What are the social and biological influences on gender schema? 1) Biological? 2) Social?
What are the social and biological influences on gender schema?
1) Biological?
2) Social?
Gender schemas are cognitive structures that children develop from an early age about gender and the various roles that males and females play in their culture, based on their gender. This theory, called gender schema theory, was introduced by Sandra Bem in 1981 and was influenced by the cognitive revolution in psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.
Bem believed that unlike what psychoanalysts said, it was not unconscious motivations that gave rise to gender roles in society; rather it was a self-perpetuating system that uses children's developing cognitive structures to teach them about gender roles in the culture that they belong to. The cognitive development of the child, thus, sets the baseline for being able to learn these schemas while the societal influences on the child lead to their incorporation in the cognitive structure of the child.
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