turner derived a set of propositions that indicate the probability that a person will be conceived of by others in terms of the characteristics of the role. For example, roles lodged in broader settings are more widely and frequently visible, and as such they are more likely to be used as clues to the person’s nature. Turner (1978) writes: “Sex roles do seem to afford confirmation for such an inference. Probably no assumption has been more generally and uncritically made than men and women are different—that they are not merely playing roles [p. 9].” Another such proposition is that the more conspicuous and widely recognizable the role cues, the greater the tendency for others to conceive the person as revealed by the role. In the case of sex roles, few role cues are as blatant or unmistakable as gender. Finally, the greater the extent to which a role in one setting determines allocation and performance of roles in other settings, the greater the tendency for others to view the role as an index of the person. Because, as mentioned earlier, sex roles are “intrusive,” they commonly determine the individual’s “eligibility” for and interpretations of many other roles.

Thus, from this subset of principles, it appears that sex roles, by their unique nature, strongly influence the attributions of others regarding the individual. Attribution theorists have studied external versus internal attributions of causation, which can be translated into the question of whether an actor is merely playing a role (external) or whether the behavior and the sentiments expressed through the role are those of the person (internal). In the case of sex roles, the internal attribution seems more probable.

Another factor that has helped to perpetuate the notion that sex roles are linked to stable behavioral sex differences is methodological—that is, the fragmented, age-limited nature of the data typically reported. Most attention has been devoted to sex differences during childhood and adolescence, and to a lesser extent, among the aged. There is a conspicuous lack of information about how the sexes compare during the active adult years—that is, during the 40+ years between the ages of 21 and the early 60 ‘s. Perhaps this disparity between the study of sex-related differences in the early years and their fate during adulthood reflects the assumption of stability of individual differences once formed, at least until they are altered by biological deterioration in old age. Although social-learning theorists (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Mischel, 1973) no longer presume the constancy of traits across situations and time, their conceptual contributions have not significantly touched the psychology of sex differences and of sex role.

Given the special nature of sex roles, it is easy to understand why a trait-like psychological definition evolved. However, a critical assessment of the psychological approach raises the serious issue of how valid sex-role measures are if no attention is paid to the delineation of other impinging characteristics or to the pertinent social location. Furthermore, it would be of considerable value to clarify the ambiguous relationship between sex roles and sex differences. The psychological position implies that they are synonymous—that is, that sex roles include the full set of differences between males and females. However, there are subsets of sex-related differences that may not be accurately subsumed under the heading of sex roles—for example, biological and cognitive differences, as well as, according to Spence and Helmreich (1978) “properties of the behaving organism [p. 14].”

One type of information that would be helpful in clarifying some of the aforementioned issues is developmental data, or more specifically, a life-cycle view of sex roles and their relation to sex differences. Are sex-role prescriptions stable across situation and time or do they vary over the life cycle? Are time-tied fluctuations in sex roles reflected in the sex differences manifested? Theories that contend that socialization continues throughout adulthood might predict changes in sex-role-related differences over the life cycle (Emmerich, 1973). Each stage of life is defined by distinctive and specific situational demands that may or may not require differential behavior and attitudes from males and females. At certain points in the life cycle, role prescriptions are quite similar for males and females; for instance, a training role such as that of a college student requires comparable attitudes from each sex. At other times, very distinctive behaviors are called for, as in the case of certain familial roles: mother versus father of an infant (Feldman & Nash, 1978). Accordingly, when the social demands of a role diverge for males and females, sex differences should emerge.

Life-Cycle Aspects of Sex Roles

In trying to understand the nature and impact of sex roles across the adult years, a not-so-trivial issue is how to conceptualize the life span to be studied. Develop-mentalists interested in childhood have frequently used chronological age as an index of change, despite the fact that age is not a psychological variable—it simply refers to the amount of time that has elapsed since birth. It is true that for the very young (under 5 years) and the very old (over 70 years), many biological milestones seem reasonably well linked to age. However, chronological age is a less useful marker of development for the middle adult years when there are a minimum of biological changes with discernible sequelae and few age-graded compulsory, environmental encounters. To the extent that every society has a system of social expectations regarding age-appropriate behavior, many life events are correlated with age (Neugarten & Datan, 1973). However, methodologically, age is a problematic variable to study. Differentiating each year would present an overwhelming sampling problem across the life cycle. On the other hand, if (for the sake of expediency) blocks of years are studied, an equally troublesome problem arises. How can these somewhat arbitrary time units be chosen to assure that the findings obtained do not obscure the real distribution of the variable? Chronological age may have some value when a new variable is being investigated in that it may highlight periods when closer scrutiny of many age-correlated variables will be profitable. Because our own interest has been to identify some of the direct causal antecedents to sex-role change across the adult years, age was, in and of itself, set aside as an explanatory variable.

Besides age, there are two general modes of viewing change over the life course: the organismic and the mechanistic I environmental. These models differ on many dimensions (Looft, 1973), including the locus for developmental change. Organismic theories place the developmental dynamic internal to the organism, whereas mechanistic theories place it in external environmental forces. The notion of the developmental dynamic is particularly useful for structuring alternate ways of conceptualizing change during the life course.

Organismic or internally generated stage theories such as those of Piaget (1950) and Kohlberg (1969) carve the life cycle (or portions of it) into qualitatively different stages, each of which has internal coherence described as psychological structure. A hierarchical organization of the stages ensures that they occur in an invariant order. Impetus to progress from one stage to another comes from within the individual as he or she acts upon the environment. Such strong stage positions are crucially dependent on elaborated theories to account for well-documented, universal developmental phenomena. As a result, the application of these theories to date has been limited to childhood and adolescence. In contrast, weak stage theories provide descriptive accounts of sequences in development (Erikson, 1950; Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978), and are more frequently applied to adulthood. Weak stage theories give the environment a larger role in fostering change, although the force for development still remains within the organism. Universal environmental encounters precipitate conflict or crises that must be resolved. To date, weak stage theories rest on more narrow, culture-bound data bases, and lend themselves better to postdictive explanations than to hypothesis generation.

In contrast to the previous approaches, which focus on changes emanating primarily from within the individual, sociologists and, to a certain extent, social psychologists have tried to understand the contribution of major life events in creating personality and behavioral change. From birth, children are socialized for participation in society: they ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Editorial Consultants
• Preface
• 1. Sex Role and Sex-Related Attributions: Constancy and Change Across the Family Life Cycle
• 2. Development of Individual Differences in Temperament
• 3. Social Conflict and Dominance in Children: A Case for a Primate Homology
• 4. Generalized Event Representations: Basic Building Blocks of Cognitive Development
• 5. The Role of Taxonomy in Developmental Psychopathology
• 6. Two Different Principles of Conceptual Organization
• Author Index
• Subject Index