Gender Conformity Starts Young
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. What age do kids start worrying if they're boy enough or girl enough? Well, new research suggests that that happens surprisingly early, as young as five years old. And the way boys and girls react to that pressure are very different. Let us dig in with Adam Stanaland, a psychology professor at the University of Richmond, who's recently written about this. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. When you started looking into this, what big question did you have in the back of your mind? Like, how does this whole be a real boy, be a proper girl pressure first show up with kids?
Yeah. So we were drawing on a lot of the research with adults that has shown that these typicality threats. So telling someone that they're not a typical man or not a typical woman can have interesting adverse consequences.
What age do children start feeling gender conformity pressure?
So for men, for example, if you tell an adult man, certain adult men, you're not masculine enough, they'll become aggressive to try to reassert their masculinity.
I would take that as a compliment, but let's keep going.
Yeah. Women demonstrate corresponding responses for femininity. So we didn't know when this started among children. We have some research that I've done in the past on adolescent boys, but further down the lifespan, we weren't sure. And then a lot of, on the other hand, with kids, a lot of the past research has been correlational. So there hasn't been a lot of experiments done with kids to try to figure out when did they start feeling this pressure? When did they start thinking about these things and responding to threats, typicality threats in most ways?
How do boys and girls react differently to gender pressures?
Let's talk about one of these experiments, something about kids playing trivia games and then introducing the subject of flowers or football. Walk me through this one and what it says about the way that kids kind of reinforce these norms.
Yeah, so we wanted to know how kids would respond to these kinds of threats, but we wanted to do it in a way that was what we call developmentally appropriate. So for kids, something that would make sense for them, that wouldn't threaten their psychology skills. you know, long-term or leave lasting consequences. And so we did borrow from the adult literature that's done some of the same things with adult men and women. But instead we had kids play two trivia games, a boy questions game and a girl questions game. And then we randomly gave them feedback that either said that they did really well in both games. So boys would get, you did well in the boy game, you did well in the girl game. Or that said, for a boy, for example, if you were in the threat condition, what we call it, then they would get feedback that said that they did really well in the girl questions game, but not so well in the boy questions game.
And so then we would briefly describe, you know, this means that you're more like other girls than like other boys, for example.
Okay. And so the moment that a kid gets feedback like that, that they're not typical for their gender, what were some reactions that you observed?
What research questions motivated Adam Stanaland's study?
Yeah, we did a, we weren't sure what was going to happen. So we did like a whole battery of measures and we did some fancy statistical stuff to see how they kind of grouped together. And so we ended up looking at their what's called their typicality enhancement. So how much they tried to prove to us that they were like a boy. So they would tell us how much they like things like trucks versus dolls. And then we would look at the scores there. Or we would even ask them if they wanted to try to replay one of the games that they had just played. And so the extent to which a boy, for example, would try or want to replay the boy game again is an indicator to us that he's trying to prove to us that he's still masculine.
And then we also looked at how much they would avoid being atypical, so moving away from the other gender, so slightly different but nuanced. And then their concerns about being viewed by their peers as less than, right?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:59
2
What age do children start feeling gender conformity pressure?
0:59–1:37
3
How do boys and girls react differently to gender pressures?
1:37–2:52
4
What research questions motivated Adam Stanaland's study?
2:52–7:20
5
What experimental methods were used to study children's responses to gender norms?
7:20–9:31
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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