Social Conformity based on gender

Social Conformity based on gender

Literature review

Social Conformity based on gender means that people change in order to align their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with that of the larger group in a bid to belong. For example, one may conform to certain gender roles or with masculinity and femininity in the way they behave, which means that they give in to pressure to conform to the greater traits of the subset. Indeed, there has been massive past work by scholars who have tried to explain how gender pressures individuals to align themselves with certain attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs in society.

Gender has affected the way people perpetrate or become victims of physical aggression in relationships. Men and women behave differently and try to conform in interesting ways according to past research. In fact, it is expected that men conform to masculine roles of being the perpetrators while women conform to being victims. However, according to a study by Berke et al.,. Men who least conformed to masculine roles were more likely to show greater aggressive behavior towards women. The researcher had aimed to find out the extent to which men conformed to aggressive behavior towards victimized women. Berke et al. sampled 60 collegiate males who were then subjected to victimized females with traits of both masculinity and femininity. The researchers measured aggression by the number of times and the intensity with which the males administered electric shocks on their victims. The implications of this research are significant as it shows that gender plays a significant role in how people conform to certain behaviors because of social pressure and expectations.

Gender role conformity refers to the extent to which individuals conform in line with expected gender roles. However, what is not clear is to what extent to which men are likely to conform to gender-associated behavior and women to female gender roles. To answer this question, Carter et al. examined the extent to which gender affected conformity behavior among a group of male and female students in a New York City café. The researcher designed the study in that participants were required to either conform to expected norms or not. The signs to bathroom door exits of men and women were used, and males were supposed to use the male exit doors, and females were supposed to use the female exit doors. Carter et al. realized that men conformed to gender expectations with a higher frequency than women. This study depicts that indeed one’s gender has an influence on how they behave and that males and females simply do not conform to gender pressures in the same ways.

Most people associate the love for sports with males more than females. The issue under focus is to find out why men conform more to sports activities more than women. To answer this gap in research, three Belgian researchers Lagaert, Van Houtte, and Roose designed an experiment to uncover the reason behind gender affiliation to loving sports. The researchers sampled 5378 Belgian adolescents and measured the effects of gender on the passive sports consumption of participants. The researchers found than the gender gap towards sports consumption as a result of higher conformity of males towards passive sports consumption than female conformity. This means that females failed to conform to sports-loving because they considered it a male behavior than a female behavior, while male students conformed more because they found sports more male associated. Lagaert, Van Houtte, and Roose argued that attitudes of males are changed from a young age, and so are those of females. As a result, the males conform towards male behaviors, and females just hold back.

The concept of gender intensification has been of concern because of the increased incidences of depression among adolescents. The pressure is, without a doubt, caused by the social pressure to conform to masculinity or femininity. Priess, Lindberg, and Hyde researched this field to assess if adolescents became more stereotypical of their gender and whether such conformity resulted in increased cases of depression. The researcher noted that the rates of femininity in girls increased in their adolescent years, but the rates of masculinity did not differ for both males and females. The researcher showed that higher conformity among adolescents was linked to lower levels of depression. This research explains the risks adolescents have to undergo to fit within the social groups because if they do not conform, they are discriminated against by their fellow males and females.

Conformity has always been determined by one’s ability to conform to the social values of the larger group setting. However, self-efficacy has always conflicted with the pressure to conform to either masculine or feminine behavior. Crocetti et al. set out to study the effects of gender on how adolescents perceived moral issues, competence, and the ability to develop social skills. The research involved 916 participants who comprised of males and females in equal number. The study highlights how males and females react differently to social pressure to conform to the larger group social values. However, the research also noted that girls had more consistent self-perception than boys, and this explains why boys were more affected by conformity pressure in the long term.

The hypothesis of the study indicates that the independent variables in the present study were gender and comment priming. The dependent variable in the present study was social conformity. For gender, we hypothesize that males will have higher social conformity to masculinity than females to femininity. On the issue of comment priming, we hypothesize that the students in the opposing condition aligned with the comments that opposed the student’s behavior. In terms of the two dependent variables, we predict that students who were in the opposing condition depicted greater conformity than students who were aligned with gender-based views and behaviors. Any responses either in the supportive condition or female conformity lie in between the two extremes.

References

Berke, D. S., Sloan, C. A., Parrott, D., & Zeichner, A. (2012). Effects of female gender role and gender norm conformity on aggression in men: Does positive masculinity reduce the risk? Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 13(4), 367-378. doi:10.1037/a0026525

Carter, M. F., Franz, T. M., Gruschow, J. L., & VanRyne, A. M. (2019). The gender conformity conundrum: The effects of irrelevant gender norms on public conformity. The Journal of Social Psychology, 159(6), 761-765. doi:10.1080/00224545.2019.1586636

Lagaert, S., Van Houtte, M., & Roose, H. (2019). Gender Differences in Sport Spectatorship and (Fe)male Adolescents’ Gender Identity, Experienced Pressure for Gender Conformity, and Gender Role Attitudes. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36(3), 233-243. doi:10.1123/ssj.2018-0022

Priess, H. A., Lindberg, S. M., & Hyde, J. S. (2009). Adolescent Gender-Role Identity and Mental Health: Gender Intensification Revisited. Child Development, 80(5), 1531-1544. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01349.x

Crocetti, E., Moscatelli, S., Kaniušonytė, G., Meeus, W., Žukauskienė, R., & Rubini, M. (2019). Developing Morality, Competence, and Sociability in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Study of Gender Differences. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(5), 1009-1021. doi:10.1007/s10964-019-00996-2