Think I'll write up a bit of Gender tonight, as it's the most recent and fresh in my mind (and I really enjoyed this topic) - addiction and R.M will follow over the next week!
Black: AO1 - Description
Blue: AO2 - Evaluation - studies
Red: AO2 - Evaluation - evaluative points/IDAs
Purple: My notes/hints/tips
While gender is defined as the social and psychological characteristics of males and females, gender roles are the differences in attitude, interests and behaviour that members of each gender adopt. For example, in most cultures, women usually look after babies, whereas men are usually the resource providers. Evolutionary theory suggests that gender roles appeared as an adaptive behaviour thousands of years ago, and then evolved to be ingrained in the DNA of modern humans due to the advantages they provided to survival and reproduction.
Parental Investment Theory (PIT) explains different gender roles as a result of different levels of parental investment between the mother and the father - for males, each offspring requires relatively little parental investment, whereas, reproduction for females involves a considerable investment. PIT can explain different reproductive strategies between genders as an aspect of gender roles. With many limiting factors reducing the amount of offspring they can have - a narrower fertility window, 9 month pregnancies, a limited supply of eggs, and carrying out the majority of childcare, a reproductive strategy of choosiness is more adaptive for women - choosing the men who display genetic fitness and status, having few offspring, and investing heavily to ensure their survival. With their only limiting factor being access to willing females, a reproductive strategy of promiscuity is adaptive for men - having many offspring with many women, and investing little into each child.
Supporting evidence for a difference in reproductive strategies as an aspect of gender roles comes from Clark and Hatfield's 1989 study into gender attitudes towards casual sex in a sample of university students. When approached with an offer of sex, all the female participants declined, while 75% of male participants accepted. This supports the concept of different adaptive sexual strategies between genders - with a much more limited reproductive capacity than men, choosiness is more likely to be an adaptive sexual strategy for women, whereas men's reproductive capacities are less limited by biological constraints, so promiscuity is a much more adaptive strategy. This link between adaptive sexual strategies and different gender roles is evidenced by the gender differences in willingness to have casual sex.
Cultural bias is an issue here when trying to apply results globally - the reported disparity in sexual strategies could be more a product of cultural norms than evolutionary differences in gender roles, and therefore would not apply cross-culturally. Casual sex and promiscuity is much more acceptable in some cultures than others - it is imposing an etic to generalise Clark and Hatfield's results from an American study to less tolerant countries like Saudi Arabia, so conclusions cannot necessarily be generalised. Additionally, there is more of a social stigma to promiscuity in women than in men, so female participants in Clark and Hatfield's study could have been less likely to accept the offer of casual sex than men because of the social taboo, rather than because of evolutionary differences in gender roles.
PIT can also explain differences in aggression between the genders - higher levels of aggression are considered to be a trait of male gender roles much more than a trait of female gender roles. In our evolutionary history, female choosiness meant that males had to compete with each other - intraspecific competition - to be reproductively successful. Physical and behavioural characteristics which are helpful in a fight (such as size, strength, and aggression) are passed into the gene pool - these then constitute aspects of masculine gender roles in the modern world. (Probably the AO1 segment least crucial and the one to drop if you're really pressed for time in the exam - not much supporting evidence or criticism of this that I could find, so it can appear a bit tacked-on, it might be better to invest more time in the other two AO1 chunks.)
Finally, Wilson suggests that our ancestors started living in monogamous male/female pair bonds because it conveyed an evolutionary advantage - females gained protection and guaranteed resources, while males could guard their mates from other males, avoiding cuckoldry and increasing parental certainty. This formation of pair bonds led to the division of labour between the couple, which turned into gender roles - the stronger males hunted and foraged, while the more nurturing females performed tasks that could be done simultaneously to childcare, such as farming and preparing food. This led to an evolutionary advantage in societies that adopted these gender roles, leading to the creation of bigger social groups.
The almost ubiquitous nature of these gender roles across many different cultures in the modern world supports the evolutionary approach's explanation of gender role development. The status of division of labour as an almost global etic suggests that the tendency to develop specific gender roles is a fundamental part of human genetic code, rather than a product of social norms, meaning that humans have evolved this way due to the adaptive advantage provided by gender roles.
However, a study by Daly and Wilson (1988) challenges the evolutionary approach's explanation of gender roles. Between the years of 1933 and 1961, in Denmark, all cases of female-female murder were of infanticide - Hardy (1999) argued that this shows women are not always warm and nurturing, in contrast with the suggested gender roles of evolutionary theory. However, some proponents of evolutionary theory challenge Hardy's interpretation, saying that mothers must respond to environmental conditions in ways that increase the chances of their own survival, not just that of their offspring - so sometimes, due to poverty, female gender roles involve favouring one child over another, or their own wellbeing over the wellbeing of their children. (Happy Valentines' Day, everyone, here's a study on parental infanticide to lighten the mood)
It has been suggested that researcher bias is an issue with this study - the unusual and arbitrary choice of years and country could suggest that the researchers picked a specific sample with which to challenge evolutionary explanations, and this evidence is not a representation reflection of female behaviour, but was just specifically selected in order to criticise the evolutionary approach to gender roles.
Buss (1989) provides supporting evidence for the evolutionary explanation for the development of gender roles. Gathering information about mate preferences from 37 cultural groups, Buss found a strong tendency in females to seek males with resources and ambition - males who fulfilled the traditional gender role of resource provision. Males had a tendency to seek physical attractiveness and youthfulness in females - females who fulfilled the traditional evolutionary gender role of bearing and raising children. However, not all of the results supported evolutionary predictions - the idea that men would place more importance than women on chastity in a partner was only supported to a small extent. Otherwise, Buss' results support the concept of evolutionarily rooted gender roles in modern society that are reflected in the traits we find attractive.
It can be argued that despite its advantage of being representative of many different cultural groups, Buss' study did not treat psychology in a scientific manner, using an unscientific and highly subjective methodology. His use of questionnaires yielded unfalsifiable and potentially inaccurate data - questionnaires are prone to social desirability bias, as participants may have given untrue answers which presented them in a certain, socially acceptable way. This makes Buss' results potentially invalid.
Holloway et al (2002) provides supporting evidence for evolutionary explanations of gender roles in a study of male and female chimpanzees. Human males tend to be 1.1 times bigger than human females, but in chimpanzees, where selection pressures for male physical competition are more intense, males tend to be 1.3 times bigger than females. This supports the concept of gender roles being selected through evolution - male size and strength are selected for more in a more physically competitive species than in a less competitive species.
Biological determinism is a large problem with the evolutionary approach to gender role development - an abundance of obvious counterexamples to the predictions of evolutionary theory suggests that free will plays a significant role in modern gender roles, rather than just genetic predermination. The existence of successful, stable couples where traditional gender roles are inverted, e.g, a highly paid, powerful woman in a position such as a doctor or CEO, and a house-husband who does the majority of the childraising, mean that it is overly deterministic to suggest that evolutionary psychology has caused the gender roles that exist in society today.
The evolutionary approach to gender roles is also overly reductionist, focusing entirely on the genetic "hard-wiring" of behaviour to explain the difference in contemporary gender roles. It ignores other potentially important factors such as the role of socialisation - an influence whose effect can be demonstrated by rapidly changing gender roles in modern society. The departure from traditional cultural expectations of men and women has led to changing gender roles - with a higher proportion of females in higher education and historically masculine professions. Accounting gender difference purely to evolution ignores these cultural expectations which play a powerful part in assigning gender roles.
Investigations into this area of psychology are potentially unethical, as much research here deals with socially sensitive issues of gender roles and expectations. Evolutionary theory sees men and women as being unable to escape from biologically determined roles - this creates social and political issues. The determinism of the approach means that results and conclusions should be treated sensitively in order to avoid reinforcing historically unfair and oppressive gender roles and expectations. Although gender equality is gradually progressing, it is only recently, for example, that the UK government changed the law regarding maternity and paternity leave to allow either gender leave from work to carry out the parenting role.
The theory seems to have overall face validity, providing a plausible explanation for physical differences and different mating behaviours between the genders. It can also provide an explanation for the extinction of the Neanderthals and the survival of Homo Sapiens - our psychological ability to form pair bonds and divide labour between the genders gave us greater food production efficiency, which helped our species survive and reproduce - an ability which the Neanderthals lacked.
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