Sex Differences in Social Behavior

A Social-role interpretation

Alice H. Eagly

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134931217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

In presenting an innovative theory of sex differences in the social context, this volume applies social-role theory and meta-analytic techniques to research in aggression, social influence, helping, nonverbal, and group behavior. Eagly's findings show that gender stereotypic behavior results from different male and female role expectations, and that the disparity between these gender stereotypes and actual sex differences is not as great as is often believed.

1

The Analysis of Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A New Theory and A New Method

This book presents a body of new scholarship on sex differences in social behavior. The theoretical orientation that is proposed considers sex differences to be a product of the social roles that regulate behavior in adult life. In the process of examining the empirical implications of this new theoretical perspective, new methods are employed for integrating sex-difference findings from the large research literatures on social behaviors. This combination of theory and method is illustrated by applying it to some classes of social behaviors, and it is shown that the new approach makes sex differences substantially more predictable and amenable to interpretation than they have been in the past.

The study of sex differences has not been an area of rapid progress. Although slow progress may not be atypical in psychology (Meehl, 1978), some specific features of research and theory in this area may have made it difficult to develop an understanding of the conditions under which the behavior of women differs from that of men. First of all, progress might have occurred more quickly had psychologists not relied primarily on theoretical perspectives with only indirect relevance to adult behavior. In particular, approaches based on childhood socialization have provided the most popular interpretations of sex differences (e.g., Chodorow, 1978; Huston, 1983; Jacklin & Maccoby, 1983; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974). To be sure, sex differences have interesting developmental histories that are worthy of study in their own right. Yet, understanding development does not necessarily enlighten us about the factors that maintain a sex difference among adults. Biological theories have also proven to be popular (see Bleier, 1984; Fausto-Sterling, 1985), but also feature causal variables that for the most part are not directly relevant to sex differences in adult social behaviors.

A second and perhaps equally important barrier to understanding adult sex differences stems from the timing of psychologists’ interest in sex differences. It was the mid-1970s when sex-difference findings came under the most intense scrutiny by psychologists. Somewhat ironically, this timing meant that influential diagnoses of the state of the evidence were formulated just a few years before an adequate technology for summarizing and integrating large research literatures became widely available to psychologists.

A third barrier to progress is that most of the research that psychologists have regarded as relevant to sex differences in adult social behaviors has been conducted in a particular type of social context—one in which research subjects interact with strangers, primarily in short-term encounters. This feature of research methods, which has typified social psychological research more generally, has limited and continues to limit the insights that the sex-differences literature can provide. This constraint raises the issue of whether psychological research strips behavior of its context and thereby distorts knowledge about sex differences—a point argued by several feminist critics (e.g., Parlee, 1979; Sherif, 1979).

The work described in this book has overcome to a great extent the first two of these barriers—(a) the focus on causal variables only indirectly relevant to adult behavior and (b) the absence of an adequate technology for integrating research findings. Thus, the theoretical approach that I propose speaks to the indirect relevance issue by employing adult roles as the major predictors of adult sex differences. The methodological advances that I describe speak to the research integration issue by implementing the statistical methods of quantitative reviewing. However, the third barrier, the use of a limited range of social contexts in research, has not been overcome: The research in the core literature on adult sex differences has been carried out almost exclusively in a social context of short-term interactions with strangers. This fact raises questions about the validity of psychologists’ generalizations about sex differences. These questions are addressed in detail in the final chapter of this book, after I have described research on a number of types of social behavior.

SOCIAL ROLES AS DETERMINANTS OF SEX DIFFERENCES

The theory that I present has emerged from my own research on sex differences (e.g., Eagly & Carli, 1981; Eagly & Crowley, 1986; Eagly & Steffen, 1986a) and gender stereotypes (e.g., Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Eagly & Wood, 1982), as well as from other social psychologists’ work on sex differences (e.g., Deaux, 1976; Hall, 1984; Henley, 1977). This approach emphasizes the numerous ways in which the social behaviors that differ between the sexes are embedded in social roles—in gender roles as well as in many other roles pertaining to work and family life. According to this theory, the contemporaneous influences arising from adult social roles are more directly relevant to sex differences in adult social behavior than is prior socialization or biology. Social roles are regarded as the proximal predictors of adult sex differences, although these roles may in turn be linked to other, more distal factors such as childhood socialization pressures and biological predispositions.

In implying that sex differences reflect the differing social positions of women and men more strongly than differing beliefs and values that may be instilled during childhood socialization, the social-role account illustrates the type of explanation of group differences that House (1981) has termed structural. House has distinguished between a structural approach to explaining group differences in personality and behavior and a cultural approach. Structural explanations emphasize that members of social groups experience common situational constraints because they tend to have the same or similar social positions within organizations and other structures such as families. In contrast, cultural explanations, deriving from the familiar socialization interpretation, emphasize that members of social groups acquire common beliefs and values because of the socialization pressures they experience during childhood. Although structural and cultural approaches are not entirely incompatible, theories of group differences tend to emphasize one or the other of these types of explanation, and the cultural approach has dominated the study of sex differences. In contrast, the social-role account of sex differences presented in this book is primarily a structural theory of the behavioral tendencies that distinguish women from men.

Social roles have already received some attention from social scientists as causes of sex differences. Shorthand explanations of sex differences have often focused on “sex roles” or “gender roles,” without much specification of the content or functioning of such roles. More interestingly, one aspect of roles—their status within a hierarchical social structure—has been explored in some detail as a possible cause of sex-typed behavior (e.g., Henley, 1977; Lockheed & Hall, 1976; Meeker & Weitzel-O'Neill, 1977; Unger, 1978). In addition, both Henley (1977) and Hall (1984) have noted some of the ways that nonverbal sex differences may be a product of various aspects of females’ and males’ differing past histories of role occupancy. For example, females’ superior ability to decode nonverbal cues (see Chapter 4) could arise in part from their greater likelihood of having occupied nurturing roles, which tend to require nonverbal sensitivity. Building on such ideas about the behavioral consequences of women's lower status vis-a-vis men and other sex differences in role occupancy, this book provides a systematic analysis of social roles as the source of those pressures that have caused women and men to behave differently in the studies that psychologists have carried out.

Psychologists’ Definitions of Sex Differences

Before explaining how social roles account for sex differences in social behavior, I must describe the type of comparison that psychologists make when they infer sex differences. Psychologists have typically examined whether female and male behavior differs, given presumed equivalence in all contemporaneous factors other than sex. Although holding other factors constant can be a difficult goal to achieve in some specific research settings (see Parlee, 1981; Wallston & Grady, 1985), it is a typical goal of research design. Investigators attempt to hold other factors constant in order to interpret an observed difference as a sex difference and not as a difference due to some extraneous variable correlated with sex. As a part of this strategy of holding other factors constant, female and male subjects are ordinarily exposed to equivalent stimuli. For example, in an aggression experiment examining sex differences, female and male subjects are exposed to the same eliciting stimuli. Comparisons between women and men are also usually controlled for differences in demographic characteristics such as age and social class. And, most importantly for the present analysis, women and men participate in psychological research as occupants of the same social role. This role equivalence is of crucial importance. Both female and male research participants are assigned the same, rather ambiguous role of “subject.” Even though women and men are differently distributed into social roles in natural settings, the research setting is generally as free as possible of specific role constraints that derive from subjects’ daily lives.

Research settings are designed to be free of specific natural-setting roles in order to rule out differing roles for women and men as an alternative interpretation for observed sex differences. For example, in a study of sex differences psychologists would seldom compare male engineers and female technicians, male physicians and female nurses, or even husbands and wives. Rather, subjects, who are often college students, are exposed to equivalent stimuli in a laboratory or field setting that is minimally affected by the constraining role obligations of daily life that are associated with occupation and family. Therefore, when psychologists study some form of social interaction, they generally have their research subjects interact with an experimenter, a confederate of the experimenter, another subject, or a computer or other laboratory apparatus that simulates social interaction. As a consequence, most of the social interaction that is monitored in research occurs in the context of short-term encounters with strangers (or simulated strangers).

These methods not only allow psychologists to rule out certain types of explanations for sex differences but also greatly increase experimental control, especially when subjects interact with a confederate or with the standardized responses provided by laboratory apparatus. However defensible these research methods may be, they must be kept in mind in interpreting psychologists’ generalizations about sex differences. For example, when Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) wrote that there is no clear evidence that females are more nurturant than males, they meant that they could not find evidence that female and male research subjects, when faced with the same eliciting stimuli, behaved with differing degrees of nurturance. On this basis, they concluded that evidence did not favor a general or underlying tendency for women to be more nurturant than men. The fact that women are much more likely than men to occupy roles that require nurturant behavior and therefore provide more nurturance in natural settings (Robinson, 1977) is irrelevant to Maccoby and Jacklin's assertion about nurturance. Assertions of this type, which violate common sense because they contradict observations of behavior in natural settings, can be understood only in the context of research methods that attempt to hold constant all contemporaneous factors other than sex.

This aspect of research methodology suggests that one implication of the claim that social roles underlie sex differences has not been of much interest to psychologists. This implication is that women and men often behave differently because they are carrying out dissimilar organizational and familial roles. For example, in a business office, men may, on the average, behave differently than women with respect to tendencies such as assertiveness and helpfulness, because men more often have roles such as executive and manager whereas women more often have clerical positions. Yet differences between men and women who occupy different roles have not been regarded by psychologists as relevant to sex differences, although they have been of considerably more interest to sociologists (e.g., Kanter, 1977; Williams, 1985).

An exception to psychologists’ lack of interest in comparing women and men as occupants of different roles is found in research on close relationships (Huston & Ashmore, 1986; Peplau, 1983; Peplau & Gordon, 1985). Nevertheless, the diverse sex comparisons reported in this research have not been treated as a basis for generalizations about sex differences in behavioral tendencies such as aggressiveness. This reluctance may stem from uneasiness about determining whether sex differences manifested in close relationships are merely due to the effects of the differing specific roles (e.g., husband and wife) occupied by men and women.

At this point in my analysis, the claim that social roles are the underlying basis of sex differences is offered within psychologists’ conventional framework of controlled comparisons between the sexes. Role differences are assumed to be responsible for the differing behavioral tendencies that women and men manifest when confronted by equivalent stimuli in typical research settings. The mechanisms through which roles bring about sex differences in such settings are of considerable interest from a social psychological standpoint. Two types of mechanisms are considered. The first type involves conformity to gender roles. The second type involves the transmission to individuals of (a) skills relevant to social behaviors and (b) beliefs about the consequences of social behaviors. These skills and beliefs, which affect behavior, are indirect manifestations of social roles because they are acquired through prior participation in roles.

Gender Roles as Determinants of Sex Differences

Psychologists have often claimed that people have a social role based solely on their gender. Gender roles are defined as those shared expectations (about appropriate qualities and behaviors) that apply to individuals on the basis of their socially identified gender. Gender roles are germane to explaining the sex differences that occur in typical research settings because these roles cannot be ruled out by investigators’ efforts to hold constant all contemporaneous factors other than the fact of being female or male. Merely by avoiding organizations and families as contexts for research, investigators can avoid comparing women and men when they are directly under the influence of their organizational and familial roles. However, researchers cannot rule out comparisons of women and men when they are under the influence of their gender roles, because gender roles do have direct impact on the social interactions that occur in typical research settings. Therefore, conformity to gender roles, but not to other social roles, provides a potential explanation of the sex differences observed in controlled research settings.

Gender roles differ in a number of ways from roles based on obligations to particular others. The greater scope or extensiveness (Sarbin & Allen, 1968) of gender roles is one such difference, because one's gender role is potentially applicable to a large portion of one's daily life, including that portion that may occur in research settings. Others to whom one incurs gender-role obligations can be many of the people with whom one interacts rather than just particular others. Gender roles also have greater generality (Sarbin & Allen, 1968) in the sense that many expectations about women and men apparently exist at the level of general qualities or characteristics, akin to personality traits, rather than at the level of specific behaviors. In contrast, the main content of role expectations for many positions, such as those in bureaucracies, is a detailed specification of required behaviors as well as penalties for failing to behave in the specified ways.

In their greater scope and generality, gender roles are similar to age-based roles such as old person or teen-ager as well as roles such as handicapped person that are based on physical attributes. For convenience in contrasting gender roles with roles of lesser scope and generality, 1 refer to roles based on obligations to particular other people as specific roles.¹ Of most interest in this analysis are specific roles based on family and occupation.

The most direct empirical support for the idea that people have expectations about female and male characteristics is found in the literature on gender stereotypes, which has documented that people perceive many differences between women and men (e.g., Bem, 1974; Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972; Rosenkrantz, Vogel, Bee, Broverman, & Broverman, 1968; Ruble, 1983; Spence & Helmreich, 1978). Yet these expectations are more than beliefs about the attributes of women and men: Many of these expectations are normative in the sense that they describe qualities or behavioral tendencies believed to be desirable for each sex. Thus, according to classic definitions in social psychology, social norms are shared expectations about appropriate qualities or behaviors (e.g., Newcomb, 1950; Newcomb, Turner, & Converse, 1965; Sherif & Cantril, 1947; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). The tendency to regard many stereotypic sex differences as appropriate has been established by research showing that these differences are perceived as desirable. For example, Broverman et al. as well as Spence and Helmreich demonstrated that ratings of the ideal woman and man parallel those of the typical woman and man. Such findings show that people tend to think that women and men ought to differ in many of the ways they are perceived to differ.

The idea that normative expectations are shared, which is part of the definition of social norm, implies that consensus exists about appropriate characteristics and that people are aware of being consensual. Relatively high consensus about perceived sex differences and the desirability of these differences has been shown repeatedly in stereotype research (e.g., Broverman et al., 1972).² People's awareness of their society's consensus about sex differences was demonstrated in Williams and Best's (1982) stereotype research, which employed the somewhat unusual method of asking respondents to report the characteristics believed to be associated with each sex in their culture.

The findings I have cited from the gender-stereotype literature thus provide evidence that the three critical features of normative expectations are present for expectations about women and men—perceived appropriateness of expected characteristics, consensual nature of expectations, and awareness of consensus. The strong empirical support for the important idea that many aspects o...