Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Evolutionary Explanations of Gender Roles
Anlagen:
- Mate choice
- Men look for partners who are physically
attractive (suggests fertility). Women are
additionally interested in the resources a
partner might be able to provide
- Buss, 1989 - Cross Cultural Study
- IDAs
- Approaches
- Biosocial
- Alternative view is
that behaviour is
affected by nurture
- Determinism
- Evolutionary approach is deterministic
but genes don't determine our behaviour
only predispose us to certain behaviours
- Division of labour
- Role division may have evolved
because women would have
spent most of their adult life
pregnant or producing milk
- If women hunted
the reproductive
success of the group
would decrease
- Kuhn and Stiner, 2006 - suggests
gender division of labour might
explain survival of the homo
sapiens and not the Neanderthals
- Both men and female Neanderthals used to hunt
- Cognitive style
- Tend and befriend
- Women may also be more focused
on interpersonal relationships
- Taylor et al, 2000 - proposed
might stem from different
challenges faced when
dealing with stress in EEA
- E-S theory
- Women are better at empathising
whereas men are better at systematising
- Baron-Cohen, 2002 - proposed that
this gender difference may by the
result of selection pressure
- - Suggested that males who were
able to systematise with greater
precision would have gained an
evolutionary advantage
- Evaluation
- Research methods
- Problems with the degree to
which data collected actually
represents the behaviour of
people from different cultures
- Speculative theories
- Do not have a firm factual basis
- Example is explanation for the
disappearance of the Neanderthals
- Other theories just as plausible include climate change in Europe
- Tzedakis et al, 2007
- Implications
- The meat-sharing hypothesis
- An outcome of men becoming
hunters due to selective pressures
is meat being used as a means of
attracting female interest
- Stanford, 1999
- Autism
- Baron-Cohen, 2004 - Proposed
that autism may be an example
of the extreme male brain
- - Those with autism score high at
systematising and low on empathising
- Research support
- Tend and befriend
- Taylor et al, 2000 - showed that in women
levels of oxytocin increased with stress
- Ennis et al, 2001 - conducted
a natural experiment to test
male-female differences in
stress responses
- - Sampled cortisol levels
and found it increased in
males and decreased in
females
- Supports
view that
women
respond to
stress of
others in a
different way
- Mate choice
- Differences in how males and females advertise themselves
- Waynforth and Dunbar,
1995 - 44% of males sought
physical attractiveness
compared to women
- - 50% of women offered
attractiveness whereas
only 34% of males did
- Cognitive style
- Baron-Cohen, 2004 - conducted
research to demonstrate that men
and women do think in different
ways which align with predicted
differences in cognitive style
- - Developed a Systematising
Quotient Questionnaire
- Found that males tended
to be systematisers and
females tended to be
emphathising